Posted by
Rob on Wednesday, August 20, 2008 5:20:49 PM
Well I've been goofing off too much in the past week. I attended the
SPIE conference on Astrobiology last week, and delivered the paper that
I had
posted as a rough draft. I was scheduled for the last talk of the
last session of the last day of the conference, so perhaps there was
some trepidation about the fallout, but the response
was generally positive, though lively. Here's the
PowerPoint slides, and here's the
PDF of the revised talk.
The bottom line is that there are two and only two ways to view the
world: chaotic or coherent. Darwin's theory, like Lucretius before him,
and Epicurus before him, and Democritus before him, argues that the
world is chaotic. The metaphysics of all these men is greatly inferior
to that of Aristotle, or Augustine after him, or Aquinas after him, or Paley
after him, because it explains less, and predicts poorly. (After all,
how good a prediction can you make if the Universe is essentially
chaotic?) There is one reason, and only one reason for preferring a
chaotic world, and that is to remove the god(s). Lucretius is
particularly clear on this point in his opening argument. Translating
this desire into philosophy, it is the desire to remove teleology or
purpose. Translating into physics, it is the denial of global
coherence. Note that the denial must be absolute, no exceptions
allowed, or else the gods do not remain banished.
So working backward from physics, if we find evidence of global
coherence, then we have found evidence of teleology, which is evidence
of god, and the entire effort fails.
But this is precisely what 20th century quantum mechanics (QM) has
found, evidence of global coherence. It goes by many names, "collapse
of the wavefunction", "entanglement", "non-locality", "quantum
weirdness" but it all boils down to a coherence in space-time that is
inconsistent with a random worldview, with what I call "the Chaos god".
Physicists don't really know what to do with QM, and tend to keep it in
a dark room on an optics bench under a black tarp, but every once and a
while it escapes the lab and becomes a monster ravaging the town,
bringing terror and order. So the Theorists are brought down from their
ivory tower, some new principle is discovered that declares the order
merely "apparent", the monster is caged in a virtual jail, chaos is
restored, and once again everyone sleeps peacefully at night.
And this is precisely what is happenning in Astrobiology.
Two, rather innocuous, discoveries have combined to create a monster
that is threatening not just our town, but our entire galaxy. The
first discovery, reported in PNAS last month, was that most, if not
all, the "
539,723 genes distributed across 181 sequenced prokaryotic genomes"
show evidence of horizontal gene transfer. This means that Darwin's
"tree of life" has become a bush, that "descent with modification" has
become modification without descent. And of course, it fingers viruses
as the culprit for this mess, with their promiscuous tendency to carry
DNA indiscriminantly between species. The other discovery (discussed
before also
here),
was that a special class of crumbly black meteorites, thought to be
extinct comets, show microbial fossils that are hundreds of millions of
years old.
Combining these two discoveries, then, suggests that if comets have
fossil bacteria, then they undoubtedly have fossil viruses. And if
viruses live on comets, then they undoubtedly live throughout the solar
system, if not the galaxy or wherever comets roam. Therefore all life
and its DNA may be ubiquitous throughout our galaxy. This global
coherence means that we can no longer assume the evolution of life on
Earth is a linear process of increasing innovation, but it may be
merely a process of discovery and communication, much as the Europeans
colonized the Americas. Even the chronological order of evolution may
be simply an accident. Then Darwin's proposed mechanism (descent with
modification), the recognized problem (change over time), and his
materialist motive (chaotic progress) are rendered irrelevant and
non-exclusive, for many paths lead to the stars.
But as Lucretius so compellingly reminds us, the god of Chaos is a
jealous god, he will not permit any other flirtation on purpose. It is
possible one might remain a materialist even in the face of such
discoveries, to believe in Chaos no matter what the coincidence, but
Darwin no longer shoulders his share of the burden, but merrily skips
beside our plodding steps of stooped despair, whistling his tuneless
hymns.