In my previous post #1, #2, #3, I addressed the Origin of life (OOL) problem. In #3, I promised to work my way back to infinities from the FT, as well as show "how this transform turns points into volumes, and lines into areas". Along the way, I hope to address the comment,

If, via non-locality, information about life is stored holographically in billions of cubic light years then is it possible to say anything more about the mechanism by which this information gets into the organic material in the cosmic biosphere? This part of your thesis seems rather sketchy.

So this fourth and concluding post attempts to fill in some of the blanks, though I will forewarn you, it will not please everybody. To quote mathematician Hadamard, "Logic merely sanctions the conquests of the intuition", or to quote Ulam (quoting Banach) "Good mathematicians see analogies between theorems or theories. The very best ones see analogies between analogies." Why is this so? Because mathematics is not about particulars, but about generalities. Here's how Poincare put it, "Mathematicians do not study objects, but relations between objects. Thus, they are free to replace some objects by others so long as the relations remain unchanged. Content to them is irrelevant: they are interested in form only." Taking courage from these heady words, I will now sally forth from the fortress of critique to engage the skeptic with formal analogies.

The Fourier Transform

The Fourier Transform, is the process of transforming a graph, a seismogram or oscilloscope trace, where the y-axis is an amplitude or a voltage or some other measurable quantity, and the x-axis is time. What we are interested in is seeing how we can reconstruct that curve with some "lego blocks", where the "legos" are a set of functions, such as sines, cosines, gaussians, or other mathematical functions. To get the legos to fit the curve, I have to slide them left and right (call that phase), stack them up (call that amplitude) and use different sizes (call that frequency). When I get a good fit, I then tabulate the size, amplitude and phase in a table, and anyone who wants to reproduce my squiggly graph can pull out the lego bucket and do so.

Now the Fourier transform uses sines and cosines, while the more modern wavelet transform uses things that look like an ocean wave or like a mexican hat. The point is that the shape of the legos is relatively arbitrary, as long as it meets certain mathematical criteria like orthogonality (you can't make one lego out of two other legos) and completeness (there aren't some weird shapes that can't be fit with the legos). 

So what has all this transforming from graphs to legos accomplished? Simply that it enables us to turn an V-Time plot into a Z-Frequency plot, so that there are two "spaces" that describe the same graph: one in terms of real quantity "V" and time, the other in terms of lego-style "Z" and frequency. Note that a "frequency" need not be a sine curve lego, it can be the frequency of differently-sized mexican hat wavelets if you prefer.  The first point is that in this frequency-space, there is no time dependence; all quantities are independent of time.

A second, more subtle point, is that the transform doesn't really introduce any information into the system, it merely transforms it. This means that the quotient of the V-Time and the Z-Freq curves should "cancel" out in some fashion, leaving behind a constant term representative of the non-informational transform. For the Fourier Transform, this corollary is known as Parseval's Theorem, and the constant left behind is π. In the case of Quantum Mechanics, the corollary is known as Heisenberg's Uncertainty, and the constant comes out to be Planck's Constant divided by 2π.  (I'm unaware of any work, but I would imagine that a similar constant will appear if wavelet analysis is used instead of sines and cosines.)

In an earlier paper, I argue that this idea of two realms where one is time-dependent, and the other timeless can be used to resolve some long-standing theological debates about free will versus predestination. The use of Parseval's Theorem then makes some very specific theological predictions, which if validated, would be a triumph of science in the realm of theology! But here the more mundane application of this transform is used to resolve the OOL debate. That is, the instant in time and the instant in space during at which the putative OOL event occurred can be analyzed in frequency-space. A spatial-frequency is a long-range coupling, where lower and lower spatial-frequencies couple larger and larger distances. A temporal-frequency does the same thing in time, where high frequencies are things change quickly, and low frequencies change slowly.

A third, and even more subtle point, is that the same information encoded in that plot exists in both the V-T-space and the Z-Frequency-space. For example, if a trained geologist were to look at a seismogram, he could ascertain several features of the original earthquake, such as the S-wave and P-wave strength, the likely Richter magnitude of the quake, its potential for causing a tidal wave etc. But in order to learn more about the quake, he needs several stations and examine their Fourier transforms, or spectral power densities. He gains information from both the physical graph and its FT.

Another way to say this, is that a physicist can compute the energy of a wave in V-Time space, and for energy to be conserved, it has be identical to the energy of the same wave when tranformed into Z-Frequency space. So if information is conserved like energy, then the same information must be present in both locations.

A more homey example is your own sense of hearing. If I sat you down in front of a symphony orchestra, you would have no trouble locating where the drums came from, or how close you were sitting to the trumpet section. But after some training in orchestral instruments, listening to them individually to learn their FT spectral "fingerprint", you could tell with your eyes shut when the oboes were chiming in with the clarinets, and whether the violin or the cello was playing the melody. This is all done by the cochlea, the inner ear organ that performs a FT on the sound entering your ear.

So in summary, something conserved in one space is conserved in the other, but we find it more convenient to analyze in one space than the other.

The Definition of Life

The definition of life varies considerably from textbook to textbook. It is sometimes taken as the ability to self-replicate. But John Conway has a computer program, Life, that does that, as do viruses that can be crystallized, a rather non-living sort of thing. Some take it to be the presence of DNA or RNA, but again, viruses do that. Others take it to be metabolic activity mediated by ATP. But from a physics standpoint, all these definitions are attempts to define life by the conservation of a ordered state, or "low-entropy" condition. The replication criterion says something about decreasing entropy with time; the DNA or ATP criteria say something about the mechanical ordering or spatial entropy having some threshold. Combining these criteria, we have a definition of life as a spatially ordered, low-entropy system below a certain threshold, which over time becomes even more ordered. (It could stay the same, such as lyophilized bacteria stored in liquid nitrogen, but in that case, the thermal motion is also nearly zero, so temporal entropy should be measured with respect to thermal motion.) 

