About those "fine-tuned" universal constants...

A missing page from the book of Genesis...

Animal species and supernatural selection

Creationist fossils

Undesigned information

Supplementary material

For a few decades, now, a creationist mathematician called William Dembski has been quite vocal about the concept of "irreducible complexity", which in a nutshell is something (some natural object or phenomenon) that is so complex that it could never, ever have developed without the assistance of magic. Needless to say, the proponents of such a concept usually say that their argument is based solely on science and not on, say, their religious beliefs, but by a coincidence that is even more astonishing that the spontaneous appearance of life, all of them happen to be religious. Dembski himself has a degree in divinity, even! (As a lapsed catholic, I have no precise idea what that is. It is not a degree in theology, and in the U.S. I believe that it is given by church-related institutions (and often as a honorary title). Not to make light of it, but to me it's akin to a degree in Pokémon studies; it means that someone has talked a lot about something that doesn't exist).

What a creationist biochemist like Michael Behe sees as irreducible complexity that proves the need for a supernatural engineer, all other scientists see as systems that may look very complex indeed but that don't require magic to be understood. The famous case of the bacterial flagellum is a good example of irreducible complexity that is after all quite reducible. It is a complex biochemical machine that bacteria use to move about, and although it's true that it is unlikely for each piece of this complex apparatus to have evolved independently until *shazam!* all were ready to be assembled to form a fully-functional flagellum, it is far less flabbergasting when we realize that most of these pieces were already present in bacteria, and used for other purposes. A sandwich appears less impressive in its final form when you know that the fridge contained ham and cheese and mayo and that there is bread in the pantry and a tomato on the kitchen counter.

"If you can't dazzle them with data, baffle them with bullshit". In my case, that would be very easy to do if the speaker was a mathematician, because my math-fu is weak. So when a mathematician says things like "information can neither be created nor destroyed", I simply wouldn't know where to start looking if Google didn't exist. Many creationists, who are as bad as I in mathematics and decidedly worse in biology, often refer to that line from Dembski as if his views on information theory were accepted by the scientific community, clearly thinking that they are as sound as Newton's laws of thermodynamics. Equating the succession of nucleotides in a DNA sequence with information, these enthusiasts readily quote their champion: "neither algorithms nor natural laws are capable of producing information."

That DNA contains information, I have no problem with. Obviously, the succession of nucleotides forms a code (it's called the genetic code, after all!) that directs the assembly of proteins, which in turn help living cells function. On top of that, the shorthand way to describe a succession of nucleotides is to drop the phoshoribosyl backbone of DNA and just focus on the first letter of each nucleotide's name: A, C, G or T. To a casual reader, it really looks as if DNA is "written" in some fashion. Like a message in morse code, or a computer line written with 1s and 0s. But that's where the analogy goes too far.

Take the following line from Shakespeare: "There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy". It is clearly information, and this information is carried by a totally arbitrary system of communication: certain signs arranged in a certain order, and the message itself is totally independent of the communication system used. You could write that sentence in Chinese or Korean and the information itself would not change.

Not so with the genetic code. Each nucleotide is more than a symbol; it is a molecule whose very shape will determine its possible interaction with other molecules. In that sense, it is more like a cog in a machine that a letter in a sentence. But even the cog analogy is abusive; a cog in a machine is placed just so, and other cogs are likewise finely positioned; no matter what William Paley might elegantly argue, a watch does not contain a bucketload of useless or broken cogs. The human genome, by contrast, is full of parasitic transposons and of integrated retrovirus remains, not to mention thousands of pseudogenes.

But there is information anyway in our DNA, even if this information is mechanistic in nature more than based in an abstract code. Does the statement "neither algorithms nor natural laws are capable of producing information" apply, then? Well, no, I beg to differ. As the cartoon above illustrates, a mindless flow of water subject to purely natural laws can certainly create information. Looking at a dry river bed, it is clear where the water will flow during the next flash flood. This information is a lot like the genetic code, which instead of directing water in one direction will direct how a transfer RNA will sit next to another during the process of assembling amino acids into proteins. Information can definitely originate from mindless, undirected and clearly not supernatural sources.

The argument from beauty

Supplementary material

The argument from beauty actually exists. Personally I find it a bit illogical because of two main things: (a) beauty is mostly in the eye of the beholder, and I seriously doubt that there is any aesthetic experience (including the very popular sunset) that triggers a universally positive response; (b) Nature is far from perfect. Oh, sure, it functions, and it functions quite well indeed; but unlike a well-made watch (tip of the hat to William Paley) nature is clearly a hodgepodge of different systems that show little sign of having been made to work together, but that managed either not to interfere too much with each other or to exploit each other to gain some kind of advantage. But let's talk of perfection to kids with leukaemia, to people with Alzheimer's disease, to people whose genes made them handicapped, or blind, or deaf, or just plain clumsy; let's talk of perfection to mothers who lost five kids in a tsunami or a mudslide; let's talk of perfection to the lost fauna of the Permian or to the hapless caterpillars that are used by wasps as living incubators (and living pantries) to the wasp's larvae... If I had a watch that ill-made, I'd return it to the watchmaker and ask for a refund. Unless, as is the case with nature, there is no other option but to endure it, even with all its imperfections. I can forgive Mother Nature for sloppy work, because no one argues that she is an actual, omnipotent and wise creator. Not so for religious alternatives.

