• MikeL
    644
    Order from Chaos
    In Lord of the Rings, one of the hobbits knocks a bucket down the well. It clatters and bangs on its way down. It is soon answered by drum beats. We know immediately this is a lifeform responding. There is order – repetition of pattern - mathematics to the response.

    Life is an order of moleculo-chemical processes that arises out of chaos. The self-repeating pattern of life seems discontinuous with the quantum world beneath.

    However, perhaps it is not as strange as it may sound. I could imagine a stone falling though an infinite field of bells, bouncing from bell to bell. It would be extraordinarily cacophonous, however, due to the nature of affinity, we can imagine a time in which order arises from the sound. The sound creates a lovely purposeful – mathematical – melody.

    It is the case of the 1000 monkeys typing on typewriters for a thousand years to produce the complete works of Shakespeare. The problem of the evolution of life from molecules seems settled.

    The problem with both of these analogies though is that order would fall back into chaos. It would not last. The next words the monkeys typed after typing Shakespeare would be gibberish. The harmony of the bells would continue to fall back into a discordant cacophony.

    It could be argued that in this pattern there are large stretches of chaos punctuated by transient sections of mathematical order.

    Life however, in its 3 billion odd years that we know of its existence, has not passed out of its order. It makes adjustments for the purpose of maintaining its order. It seems to try to survive and keep the melody of life ringing. Not only this, but it seems to build on this melody, turning it into a mathematical symphony.

    One would expect, given the millions if not billions of random moleculo-chemical events occurring within life, that at some point the whole system should have all drifted sideways and fallen out of existence – this seems especially true as complexity increases and the necessity for tight constraint at the base becomes ever more crucial. The likelihood of catastrophic collapse increases with each new emergent layer.

    The fact that not only has life occurred and been sustained through billions of years, but that complexity has increased without causing a drift into chaos goes against what we would expect of order collapsing into chaos.

    Surely the evolution of complex life from such a perfectly formed base of molecular and then cellular interaction points to intelligent design.
  • Banno
    24.9k
    Interesting prose; but then the usual misunderstanding of evolution.

    Perhaps what you want to do is defend your faith against a perceived threat. What I see is a reductio that shows the frailty of belief in god.
  • Rich
    3.2k
    No, he's simply pointing out the absurdity of evolution without intention. Evolution simply says one miracle is simply followed by an infinite number of subsequent miracles. That is Faith in the Infinite. He is not the first. Lee Smolin said similar when discussing the Many Worlds Interpretation of QM. The Belief in the Infinite (God).

    Good post Mike. You are in good company.
  • CasKev
    410
    I lean toward intelligent design of some sort, but not sure what to think about the form or nature of the source. It is all so paradoxical... How could something always have existed? But on the other hand how could nothing have existed? If nothing existed, how did something come from nothing? Surely it relies on concepts humans are not currently capable of understanding.

    I hope someone figures it out before I die, because I'm very interested in the answer!
  • Srap Tasmaner
    4.9k
    Life however, in its 3 billion odd years that we know of its existence, has not passed out of its order. It makes adjustments for the purpose of maintaining its order. It seems to try to survive and keep the melody of life ringing. Not only this, but it seems to build on this melody, turning it into a mathematical symphony.MikeL

    I think the puzzles you keep running into, Mike, come from an image of the lone organism, a person, struggling heroically against their environment. Now you've even taken to treating Life as if it were a single entity doing stuff like adapting and surviving. It's not. There's not a single rock falling down the well but trillions. Evolution is a statistical phenomenon. It's all about populations. What evolution makes clear is how relative invariance arises, or relative "lock in" of change (usually advantageous in one way or another related to survival or reproduction).
  • Nils Loc
    1.4k
    https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/a-new-physics-theory-of-life/

    Apokrisis has been going around saying our impulse to order here is to dissipate heat, to increase entropy. At the molecular level, under certain stable conditions (an energy source, heat bath) matter orders itself to dissipate more energy and this puts the upward trend of evolution of matter into motion.

    How much heat are you dissipating?

    It brings new meaning to the saying: If you can't handle the heat, get out of the kitchen.
  • Wosret
    3.4k


    That's because he's an emotionless kyubey that lacks hope!

    378px-QB_loves_entropy.jpg

    Why doesn't the image thing ever work?
  • fishfry
    3.4k
    Wosret
    378px-QB_loves_entropy.jpg?20110318181040

    Why doesn't the image thing ever work?

