I'm trying to write a thesis on recursion, but I keep thinking about it and don't know where to start.

I've also resolved to stop procrastinating, tomorrow.

All these sentences are false because all generalizations are false.

Once you are sensitized to the issue of recursion, you will know it must be divine to be so ubiquitous. Which is another reason it is hard to start the thesis, everything seems to entail recursion.

For example, suppose there's a El Nino combined with a decadal oscillation that produces 10 years of warm winters. It's not in anyone's climate model, so at meteorology meetings everyone talks about this anomaly. Someone comes up with a neat solution, feedback in the greenhouse gas radiation module. Soon everyone has that fix in their model. Is it right? Well, everyone's models are in complete agreement, and it matches the current climate, so it has to be right. Lots of funding is poured into this solution. Then the El Nino gives way to a La Nina, and the climate cools. It is not in anyone's model. Someone comes up with a neat solution, aerosols are heating the Arctic. Is it right? Of course not, no one has it in their model. And besides, too much money is invested in the other solution. Science is a finite state machine which has locked into a "global warming" solution that can hardly be changed.

The problem with the scientific method, like the problem with anything humans get involved in, is that we can foresee the result and accommodate our behavior accordingly. Our predictions are contained in our assumptions. In other words, we apply feedback or recursion into the science. Once this is done, and there is no way to really avoid it, we no longer have a deterministic system. Without a deterministic system, science is not deductive, it isn't even very inductive, because it isn't reductive; it is creative. We create a reality which didn't exist before, so we can neither deduce it nor induce it. Science is part of the system that we are describing, and we cannot objectively remove ourselves from the endeavor. And until science admits that it is a social endeavor and employs the same sort of checks and balances that apply to other human organizations, it will forever be mislead by the same people who lead it.

Let's see how this works in biology, more specifically, in the Evolution versus Intelligent Design debate. Jerry Coyne is an ardent evolutionist who argues that all the science support him and undermine his enemies. Here is his argument:

I have little to add to what P.Z. said except to note that the argument from imperfection — i.e., organisms show imperfections of “design” that constitute evidence for evolution — is not a theological argument, but a scientific one.  The reason why the recurrent laryngeal nerve, for example, makes a big detour around the aorta before attaching to the larynx is perfectly understandable by evolution (the nerve and artery used to line up, but the artery evolved backwards, constraining the nerve to move with it), but makes no sense under the idea of special creation — unless, that is, you believe that the creator designed things to make them look as if they evolved.  No form of creationism/intelligent design can explain these imperfections, but they all, as Dobzhansky said, “make sense in the light of evolution.”

Cornelius Hunter is all over this (lack of) logic. Let me add something I'm sure Drs Myers and Coyne will undoubtedly recognize--Bayesian hypothesis testing. The quality of a theory, according to Bayes, is more than whether an experimental result was predicted by the theory, but rather is defined as the "Occam factor", the experimental measurement (with error bars), divided by the space of the prediction (highest minus lowest prediction). If a theory is consistent with any measurement, as Karl Popper famously said of Freud, then it is a pretty useless theory for it is unfalsifiable. Bayes would say it had a very small Occam factor.

Now Coyne says that if an organism has a bad design, it is consistent with evolution, and of course if it has a good design, it is consistent with evolution. Evolution is consistent with any design, but not ID, which specifically mentions design. According Coyne, God would never make something with a bad design, which says Coyne, is not a theological argument(!). Whether or not it is a statement about the God Coyne doesn't believe in, it still seems to me that it is a Bayesian argument. Coyne just admitted that ID is a better theory than evolution, because ID is falsifiable, as he futilely attempts to prove.

Cornelius points all this out in his blog, which is another failed attempt to convince Coyne that he is as religiously dogmatic as the straw men he skewers. But Cornelius is puzzled by one thing, the brazenness of Professors Coyne and Myers that make these illogical arguments as if they were perfectly obvious. Are they playing the fool, or playing us for fools? (This is the Procrustes Dilemma: incompetence or malice?)

I think the answer is both. Or more precisely, recursion. Like global warming, once the fix is in, then the system produces feedback that makes it impossible to get any other answer. Once Coyne has said that he is an atheist, then it is impossible for him to be religious about his atheism. Just as it is impossible for a woman to be a chauvinist, or an African-American to be a racist. If Coyne were to admit that he is recursively trapped, he would have to admit that something very basic, something very fundamental in his worldview, is wrong. Thomas Kuhn called these things "paradigm shifts", and seemed to think that one couldn't be gradually talked into or out-of a paradigm. Instead, there was a "conversion experience" as one moved from one paradigm to the other. Despite the analogy, these quantum jumps have no physical basis (unlike real electron quantum jumps), and merely reveal something about the human brain, something about consciousness, something about ourselves. And that something is feedback.

Feedback is why we polarize into opposing camps. Feedback is why we can't be objective. Feedback is why global warming is such a big topic in a frigid year. Feedback is why Science is doomed. Feedback is why the human race is damned. For there are many ancient theological terms for feedback--rebellion, sin, pride, conceit--and it was this feedback in that garden so long ago, that introduced the human race to this strange condition called original sin. What starts out as incompetence rapidly turns into malice. And so malice propagates from heaven to earth and from past to future. Perhaps, in some theological sense, eternity will have no incompetence, only malice.

Which is why there is but one cure for recursion, for science, for history, for man: love.