The anthropic principle is another argument that some use to claim that the universe was essentially "made for humans". After all, they argue, we are here to observe the universe and so this is the proof that it is fine-tuned for the possibility of our existence... because even if a few universal parameters were changed, the universe as we know it could not exist and we wouldn't be here to talk about it. Which strikes me as a bad case of mental masturbation: an activity providing momentary pleasure but that is ultimately sterile. It's very much like using Zeno's paradox to analyze real-life athletics. Doctor Pangloss would probably have subscribed to it, though: "It is clear, said he, that things cannot be otherwise than they are, for since everything is made to serve an end, everything necessarily serves the best end. Observe: noses were made to support spectacles, hence we have spectacles. Legs, as anyone can plainly see, were made to be breeched, and so we have breeches. . . . Consequently, those who say everything is well are uttering mere stupidities; they should say everything is for the best." (Voltaire, Candide).

Were we to change a few universal constants, our universe couldn't exist. Fine. If pi were to equal three (as in 1 Kings 7:23) instead of 3,1415926 and change, the ratio between a circle's diameter and its circumference would be different, something which would not be compatible with our universe's geometry. But so what? A universe with different constants would, by definition, be a very different universe. We would probably not be there, but who's to say that a different universe couldn't exist instead? One with different laws, different types of energy and matter, perhaps different types of intelligence? The anthropic principle makes sense only if we centre things around our little selves, as we are wont to do. Let's look at things in a more humble way, and we might find that the universe isn't as it is so we can be there to observe it, but rather that we are here to observe it because the universe is as it is. We are the accident.

Noah the undertaker

Supplementary material

For a hypothesis to be scientific and not simply a just-so story, it must meet certain criteria. Among these is falsifiability, or the possibility to be proven wrong. If an untestable hypothesis cannot be proven wrong, that doesn't make it right: it makes it useless. So the next time uncle Arthur tells you that you cannot prove that Leprechauns don't exist and that they're the reason thousands of unidentified people disappear each year, don't fret about it: the burden of the proof is on him, not on you.

Of course, in the case of a hypothesis that could be proven wrong but isn't, the lack of negative evidence (especially as the hypothesis or theory is tested again and again) makes one more and more confident that it is right.

A famous quote about the falsifiability of the theory of evolution is attributed to the famous biologist J.B.S. Haldane. Asked about what could convince him that the theory was wrong, Haldane answered "rabbits in the Precambrian". As we've mentioned before, the succeeding geological eras of our planet left layers of sedimentary rocks piled one over the other under our feet; these layers allow us to get a glimpse of what life looked like as we go farther and farther back in time (or deeper and deeper in the ground, which amounts to the same thing). An obvious testable prediction is that according to that theory, one should not encounter the remains of a life form in a layer that predates its apparition. During the Precambrian (anything older than 541 000 000 years BCE), we were still millions of years from the appearance of the first primitive fish, let alone amphibians, let alone reptiles, let alone mammal-like reptiles, let alone mammals, let alone rabbits. Were we to find fossilized rabbits among the remains of the Ediacara biota, it would fit with the theory like a square peg in a round hole. So there are ways to prove this theory wrong, and the fact that we can't is a pretty strong endorsement for its validity.

Needless to say, there aren't any rabbits in the Precambrian strata. That leaves creationists with a bit of a problem: how did fossils get organized in a way that somehow agrees with the theory of evolution? Hypotheses vary. Some claim that an evil imp organized fossils that way to confuse people. Some argue that as Noah's Flood struck, slower-moving animals like dinosaurs were drowned first and were the first to be buried under sediments. This is actually not an untestable hypothesis, unlike the first one, but it doesn't hold water (pun unintended). For one, the deeper strata do not contain the remains of dinosaurs, which appeared hundreds of millions of years after the Precambrian: they contain the remains of marine animals (no dinosaurs, no rabbits). Second, a large number of dinosaurs were not particularly slow-moving, judging from what biomechanics tell us about their skeletons. Third, according to this hypothesis, all slow-moving animals should be found in a deeper stratum than fast-moving ones; and yet, sloths are found just where the theory of evolution expects them: with other mammals, fast and slow, not with dinosaurs.

Once upon a time in Designer school...

Badass Darwin

Arbitrary design

Artificial Intelligence design

...from the mouth of babes...

Unintelligent design

Modern beliefs

Challenging Haldane

The olinguito

The canon of science

Talking nonsense

Age of the planet

The salt of the earth