We can rewrite this definition quantifiably in terms of the Shannon information, (though in principle, all information measures should give roughly the same result):

I = negentropy = -S; 
where S=entropy=disorderedness; (low entropy = high information)
Boltzmann gave us the definition of entropy (and wanted it engraved on his tombstone) as:

S = k log(Ω) where k = "Boltzmann's constant", Ω = number of permutations or "states" of the system.

But just as zero entropy has to be defined, so also we need to define zero information. Using the ansatz that a Gaussian distribution of states has the maximum entropy while conserving energy, we define this to be the zero information state. Since negative information is hard to explain, it is the difference from zero that becomes our useful "information", or:

I' = I/k = - (log(Ω) - log(G)) = -log(Ω/G) = -log(Ω')
where G is the gaussian distribution of the same number of particles at the appropriate temperature, I' =normalized information, and Ω' is the "normalized" entropy. If we accept a definition of life as a high information state in both space and time, using the symbol "xt" to indicate space-time, we can now apply point 3 from the previous FT section:
 
 I_life = I_xt + I_f
where we describe the biological information as a sum in both V-space and the Freq-space.  Why a sum? Because Shannon information is purely local, not taking into account the state immediately preceding or following this one. It's like an instantaneous derivative. But in order to describe the dynamics of the system, one has to take into account both temporally distant, as well as spatially distant information. My intuition is that the best way to "improve" the Shannon approach is to take the FT of the system and extract the Shannon information from that as well.

Then by the definition of Shannon information, this is:

I_life = -log(Ω'_xt * Ω'_freq).
Now we know how to calculate Ω_xt, but what precisely is Ω_freq? Well this is the quantification of what was described in the previous two examples: the information from an FT analysis of seismograms and orchestral performances.  Since we can describe Ω'_freq as a function of the FT:

  I_life = -log(Ω'_xt * Ω'(FT(V,xt)))
and the FT doesn't add any information to the system, then we can reverse the order:

  I_life = -log(Ω'_xt * FT(Ω'(V,xt))) = -log(Ω'_xt * FT(Ω'_xt))
Then the information of life includes FT-space or the non-local information hiding in the spacetime realm, where "spatially non-local" includes long-range interactions and "temporally non-local"  includes events that may have happened a long time ago. If we define some threshold for life, then something is living if:

I > I_life-threshold
This looks a lot like Parseval's theorem, which says that the "width" in space multiplied by the "width" in frequency results in a constant. This also looks like Heisenberg's Uncertainty relation, where multiplying by the complex conjugate makes the right-hand-side real. Then the I_life_threshold is positive definite, real, and independent of coordinates.

We'll interpret this to mean that the finer the resolution we look at life under the microscope (the smaller the lego block), the lower the resolution in the FT (shorter the temporal and spatial non-locality) needed to pass the threshold. Conversely, the blurrier we observe life through the telescope (the larger the lego block), the more we rely on temporal and spatial non-locality to determine whether it passes our threshold.

Putting all these examples together for biology, we can say that biology is defined as an extremely low-entropy/high-information system, one that cannot happen by random chance. This low entropy is true in both space and time, meaning that as a photograph of a cell shows information, so also the time-history of the cell shows information. Thus a cell exposed to gamma-rays may look the same, but its time-history shows decay and loss of information, so it isn't enough to define life as a complicated machine, it must also be a dynamic machine: low-entropy in both space and time. And once life is defined as a low-entropy V and T system, then we can use our 2nd and 3rd corollaries to show that total information is conserved (Ω_t * Ω_f) and that this information is not stored locally.

Finally, and the whole point of these last two sections, it is the non-local nature of biological information that provides the solution to OOL.

After this mathematical introduction to the problem, lets take a more physical analogy to elucidate some details.

The Space-Time Data

When astronomer Hubble discovered was that all the galaxies are receding from us, the more distant ones at a faster rate. Running the movie backwards, this would have all the galaxies originating from a single point, an event which Hoyle ridiculed as "The Big Bang". Several Russian theorists proposed that the galaxies might not collide, but "just miss", so as to form an "hourglass" shape in space-time. Hawking's claim to fame, was to show that even if the Russians were right, the gravitational attraction of all those galaxies close together at the "neck" would produce a fatal attraction leading to a black hole. In fact, said Hawking, the Big Bang is just a black hole in reverse, and we are all living inside the event horizon, the Schwarzschild radius.

Just to make Hawking's observation a bit weirder, every relativity book carries the proof that space and time reverse when one crosses an event horizon. It is also the opinion of several cosmologists that the information carried by books, disk drives, or people that cross the event horizon remains plastered on the horizon, so that all the information of a black hole becomes encoded on its surface.

So the analogy here is that the singularity of creating life is as significant in terms of information as creating the universe is in terms of matter. Just as the moment of creation explodes into the volume of the universe, so also life has exploded into the volume of the universe. And again by analogy, just as space and time invert as we cross the event horizon of a Black Hole, we have a similar inversion of space and time as we cross the event horizon of information in the cell.