    Clip the URL data after the jpg.

    378px-QB_loves_entropy.jpg
  • Wosret
    3.4k


    Omg, I did it!
  • Wayfarer
    22.4k
    It is the case of the 1000 monkeys typing on typewriters for a thousand years to produce the complete works of Shakespeare.MikeL

    Monkeys can't even type. If you had a 1000 monkeys, and typewriters, I think you would get a whole lot of broken typewriters with shit on them - no actual output. But then, if you wanted to simulate it, it would be quite easy to write a program which could endlessly produce random strings of characters. The odds of it producing even a sentence must be astronomically slight, I would have thought.

    The narrative of life arising 'by chance' is one of the guiding memes of modernity. Until about the mid 19th Century, it was simply common knowledge that God created the world and everything it. Even scientists thought that, Newton and his contemporaries always thought that their discoveries 'shewed the handiwork of the Lord'. It was in the subsequent centuries that the thought really began to dawn that the Lord hadn't done it.

    But there's a lot going on in the background. There was the Copernican revolution, and the abandonment of the 'medieval synthesis' based on Ptolemy and Aristotle. Then of course there was Darwin, and the dawning understanding of the reality of deep geological time.

    So homo modernicus emerges blinking into Pascal's 'appalling abyss of space', the realisation that the whole of existence might be a cosmic crapshoot and our existence mere fluke. That sentiment animated a great deal of literature, drama and philosophy throughout the 20th Century. Read Bertrand Russell's A Free Man's Worship for one of the canonical statements. Another is Jacques Monod's 1970 book Chance and Necessity:

    The ancient covenant is in pieces; man knows at last that he is alone in the universe's unfeeling immensity, out of which he emerged only by chance. His destiny is nowhere spelled out, nor is his duty. The kingdom above or the darkness below: it is for him to choose.

    What 'the kingdom above' is, I am not really sure, but I'm pretty sure it means Progress - perhaps culminating in space travel, literally 'going to heaven' in physical form (which seems the presiding mythos of technological culture.)

    This, in any case, is the narrative underwriting the 'culture war': between godless evolutionary materialism on one side, and superstitious religious fundamentalism on the other.

    However there are many more nuanced accounts of the issues, from both scientific and philosophical perspectives, which accommodate both the scientific and the spiritual. A couple of the books that I have found useful from a philosophical perspective, include

    Evolution as a Religion, Mary Midgley:

    Mind and Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature is Almost Certainly False Thomas Nagel

    Another of Nagel's essays that I have found helpful is his Secular Philosophy and the Religious Temperament. (pdf) Nagel is a professed atheist philosopher, in the rationalist tradition, who nevertheless draws out many of the deep perplexities in what he sees as the dogmatic materialism of secular culture.
  • Metaphysician Undercover
    13.1k
    It is the case of the 1000 monkeys typing on typewriters for a thousand years to produce the complete works of Shakespeare. The problem of the evolution of life from molecules seems settled.MikeL

    I don't think 1000 monkeys could type Shakespeare in 1000 years. I think the proper example is that is a monkey were given an infinite amount of time it would type Shakespeare. But this only exemplifies the absurdity of allowing that there could actually be an infinite amount of anything.
  • Srap Tasmaner
    4.9k
    only by chance

    The question is how much of Monod's "only" can we chip away...
  • Wayfarer
    22.4k
    the question I would ask, in what other field of scientific endeavour would the argument that 'something happened for no reason' be considered an hypothesis?
  • fishfry
    3.4k
    I haven't followed this learned discussion in detail. But it's clear that evolution provided the means for a primate to type the complete works of Shakespeare in only a few billion years. The primate's name was Shakespeare.
  • Wayfarer
    22.4k
    Personally, I doubt whether Darwin explains Shakespeare. There seems no convincing biological reason for such a phenomenon.
  • Srap Tasmaner
    4.9k

    That Shakespeare could type is pure speculation, since he predated the typewriter by, I think, several years. How do you answer that, evolutionist scum?

