Posted by
Rob on Friday, April 25, 2008 3:12:02 PM
In the previous blog, "
Expelled-the movie" I wrote about the efforts to annihilate
Intelligent Design because of the religious commitments of Darwinists. However, Darwinists know that their paradigm has been crumbling for 40 years, as the movie tangentially discusses. That is, there's only so long you can go on calling
everything "apparent design", without your students starting to treat it like
"actual design". This has led many bright people to look for ways to shore up Darwin, by finding a source of Unintelligent Design. And the nexus for all these politically correct UD studies, is the
Santa Fe Institute.
A colleague sent me a reference to one of their
scientific papers, published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, or
PNAS, which requires a word concerning
NAS. When religious surveys were taken asking only 2 questions "Is there an afterlife? and, Does prayer work?", some 20% of scientists answered both in the affirmative, which was roughly comparable to the general population. However, when they took this survey of the NAS, only 7% agreed, indicating that the self-selection process at NAS carefully sorts scientists by their level of unbelief. "Expelled" explains this phenomenon. Now I have other beefs with PNAS concerning the shoddy scientific work
they publish, but there is one area they excel in--the defense of
Darwin.
So when PNAS publishes the work at Santa Fe Institute, they are trying desperately to defend Evolution. Somehow, they have to figure out how design can appear from
random chance. When I was in grad school, it was avalanches in sand
piles that were all the rage for "self-organizing criticality" at Santa Fe. My
daughter at college quit her work study on sand piles because she found
it so terribly boring. And it is. Because it manifestly can't work. It's
another instance of the "looking for my lost keys under the
streetlight" phenomenon, since we can almost do the math on sandpiles,
but biochemistry is hopeless.
That's why I think the Santa Fe Institute will never be able
to achieve their goals. The biochemistry holy grail equivalent to physics self-organization is
"autocatalytic enzymes", or enzymes that make themselves. Prions are a
good example of this, since bovine-spongiform encephalapathy (mad cow
disease) is caused by a reconfiguration of a good protein into a bad
one autocatalyzed by the same protein. I prefer to think of it as a
crystallization event. But that is exactly the point, crystals don't
have any information. Sure, they look really organized, so it is
"self-organized", but there is a world of difference between that and a
Maserati. And the cell (remember the Expelled movie?) makes a Maserati
look like a sugar cube.
So this paper is saying that energy efficient metabolic pathways permit
the energy to be used in self-construction, so a more efficient system
will naturally bubble to the top in a random world since it will make
more copies of itself. Now this is true in Detroit, since the
manufacturer of better engines will make more money and therefore can
improve his car plant. But it doesn't work that way in, say, Lagos.
Why? Because corruption is so bad there, none of the extra income ever makes
it back to the engineers on the plant floor. So until the system
minimizes parasitical entropy, until the system achieves a certain
signal to noise level, there isn't any feedback to work with. And the
cell has many, many orders of magnitude more noise, needing orders of
magnitude more signal to noise than this effect they describe in the
paper.
Let me say it another way. Everything in a cell is done in a water
medium. (Nearly) everything is done by diffusion-limited growth. The
entropy is absolutely enormous in a viscous medium with Rayleigh
numbers approaching asphalt. So how do you get anything to work at all?
With enormous difficulty, careful planning, and structure structure
structure. Conveyor belts, ionic gates, rotary motors, are all parts of
the way the cell gets information through the viscous entropic system.
The effect that the Santa Fe Institute is describing is a mere burp on
the conveyor belt. By itself it means nothing, and less than nothing,
since it distracts from the conveyor belt that is actually producing
the proteins. This would be immediately obvious if the authors ever
thought to do their chemical experiments in a cell-free medium, trying to abiotically duplicate this supposed advantage.
So the short version is, the Santa Fe Institute is looking for the
Chaotic god. When they stop insisting that God be chaotic, then and
only then will they begin to make progress.