That is, if we can invert the Big Bang into a Black Hole so also we can invert the expansion of life into the contraction of death. As we approach this event horizon, time and space reverse, so that just as life is lived as a unified body--extended in space, but linear in time--so death is experienced as a diversity, extended in time but linear in space, for being "dead" is a spatially defined corpse, but an unspecified or eternal time. Likewise, you as a person are alive, but not just because your cells are alive. After all, Henrietta Lacks cells are still alive some 50 years after she died. But there's a spatially defined boundary, roughly your skin, within which we have living components of you, but not a living you. So to be alive is to be extended spatially (but delimited by your skin), and linear in time (birth to death). You can play around with these numbers, you can even include societal components of "being alive", but the exercise is intended to show that we can make a quantifiable measurement of the "width" of the information in space and time.

Recalling that "alive" is defined to be an information state defined as I_xt + I_f > I_life-threshold, then we can start to see where the contribution to the sum comes from. I_f (spatially) has a large contribution at the size of the nucleus, at the size of the cell, at the size of the organ, and at the size of the skin. If we were to include the entire "colony" there are some weaker contributions at the size of the family, at the size of the city, and at the size of the world.

So what does it mean that life permeates the galaxy on comets? It means that there is a term on the spatial scale that is larger by the ratio of galaxy/world, or about sixteen orders of magnitude larger than the world. In comparison, the world is about 14 orders of magnitude bigger than a single cell.  Now we'll make a typical physicist simplification, and suggest that if information is distributed more or less evenly over these different scales, then presently there is 100 times more extraterrestrial information than terrestrial.

Now if we run the clock backwards, to the moment when life first appeared, the OOL boundary, the biological big bang, then space and time invert, and that 100x more extraterrestrial information becomes 100x more temporal information than in the temporal arrangement of the cell itself. Another way to say this, is that the organization of the universe is so inclined that it completely dominates the OOL problem of arranging the chemicals in the right order. One more try. For every protein that encodes a special order of amino acids for OOL, there are 100 solar systems that encode a precise position of planets for OOL.

Cosmology and biology are intertwined, and the contingency of the universe is now invoked to explain the contingency of life. Physicists just inherited a problem that 100 times as many biologists have failed to solve.

So how are they going to make progress on this insoluble problem? By transforming into Fourier space, and converting evolution into a sequence of frequencies.

What does this mean? Evolution for the biologist becomes for the physicist a series of waves imposed on the Big Bang.

It becomes the voice of Creation;

The words of God.

Thirty years ago, I matriculated from Wheaton College, a "fundamentalist" school 25 miles west of Chicago. Well, actually the faculty and student body never called it fundamentalist, that's what the big TV station called us whenever they did their "local news specials", and waited for the opening prayer at mandatory chapel to pan the audience for the obligatory "every head bowed" shot. In actuality, Wheaton was proud of its "progressive status" among the consortium of 13  small liberal-arts Christian colleges, promoting an "old-earth creationism" in contrast to the 24/6 "young earth creationism" usually associated with Bible colleges. They had even built their then-new science building with a rotating display of a student-excavated mastodon skeleton ("Perry") to reinforce their commitment to older-than-6000-year bones. And my science profs proudly displayed their membership and articles in the Journal of the American Scientific Affiliation, the "non-YEC" Christian society for scientists.  I faithfully read the journal at the library, feeling not as wealthy as my geology-major roommate who had a subscription. And a particularly good essay in a science class might get the rare praise "perhaps you can submit it to JASA."

So it is with some astonishment that recently I received an email asking why attendance at ASA meetings has "grayed" so much, with one reporting that only 5 in a crowd of 80-100 were below the age of 40. A mail-in survey of 53% of the members found that less than 15% were below 40, (and apparently not desirous of attending meetings.) An anecdotal survey of other Christian affiliations of scientists found them with larger percentages of young scientists.  So what ailment has afflicted the ASA?

One colleague suggested that ASA was designed as an anti-YEC affiliation, since with publication of Henry Morris' 1961 book The Genesis Flood, YEC was taking the evangelical world by storm.  Accordingly, as YEC evangelism stalled out, so did ASA membership, leaving behind a graying coterie of scientists fighting yesterday's battles.

While there is some truth in this analysis, JASA didn't spend most of its page count debunking YEC. (A random issue from Dec 1981 found 4/15 anti-YEC articles, or about a 30% ratio that has stayed relatively constant.) Nor did my geology roommate join ASA to fight YEC, he did it to talk to other Christian geologists. That's the principle reason anyone joins an affiliation--networking. So why was Christian networking so important in 1980 but not in 2010?

Another colleague suggested that young, career-minded scientists have to network so much more nowadays, that they don't have time for an organization that spends an inordinate amount of time on history and philosophy. So there just isn't any practical benefit for an untenured scientist to join. To test this hypothesis, I downloaded the most recent JASA table-of-contents:

Editorial: Leegwater, Arie. “On Tipping Points and Christian Scholarship,” 61:2, 65, J 2009.
Articles: Brooke, John Hedley. “Charles Darwin on Religion,” 61:2, 67, J 2009.
Davis, Edward B. “Prophet of Science—Part One: Arthur Holly Compton on Science, Freedom, Religion, and Morality,” 61:2, 73, J 2009.
Heun, Matthew Kuperus, David Warners, and Henry E. DeVries II. “Campus Carbon Neutrality as an Interdisciplinary Pedagogical Tool,” 61:2, 85, J 2009.
Hill, Carol A. and Stephen O. Moshier. “Flood Geology and the Grand Canyon: A Critique,” 61:2, 99, J 2009.
Essay Book Review by Author: Rudwick, Martin J. S. Worlds Before Adam: The Reconstruction of Geohistory in the Age of Reform, 61:2,116, J 2009. (Davis A. Young)
Essay Book Review by Reviewer: Young, Davis A. “The Historical Reconstruction of Geohistorical Reconstruction.” Review of Worlds Before Adam: The Reconstruction of Geohistory in the Age of Reform, by Martin J. S. Rudwick, 61:2,116, J 2009.