    (And, BTW, excellent point.)
  • Srap Tasmaner
    4.9k
    for no reasonWayfarer

    I don't see this phrase as helpful.
  • Forgottenticket
    215
    . It would not last. The next words the monkeys typed after typing Shakespeare would be gibberish.MikeL

    I'm not good with probability but isn't the analogy that it is an infinite amount of time? So eventually there will come a time when you get Shakespeare again and again ect, like rolling two dice and getting a 12 after a 12 and so on.
  • Wosret
    3.4k
    Monkey's aren't random, eh. There is nothing stopping them from typing just "s" for eternity.
  • Banno
    24.9k
    odd, that the absurdity of evolution without intention seems only to be apparent to god botherers.
  • Rich
    3.2k
    No, it's absurd to most people, but you don't bite the hand that feeds you. So the Emperor With No Clothes continues to enjoy the parade.

    The OP merely highlights the obvious. Exactly how many miracles are permitted per faith. Materialists apparently feel they are entitled to an infinity. Most religions are content with a handful.
  • Banno
    24.9k
    can you produce evidence that most folk think evolution requires intent? That would be interesting. Which folk?
  • Wosret
    3.4k


    Every biologist. Lots of people can nod in the direction that it doesn't, but name any actual text on the subject that isn't ripe with teleological language. Even Dennett uses "free floating rationality". You can't talk about biology without teleology.
  • Banno
    24.9k
    that's a deflection, not an answer.
  • Wosret
    3.4k


    Hey, I gave that lots of people can say it doesn't... but people can say many things that they can't actually do.
  • Srap Tasmaner
    4.9k

    Suppose you're a curious youngster with internet access and you look up "Evolution" on the Wikipedia. Here are the first two paragraphs you'll read:

    Evolution is change in the heritable characteristics of biological populations over successive generations.[1][2] Evolutionary processes give rise to biodiversity at every level of biological organisation, including the levels of species, individual organisms, and molecules.[3]

    Repeated formation of new species (speciation), change within species (anagenesis), and loss of species (extinction) throughout the evolutionary history of life on Earth are demonstrated by shared sets of morphological and biochemical traits, including shared DNA sequences.[4] These shared traits are more similar among species that share a more recent common ancestor, and can be used to reconstruct a biological "tree of life" based on evolutionary relationships (phylogenetics), using both existing species and fossils. The fossil record includes a progression from early biogenic graphite,[5] to microbial mat fossils,[6][7][8] to fossilised multicellular organisms. Existing patterns of biodiversity have been shaped both by speciation and by extinction.[9

    We've got "shaped" there, looks a little intentional, so you check to see if either speciation or extinction are the sorts of things that have intentions. Nope.

    So if you start from scratch, and just learn from Wikipedia, you should be fine.
  • Rich
    3.2k
    As the OP success, those who believe in evolutionary theory simply believe in an universe of infinite possibilities that Just Happens like this and continues to miraculously Just Happen. Evolution is much less a theory (there is no way to replicate it falsify it), than a good mythological story.
  • Wosret
    3.4k
    That evolution occurred is difficult to deny... but to completely remove teleology from biology gets incoherent, and absurd pretty quickly. Nothing is for anything then, and no traits exist in order to bring about future results. There is no reason, or intention behind anything. Wings are no more for flying than literally anything else, teeth are not for biting or chewing or anything like that. That's just nonsense talk. Projecting your dirty primate rationality onto the meaningless universe, yo.
  • MikeL
    644


    Sorry guys, I'm getting a bit pulled about at the moment, so haven't had time to sit down and respond.

    How could something always have existed? But on the other hand how could nothing have existed?CasKev

    My OP suggests large stretches of chaos until the mathematics falls into a recognisable harmony, and then slowly drifts back out again. There is no reason that the harmony should continue, let alone become an increasing complex mathematical melody through time.

    This OP suggests that if we buy into the premise that life arose out of nothing, we must also accept that because there was no intent, life should also drift out of existence just as easily. To not accept this position is to negate your own argument.

    And yet the facts of what we know about life do not support the argument that life has drifted out of existence, thus contradicting the premise. So how do biologists reconcile this fundamental conflict in their own theory? This places the burden on them. If it hasn't drifted out, then it could not have drifted in.

    As to the monkey analogy, it is not mine of course, I just borrowed it for this OP to illustrate my point.
  • Wosret
    3.4k
    There is a sense in which teleology itself becomes overextended, and restrictive, and that is when we think not only are things for certain purposes, but only for those purposes, and nothing else. That's clearly absurd as well, but so is the antithesis.
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