Chemical Civilization or More Comments on ID

Human imagination has limits of sorts—not at the individual level, to be sure, but when we get more collective, certain thoughts never seem to occur to groups—at least not in public writings. The Intelligent Design movement in biology (I call it the new biology), using very powerful reasoning, based on observation, not on first principles, has concluded that actual design underlies biological systems. The proposition surfaced—and in the wink of an eye ID proponents were tarred with the brush of creationism. If life is actually designed, the only possible explanation anybody can come up with is that the designer must be God.

The leading thinker in this field, in my opinion, is Michael J. Behe, a biochemist. I rank him thus because he stays close to the actual observational data at the lowest possible level—and he isn’t tempted to knee-jerk reactions. His two books are Darwin’s Black Box and The Edge of Evolution. These are must reading for anyone who wishes to understand the ID proposition. I’ve quoted Behe earlier to show that he does not name the designer but simply insists that design is present in life. In his second book, which is largely concerned with malaria, a disease caused by a one-celled organism (a so-called protist) of which the most virulent kind is Plasmodium falciparum, Behe faces the “designer” question squarely when he says:

Here’s something to ponder long and hard: Malaria was intentionally designed. The molecular machinery with which the parasite invades red blood cells is an exquisitely purposeful arrangement of parts…. What sort of designer is that? What sort of “fine-tuning” leads to untold human misery? To countless mothers mourning countless children? Did a hateful, malign being make intelligent life in order to torture it? One who relishes cries of pain? Maybe. Maybe not.

I discovered “intelligent design” before that movement began when—already a father with children—I studied biology on my own and discovered what I called the unmistakable signs of what I called technology—present at the cellular and sub-cellular level. I was then professionally engaged in technology assessment—the human kind—and the conclusion seemed obvious. Being also a science fiction writer, my own intuitions rapidly produced the concept of chemical civilization. (That subject is mentioned multiple times in this blog; here are one, two, three, and four posts on the subject.) What I saw in Brigitte’s textbook (Biology Today, Random House, 1972, which is the book I had been reading) was precisely what I saw in my work-life, but more sophisticated in design at the sub-microscopic level—namely technology of the human kind. It wasn’t perfect; it showed the same tendencies as our own—thus definitely goal-seeking arrangements of chemicals to get certain jobs done, by far not perfect, frequently not elegant at all—but working. I imagined this civilization peopled by what I called “little people”—invisible to us, utterly invisible, who made machines by nudging atoms around to achieve some end which still remains murky except, on certain days, to the primitive cosmologist who cohabits this body with me.

The picture I have of life is of an intelligent striving but by a civilization that cannot see the whole picture at all—indeed is striving mightily to see anything at all. We are one of its most successful ventures, because we do, indeed, see a little something ourselves—still not enough, but something. The very fact that life eats life, nature red in tooth and claw—and the fact that life is innocent, innocent, innocent—right up to our appearance—tells me that intelligence is present but, above the chemical, not vision of the sort we sometimes manage. Assuming that our observations are correct—that something intelligent but certainly not even very scient, much less omniscient, is the causative agent of life—indeed that it is life, as we really understand it, and bodies are merely tools it needs in this weird dimension—assuming all of that, quite interesting cosmological ideas surface—and indeed this blog is filled with such speculations.

Now to my opening statement concerning imagination. Nowhere in the ID literature have I thus far encountered serious speculation of the sort that imagination and a little thought—particularly about the fractal nature of this universe—suggests, namely that intelligence may be diffused in the universe and may be as common as matter, thus that many orders of intelligence may exit—to be sure all of them created. Deep down I am a creationist, but not of the primitive variety. Some of us, anyway, accept two orders already—the human and the angelic, beneath the Ultimate. Why not, minimally, a third? My conclusion? It might best be expressed, perhaps, by modifying a popular saying. Keep it simple—and you’ll stay stupid.

On the Trail of the Grail

David Bohm, the physicist, proposed that anomalous phenomena in science—like the Big Bang at the large and the wave-particle paradox at the small end of the spectrum—are due to the limitations of our theoretical frameworks. The theories are based on correct observations, to be sure, but we are now, as it were, on the border of two domains, and the new observations no longer fit. Bohm goes well beyond this and suggests infinite reaches: beyond every border extends a vast geography—which also has a border. Looks like we have borderzones in the realm of physics too. Here a graphic to make Bohm’s view accessible:

Here we might assume that the left Anomalous Region is the sub-atomic and the right one the cosmically large. The arrows point at the borders of our current knowledge where other or “higher” ranges of knowledge are necessary (new theories), to make sense of the observations. The new theories, to be sure, will not “falsify” the old—but render the old as limited cases valid enough, but only within their own domain of observation.

Bohm proposed that as we reach these borders, we must “shift” our theoretical framework (the yellow region). He asserted that a Grand Unified Theory (the grail of theoretical physics) is unachievable. We might think we have it (e.g. Newton’s clockwork universe), but sooner or later new anomalies will start to appear like signs announcing another border crossing—and to cross we must have passports; the driver’s license will no longer do.

When people encounter notions like this—what look alarmingly like infinite regresses—they standard outcry is “Enough already.” We like to limit our infinities with nice, self-enclosed symbols like the lazy eight. The biggest battles in science (and elsewhere) arise when something established once and for all is shaken to its foundations by new observations or experience. The uproar is Sisyphus’ enormous frustration every time he gets his huge rock to the top of the hill and then, just as he is about to sigh in achievement, watching the damned thing roll down again. But this frustration is then also echoed by roars of triumph on the part of those who, under intense and decades long attack (invariably ideological) discover that they were right all along.