Tabulating topics, the editorial is talking about the sociology of science, while the first two articles are history of science topics. The third article is on ethics, and only the fourth an anti-YEC apologetic. The book reviewed twice is on the history of science, with perhaps some application to anti-YEC apologetics, seeing as the latest battle has YEC authors recruiting Reformation-era scholars to their side. None of these articles are suitable for the "peer-reviewed" literature of a hard-science journal, but are directed at the soft-sciences of history, sociology and philosophy. Fully a third fall in the category of anti-YEC rhetoric.

So while there is a grain of truth in this argument, thirty years ago every one of us budding scientists would have been insulted if we were accused of carefully calculating our career track to exclude our faith. If anything, we college students were much more idealistic than our aged professors, and found JASA highly relevant to the synthesis of our science with our faith. Why then are today's college students not finding it relevant?

That brings me to my hypothesis.

The ASA, which began 60 years ago under different circumstances, has become for all intents and purposes, the ATA, the American Theistic-evolution Association.

Being a TE was cutting edge in Christian circles 30 years ago when I attended Wheaton, but has now become a secular liability. The academic conflict, documented by Expelled, has now become so severe that only tenured profs can admit to being part of any theistic society.

So right away, going to an ASA meeting requires tenure. And tenure is a 6 or 7 year process after a PhD, which is itself a 6 or 7 year process and we have 22-yr bachelor-of-science grad becoming a 36-yr old tenured prof, which can easily become 40-yr if one had to take a postdoc or two before tenure-track and this explains the cutoff as well as any other theory.

In addition to this threshold effect, there's the unnecessary baggage of TE that is making young people avoid this solution altogether.

That is, TE was an attempt to remain "evangelical" (holding the Bible in high esteem) while continuing to be a scientist who subscribes to Darwin. This compromise was in itself costly, with valuable resources, time, and argumentation consumed defending the position against both secular humanists and ardent creationists. If the benefits of being TE (being a member of an exciting church) are removed, then who would want to pay the cost? Yet churches are no longer as anti-Darwin as they used to be, post-modernism and emergent churches are fine with Darwin, so the benefit to being TE is rapidly diminishing.

One more anecdote. Last year I attended a "Faith and Science" seminar at Princeton sponsored by the Westerly Road church. The three panelists included two "young" scientists, possibly graduates of Princeton, and a prof from Westminster Seminary. When the moderator asked how they combined their science with their faith,  one replied that "I just do science", and the other opined that "my faith isn't shaken by science", amplifying with an ethically disturbing scientific discovery that they just accepted at face value. In other words, there appears to be no connection between science and faith, and apparently, no need to integrate them. 

So make the cost high, remove the benefits, and what young scientist wants to join the ATA?

It isn't often that my favorite topic appears on Fox News! It is even more rare when Fox News contacts people that I know and interact with. So you will forgive me if I get excited and deconstruct this "slow news" filler item. It turns out to be more insightful than I had first thought.

The article, Science vs. the Bible: Reconciling Genesis and the Big Bang, is not all that new, seeing as Hugh Ross has made a career for the past 20 years on this topic. But Fox's take on it is intriguing, and ends up interpolating between all the standard views. So to understand the players and the internal controversies, here's a short diagnostic you can employ.

Question 1: Do they take the Bible (and Genesis) to be literal truth? --- infallibility
Question 2: Do they believe in God? --- theism
Question 3: Do they take the Big Bang as being scientifically accurate? --- cosmologist
Question 4: Do they take the data seriously (epistemological realist etc.)?  --- empiricist

Young Earth Creationists, who believe in a literal 6-day creation some 6000 years ago, are 1,2,!3, and ~4, meaning they are infallible theists who dislike cosmology and maybe accept data they agree with. Hugh Ross is in the category of Old Earth Creationists who are 1,2,3,4 but they employ some juggling to get 1 & 3 to agree. Theistic Evolutionists (and I know cosmology is not the same as evolution, but the approach is the same) generally drop 1, so they are !1,2,3,4. Secular humanists are !1,~2,3,4, and atheistic materialists are !1,!2,~3,~4.  Now where this article gets interesting, is when it asks how Judaism handles Genesis.

Gerald Schroeder, the lead-off scientist in the article, is the only physicist at Aish ELC, a "conservative" jewish college, and from their literature, Aish HaTorah have as high a view of Torah (Genesis through Deuteronomy) as their Christian counterparts. So we have the same 6-day vs 13.7 billion year problem to solve. Schroeder apparently solves it with a 1,2,3,~4 view, where he thinks that Einstein relativity may modify our measurement of time. We'll come back to his solution, but first the debate.

His closest Christian counterpart in ~4 is YEC, who are also anti-Big Bang, so naturally the article goes on to cite the disapproval of Ken Ham, a big YEC proponent. And Ham's principle concern is the motivation for Schroeder's rejection of 4. In other words, YEC isn't really concerned with reconciliation between science and theology, but the victory of theology over science, and not just any kind of theology but specifically protestant theology. So Schroeder's agreement isn't welcomed. This isn't too surprising, actually, since much protestant theology has located sin and salvation in the attitude and motives of the inner "heart" (versus the actions and indulgences of the external body). So naturally, for the science to be correct, it must also have an attitude check. Epistemology is rejected because spiritual reality trumps physical reality. The Gnostics are in control.

Well the next best fit might be to Hugh Ross, but curiously the Fox religion correspondent, Lauren Green, does not interview anyone of the OEC flavor. So trying to fill this gap, I would say Jack Collins and Vern Poythress have both addressed this difficulty by arguing for an "analogical" day of more than 24-hours. In other words, there's a relativity of words to match the Einstein relativity of spacetime. While many evangelicals embrace this position, it does put a great deal of faith in the Hebrew scholarship of theologians. So it is quite interesting that Jewish scholarship, arguably the experts in Hebrew translation and represented by Schroeder, don't take this option. Instead they pin the uncertainty on physics. In the poker game between scholars and scientists, they think linguistics trumps physics, whereas these theologians break the other way.

Well a worse fit might be the theistic evolutionists, as represented by Pete Enns and Karl Giberson. There's a great backstory, with a fight brewing between the old-school evangelicals as represented by Collins and Poythress, and the new-school as represented by Enns and Giberson over the proper way to interpret the Bible. In fact, Enns was recently ousted from his Old Testament teaching position by a coalition which included Poythress.  Since the principle doctrine of Enns is that Genesis cannot be interpreted apart from its Bronze Age composition, he finds it blasphemous to find in it anything related to the Big Bang, as if Mesopotamian temple dedication rituals could possibly reflect modern scientific truth. Of course, calling this retro view "new-school" is most unfair, because it involves the same premises that drove Westminster seminary to separate from Princeton in 1929 as recorded in Machen's 1923 classic Christianity and Liberalism.

If Enns rejects Schroeder because he blasphemes the high priests of science,  Giberson rejects him because he blasphemes the high priests of theology. That is, he accepts that Einstein's (special) theory of relativity would permit 6 days to be 13.7 billion years (on a spaceship zooming by the Earth), but if other theologians have never seen Einstein's theory in Genesis, then there can't be any evidence supporting Schroeder. The ironic aspect of this dynamic duo who both now moonlight at Biologos, is that Enns is a Hebrew scholar and Giberson a PhD physicist, but they both find his blasphemy outside their area of expertise.

Finally, the atheist materialist absolutely revels in his abhorrence of theism, while simultaneously wallowing in a worship of science, so his ~3, ~4 is not from reverence of scripture, but from ideological adherence to methodological naturalism. For no atheist is really comfortable with the Big Bang since it requires a belief in beginnings. This makes the atheist scientist susceptible to every alternative sham theory from Big Bounces, Baby Universes, String Landscapes to the now-discredited Steady State model; all without a single shred of evidence.

We find TE, OEC, YEC, and AM at the four corners of the boxing ring, with Schroeder someplace in the middle. With the TE he thinks that science and the Bible must agree; with the OEC he trusts the data for a 13.7 billion year earth; with the YEC he finds the Genesis account infallible; and with the AM he finds the Big Bang model mildly unsatisfying. But none of these sparring partners want to claim him, and each of their objections are based on something outside their expertise. The OEC prefer to locate the solution in the ambiguity of language; the YEC prefer the attitudinal stance toward linguistics; the AM require a dogmatic faith in philosophical materialism; and the TE defend a century-old modernism. Schroeder arguably has the best linguistic support (at Aish HaTorah) of the bunch; he is a trained physicist (as Giberson reluctantly admits); he has no ideological axe to grind in philosophy; and he accomplishes all this without triggering the 17th century Christian wars of religion.

In other words, he's in my bunker, filling sandbags, taking heat.

Thanks, Gerald.

Judging from the comments to the homochirality post, Darwin (aka evolution) still gets support and Pasteur still endures ridicule. Some suggested that I had misread the meteorite data, others suggested that homochirality is easily obtained in the laboratory, while still others proposed circularly polarized light. So it is with a certain sense of vindication that I read the New Scientist article, Did exploding stars shatter life's mirror?

The article begins by saying all life is L-amino, and then admits that all amino acids found on meteorites has an excess of L-amino.

"For every type of amino acid found in meteorites there is an excess of the left-handed form over the right-handed of between 2 and 18 per cent," says Uwe Meierhenrich of the Nice Sophia Antipolis University in France. "An excess of the right-handed form has never been found."

This amazing admission is then qualified with a "well it might be Earth contamination", but for unspecified reasons, this excuse is not followed up. The reason is simple, it can't be Earth contamination, at least not recently, as in the last 400 million years. So if Earth can contaminate comets in the Oort Cloud 400 million years ago, then there is no reason to believe the opposite is impossible either. Hence the quick change in argument.

So how do we explain this (presumed abiotic) production of amino acids? The article goes on to shoot down the circularly polarized light argument, which is what I alluded to in the comments.

Circularly polarised light interferes with the arrangement of electrons that bind atoms together in such a way that it can selectively break up molecules of one or other chiral form, depending on which way it is rotating. ...It is a seductive possibility, but it has its problems. The selective destruction of amino acids only kicks in if the light has enough energy to trigger the necessary chemical reactions - in practice requiring the presence of ultraviolet light, rather than the less energetic infrared light seen in the Orion nebula. "No one has detected any of this light yet," says Meierhenrich...

As an aside, you never hear the caveats until a new new theory is advanced, and suddenly all the problems with the old theory are freely admitted. The Darwin-defenders at Wikipedia, for example, happily talked about circularly-polarized light producing homochirality, without actually discussing whether visible and IR light actually destroyed any amino acids. Like Darwin himself, theoretical possibilities that advance the cause will trump reactionary experimental observations every time. This is why Pasteur never gets the respect he deserves.

But wait, the new new theory is so much better than all those other losers!