This is the situation that surrounds Darwinism now under the assault of the new biology invariably labeled by its proposed answer to what might be called the anomaly of matter: Intelligent Design. What the new biology suggests is that the frame must be moved to understand this strange anomaly—matter preserving form and, horrors, reproducing it, over and over again. Here we have orthodox biology in frustration—and fundamentalist Christians roaring in triumph. But the detection of design in life (and we don’t really need the qualifier, intelligent, at all) should not be viewed as the achievement of closure. If life is designed, who else but God could do it? Du calm, as the French would say—indeed as one of the new biologists also says. Here is a quote from Michael J. Behe, taken from Darwin’s Black Box, Touchstone, 1996, p. 196:

Inferences to design do not require that we have a candidate for the role of designer. We can determine that a system was designed by examining the system itself, and we can hold the conviction of design much more strongly than a conviction about the identity of the designer.

I recommend this book by Behe as a superb demonstration that design is present—and at the biochemical, which is the meaningfully proper, level. Life manifests as the cell. And it as at the cellular level that we must look for its explanation.

To this I might add that the same triumphant “Told you so” we hear from fundamentalist circles concerning life we also hear, although from a smaller circle, concerning the Big Bang. Does the expansion of the universe really prove that it came out of nothing 14 billion years ago? No. The inference of God based on the Big Bang is as faulty as the inference of God from design in life. What it calls for is a moving of our theoretical frames. Endless wonders will then await us. God transcends both microscope and telescope. No pin will pin the Ultimate.

The Mysterious Survivor

A coincidence of various stimuli got me thinking once again about Darwinism and Intelligent Design. One such was discovering the Journal of Scientific Exploration, thus a pointer to science as practiced close to the borderzone; I’ve made notes on that earlier here. Another was seeing Lee Strobel’s The Case for a Creator, courtesy of Netflix. The film makes a very calmly reasoned case for transcendentalism by, among sources, mining the insights of the ID community. I’ve written some notes on the ideological aspects of ID on Ghulf Genes here under the title of “Battle of Clerics.” In that I focused principally on the unfortunate aspects of a debate where philosophical positions clash and cannot be resolved. The actual scientific work that people like biochemist Michael Behe pursue I’ve always admired. That sort of work, seems to me, is genuine science—open-minded, in other words—much like the material presented by JSE. Third on my list of stimuli is my use of the word devolution in the political context on LaMarotte—and remembering, later, that the New Yorker had used that word to lambast Michael Behe in an article published in 2005. The article’s subtitle was “Why intelligent design isn’t.”

But let’s examine that dismissive phrase. The new biology, as I might call it, is quite excellent natural philosophy; it is reasoning about nature based on observation. What the ID movement sees is the marks of intelligence in living beings. It’s obviously there, as I pointed out on Ghulf Genes. Long before the ID movement had its birth, I spent some month studying biology in depth, but as a grown man and already an expert on technology. What I saw in living things, and this time in detail, was just that, technology—indeed exactly the same kind of technology I’d been studying for years already in human society; the big difference between the two was that the biological variety was much, much more sophisticated—and the agencies behind it invisible. And therefore, being also a science fiction author, I hit on the notion of a “chemical civilization” to explain it. In other words, I do agree with the ID proponents, and did so before they came to be known. Obvious intelligence underlies life. No doubt about it.

Now what is not intelligent is to assert that matter can, by sheer chance, produce intelligence—with nothing else added or present. Matter shows no sign whatever of having the potential to manifest life, never mind intelligence. The two concepts on which the whole of Darwinism (neo- or otherwise) rests are natural selection and survival. Natural selection for what? Survival. But what or who is this Mysterious Survivor? Well, it is a chance convergence of chemicals, per Alexander Ivanovich Oparin (1894-1980)—who pushed evolution back to the level of chemicals. By chance they converged, by chance they accidentally formed some more chemical combinations within themselves, the DNA, which by chance coded for proteins that formed, first of all, the walls that they had earlier accidentally formed without the help of DNA and also, by good luck, the enzymes (also proteins) that actually read the DNA later and, reading it by forming RNA, aligned themselves accidentally in such a manner as to form a machine that could, reading RNA this time, form other proteins as well. And presto we have the self-reproducing cell. And having shown that this could be, and all just by accident, the rest is history, a history that, by accident, formed Alexander Ivanovich Oparin, who, by the accidents of birth and education could finally explain it all to the accidentally formed Soviet citizenry.

Considering the mind-boggling improbability of all this, the little child who cries that the emperor is naked might be viewed as intelligent. And that, ultimately, is what the new biologists are actually doing. They point to a gap in the logic that leads from a handful of elements—but by no means all—to self-moving creatures that exhibit purposive arrangements internally, like that handy DNA code. Is it their unforgivable sin that some of the more philosophically minded among them, looking to fill the gap, point to God rather than, like their opponents, to the equally mysterious divine Complexity. The sin, it seems to me, lies in the meanings associated with these two concepts. God is assumed to be intelligent, a source of law, suggesting a relationship between creator and creature—whereas Complexity demands nothing at all while giving us whatever we want in the way of explanation. And where power to explain is sought, Complexity is certainly omnipotent.