Meaning, no one has yet had an opportunity to shoot it down, or why else would New Scientist include this quote?

It is a daring suggestion, but one that so far has raised surprisingly few objections.

It is a challenge that I couldn't resist, so I had to write this blog. Here's my objections:

 1) Chemical bonds, say, between a carbon and a nitrogen atom, are in the vicinity of 1eV in energy. IR light, as this article noted, is about 0.01 eV, making it rather incapable of the bond destruction that was proposed. UV light is about 1 eV, but no one has found circularly polarized UV yet. Even if you could make a nice Ray-Ban circular polarizer for UV, it would be destroyed by the very light it was filtering, which is a serious problem for satellite solar-UV monitors.

2) A strong magnetic field and a blue-white giant star could do it, which is what I thought this paper would be about, but even then, the radiation environment of a blue-white giant isn't favorable for amino acid creation; it has no "Cinderella" location that is amenable to liquid water. Instead it would ionize hydrogen and deplete the planet/synthesis region of water, much as Mars lost its water because of its much weaker magnetic field. This is one of several reasons why blue-white stars are not expected to have habitable planets. Another reason is that if all stars are like our Sun, the magnetic field would flip every 10 years, and the admittedly very small homochirality effect should average to zero.

3) But the authors are not proposing a UV light solution, nor are they proposing a long term decay. Instead they want the whole process to happen in, oh, a few seconds at most. When a Type II supernovae explodes, its iron core collapses, squeezing electrons and protons into neutrons and releasing enormous burst of neutrinos, such as those measured in the aftermath of supernova 1991a. If these neutrinos are produced in a strong magnetic field, the authors argue, they preferentially destroy one chirality of an amino acid, by transmuting its nitrogen-14 into oxygen. Now transmutation involves MeV energies, which is why Uranium has a million times the energy density of TNT. So we are solving an eV chemistry problem with an MeV nuclear solution.

4) Not only do neutrinos have nearly zero interaction with matter, but they are produced right before the star destroys itself in an enormous explosion. It seems unlikely that our precious collection of newly minted chiral amino acids will survive the intense heat and destruction coming immediately after the neutrinos. The authors thought of that, and suggested that the supernovae could collapse into a black hole, which would then prevent the explosion that ripped the star apart.

5) This is only making things worse. It takes a super-massive blue-white star to produce a black hole supernovae, at least, according to theorists. The smaller supernovae merely make neutron stars. But even if it makes a black hole, 90% of the star is still exploding, it is only the core that collapses. And we've already discussed why blue-white giants make terrible nurseries for amino acids.

6) But where did those amino acids come from in the first place? Didn't Miller-Urey and its successors demonstrate the extreme difficulty in producing any amino acids at all? So isn't there a contradiction between the conditions that support amino acid production, and the conditions for a blue-white type II black-hole supernovae? And if it takes more than one supernovae to build up the interstellar supply of chiral amino acids, why should they all have the same polarity magnetic field? Like the Sun, wouldn't the average erase the already small chiral effect? And can there be any data whatsoever when an experiment requires the trillion-trillion neutrino production of a supernovae to test the theory? In other words, the only advantage of this nuclear transmutation over the circular-polarized UV theory is that it can't be tested.

In the end, this theory errs in the opposite direction from the IR circularly polarized light solution; if the latter tries to kill a fly with a heat lamp, the former kills the fly with a nuclear bomb. In neither case is there much hope in having the fly pinned to a board.

With regard to the deniers who think homochirality is not much of a problem, I only ask whether a solution requiring multiple massive magnetized black-hole supernovae doesn't imply there is at least a small difficulty to overcome? A difficulty, perhaps, that points to the non-random nature of life in the cosmos?

In Part 1 we argued that Origin-of-life (OOL) was indistinguishable from creationism, but distinguishable from panspermia. In Part 2, we argued that panspermia had not, in fact, solved the problem of OOL by positing infinite space or eternal time. However, we pointed out that panspermia at least recognized that there was a coupling between space-time and OOL, a coupling we identify with the Fourier Transform. In contrast, most OOL theories suppose life began at two points and a line: a point in time, a point in space (microscopic coacervate, etc.) and a line of serially encoded information (DNA, enzyme, etc.) Our goal for this post, is to elucidate what this FT does to the traditional OOL theory, how this transform turns points into volumes, and lines into areas.

Judging from the comments, the concept of infinity stopped most, who did not proceed further to understand the FT, nor its relationship to infinity. Georg Cantor's work on infinities demonstrates both their profundity (which should warn us against trivializing platitudes) as well as the danger for anyone embarking on this career.  So instead, let's begin with some examples of FT, and we'll work our way back to the infinities.

The key argument here, is that the central dogma of molecular biology is false, and has mislead investigators for decades. That is, the concept that DNA is the "master" of the cell, that DNA-->RNA-->protein-->life is wrong. 

[Very briefly, DNA stands for "deoxyribonucleic acid" and is double-stranded, while RNA stands for "ribonucleic acid" and is single-stranded. The differences make DNA more robust than RNA, and also permits DNA to form compact coils of the famous double-helix. All of this makes DNA ideal for information storage but less ideal for manipulation. So the cell makes a copy of a relevant piece of DNA but with a more malleable substrate, RNA, and sends it out to the protein factory called the ribosome. When other uses for RNA became apparent, biologists settled on prefixes as a way to distinguish the various functions: mRNA = "messenger" for the use we described above; tRNA = "transfer" consisting of 75-90 base RNA strand that latched onto one of the specific 20 amino acids in the cell, and brought them to the ribosome; sRNA="small"; siRNA="small interfering"; rRNA="ribosomal"; miRNA = "micro"; and so forth.]

Why is this misleading? Because it suggests that the secret of life can be boiled down to a single molecule in a single place, and if we could just find the miracle that instantiated that molecule, we would have life. Think of it as a successor to the Galvani hypothesis, that the secret to life is electricity, and if we could just electrocute dead bodies, they would come to life again. All these hypotheses are examples of reductionism, of trying to simplify something that is quite complicated. They make the same materialist error of denying information from Fourier space.

These examples are drawn from my reading in the past week, and are not intended to be either exhaustive nor comprehensive. They are simply the tip of a vast iceberg of data whose ominous presence goes unnoticed by the radio operator in the bridge.

Example 1: miRNA modifies itself

The interest in this press release from May 3, 2010, was that miRNA was found to not merely assist (or interfere!) in the production of proteins, but actually get involved in modifying the DNA. It is as if the messenger boy gave advice to the boss, before dashing off on his business. Even more strange is this discovery that the messenger boy trained more messenger boys! The significance is that this forms a self-reinforcing loop, which like electronic flip-flop circuits is a form of memory. Thus RNA is no passive channel in the central dogma, but a processor that causes information to flow both directions and has a local memory.

The importance is that information is not spatially located in the nucleus in the DNA, which is temporally transferred to the cell via RNA, rather, information is encoded in the conduit itself, and at every node in between.

[I can't resist drawing an analogy between communism's centralized power and democracy's decentralized economy that uses money as a bi-directional information flow. The cell, like a democracy, needs information to return from the proteins back into the DNA in order for embryos to differentiate. Information is the lifeblood of the cell, and all central dogmas, one-way valves, or obstacles to its flow must be held suspect until they reveal their hidden agenda.]

Example 2: PTSD affects DNA

The central dogma has long since lost its lustre, having been overshadowed by the epigenetic revolution, showing how information flows back into the DNA. While many laboratory examples involving rats or microorganisms have been discussed, or statistical studies that imply a correlation between generations, this article from May 5, 2010 shows how humans can immediately modify their own genes. Unfortunately, it is not a modification they would willingly undertake.

As I have often blogged, Moses reported that the "sins of the fathers go down 3 and 4 generations" demonstrating an environmentally driven epigenetic response. This paper gives the nuts and bolts of how a classic Mosaic trait achieves this epigenetic effect. Of even more interest is the timescale of this information feedback--a matter of months or perhaps even days. This is a very short time, a very high-frequency for an epigenetic effect, which from control theory, says something about the types of environmental stimuli that it is designed to handle. Something slower than breathing and drinking, but closer in frequency to eating and living. Even on these fast timescales, DNA is affected. Evolution proceeds not just at the rate of reproduction, but at much higher rates as well.

Example 3: splicesome code

This May 6, 2010 Nature paper has been getting a lot of press, whose point was that DNA has codes within codes. From the central dogma, DNA generates RNA. But now we find that RNA has a code in it for making several different versions of itself, removing and splicing the shorter pieces together. This enables the same piece of DNA to make multiple useful versions of RNA. Who does the splicing? Proteins that are created by RNA. So information is flowing backwards, with memory located in these feedback loops. While in one sense this information is all located in the DNA, albeit not contiguously but fractally, it does give a job to "junk DNA", revealing that there is far more information packed into the DNA more densely than we had thought.

Example 4 Cytosome organization

In this May 6, 2010 article, the authors discover that the "bag of chemicals", which was Darwin's view of the cell, was actually highly organized. Many chemicals were not distributed evenly, which is what random diffusion should be doing. Closer examination revealed that the proteins were being tagged, sent to different locations in shipping containers, unpacked, and then their tags removed. As they diffuse back from this location, they eventually get retagged and the cycle starts again. In this manner, chemical gradients can exist in all manner of designs within the cell. This is information stored in the spatial pattern  of proteins, but nowhere in this picture does DNA or RNA play a part. This is entirely a protein driven loop, which as we said above, functions as a "flipflop" memory bit. Information is encoded, decoded and transmitted entirely by proteins.

Example 5 Chromosome organization

In this May 7, 2010 article, the authors talk about a glue that holds DNA together. We all know about double-helix, and even how histones are the spindles for a super-helix, but what keeps the pairs of chromosomes together in mitosis? A protein glue, which knows when to employ and when to deploy, which depends on its concentration. This is an example of how a protein regulates DNA, so information is flowing back into the nucleus from the proteins.

Two points and a Line

What do all these examples from a single week demonstrate? That the central dogma is toast. That not only does information flow both directions, but it encodes dynamic memory states along the way. That the information is spatially distributed (patterns in the cell), temporally distributed (dynamic flipflop states), and fractally distributed (not linear). And most importantly, that the biology community stubbornly refuses acknowledge this paradigm shift, because they cling to the materialist fallacy of denying information in the Fourier realm.

Now let us return to the OOL dilemma. We said that it had assumed two points and a line: a point in time, a point in space, and serially (point-like) information encoding. All of these assumptions are precisely what we have identified as the materialist fallacy, that of denying information is extended in space, time, and encoding. That is, if life today does not demonstrate point-like properties, why is it essential that OOL demonstrate point-like properties? If information today is not localized, why would OOL show localized information? If we can confidently assert as Pasteur did, that "life comes from life", then why can we not also confidently assert that "information comes from information" and "non-local comes from non-local"?

In the face of this revolution in biology, this recognition of the extended properties of information in space, time and encoding, how can we continue to maintain that OOL is reductionistic and point-like? To propose that non-local information can be reduced to a single point is to look for "emergent" or "self-organized" systems, where great complexity arises from simple laws. Two of the favorite examples are the water-molecule and Mandelbrot set. The problem with both examples, is that they achieve their remarkable properties only in context of a rich set of relationships.

Hydrogen bonds are essential in making water a peculiar substance essential for life, but only because there are no other bonds quite like it. And only because carbon also exists, with the ability to bond both oxygen and hydrogen. And carbon forms polymers. And so it goes, with the significance of the water being due to a huge network of relations.

Likewise the Mandelbrot set lay silently in the mathematics until the advent of computers. Before then, a computation was accurate only to two or three decimals, with some of the huge bamboo slide rules giving a remarkable 5 digit accuracy with great effort. But digital computers could have infinite accuracy, and so the "zoom" feature of computers allowed the Mandelbrot set to be zoomed in to discover an infinite world of self-similar but not identical patterns. It was math in relation to an informational tool that revealed the "emergence" of order. Information lies in the relations, not just in the math equation.

So the search for how to reduce the non-local information of FT-space to a single point in space, time or encoding is destined to fail. The OOL objective is doomed from the start, because it attempts to do what is never observed in nature: reduce non-local information to two points and a line. And because this is an impossible task, so also the evolutionary paradigm that assumes all life began with OOL and randomly emerged (complexified, self-organized, emerged, etc.) is also false.

How does the discovery of micro-fossils on carbonaceous chondrites affect this OOL paradigm? It reveals the ad absurdum consequences of making the materialist fallacy. For if OOL is to overcome such huge odds (discussed in part 1), it has to be highly probable. But if it is highly probable, then it must have occurred elsewhere in this galaxy (discussed in part 2). But if OOL occurred elsewhere independently, it must be different from life here (discussed in chirality blog), because otherwise phase space is isn't densely populated. These are all direct corollaries of the materialist fallacy.

But what does cometary life tell us? That it all looks the same. The same chirality. The same cells. The same species. (Okay, there's some bizarre stuff in these carbonaceous chondrites that we haven't seen on earth, but I'm betting that when we grow microbial mats on the space station we'll produce these structures.) And that life probably exists wherever there are comets, since one comet can infect another. Life is distributed across the galaxy, possibly from the very origin of the galaxy itself. In fact, it may be likely that stellar evolution and biological evolution are linked problems. So the solution to the OOL problem turns out to be the same solution as that of  the cosmic fine tuning problem: the anthropic principle.

For if we really take the FT-space seriously, if we really can move beyond this materialist fallacy of thinking locally, then the entire universe is involved in the production of life, and over its entire history. There is no localization in either space or time or even encoding. This is why I reject "panspermia", which implies that seeds (linear) of life are spread (linear) throughout the galaxy, and prefer "panzooia", which emphasizes that life itself is an interconnected web throughout the galaxy, throughout time, and possibly throughout the cosmos. Like the Cat in the Hat, we have solved the OOL problem by spreading the bathtub ring of life over the entire galaxy. Because only by seeing the problem as a non-local problem, can we invoke a non-local solution. The solution to OOL is Voom!, the power of little cat Z.

For life is an expression of information stored non-locally, it is a proof that the universe is not the great void that concludes Jacques Monod's book "Chance and Necessity",

… man at last knows that he is alone in the unfeeling immensity of the universe, out of which he emerged only by chance. Neither his destiny nor his duty have been written down. The kingdom above or the darkness below: it is for him to choose.

In contrast, the universe is full of feeling, information, and meaning, from which man "emerged" as the acme of all the distributed information. Both his destiny and his duty have been inscribed on the stars, and he has only two choices: to join the kingdom above, or indulge the darkness within.

In my previous post, I suggested that we can learn from panspermia how to avoid the Origin-of-life (OOL) problem--by spreading it out. In the case of materialists from Epicurus to Hoyle, this was accomplished by making time eternal. If you have eternity to do something, they argue, why even the most improbable will necessarily occur. One can also make a spatial version of this argument by saying if the universe is infinite, then somewhere the improbable will necessarily occur. Sounds good, but...

Does this argument work?

Not the way they intend it to. For one thing, most cosmologists believe the universe to have begun in a Big Bang, which severely restricts the amount of time available for any improbable object. Likewise, many cosmologists think that the universe is finite, or at least, indistinguishable from finite size. This one is a bit trickier to argue, and so there have been many versions of an infinite universe, but every time a prediction of an observable effect is made, it turns out to fail. While there have been no lack of theories for an infinite universe, there have been no confirmations and a lot of disconfirmations, which would suggest we actually do live in a finite universe. So despite the ancient Greek belief in the infinity of time and space, the past 2500 years have been hostile to that position.

Of course, being unpopular for 25 centuries is a trademark of Epicureans, and one they tend to bear with pride. Science is not a popularity contest, and they may still turn out correct on a few details. However, the idea that eternity or infinity will solve the OOL problem is not one of them. Still, the concept of eternity/infinity in both science and theology can be fruitful, if we can refine the Epicurean argument. Is what they claim true, ...

Does eternity make everything probable?

Let us suppose that we can calculate a quantum probability for every possible event. Does multiplying that probability by eternity give us a certainty? No, because there may be two other factors we need to calculate:
 (a) Probability zero events.
 (b) Heisenberg uncertain events.

In the case of (a), some things just never happen. Exact knowledge of the position and momentum, which is an example of the Heisenberg uncertainty relation, cannot be had simultaneously no matter how long you wait. QM has many such "exact" relations, so there are many events that cannot be had. And multiplying zero by infinity has a well-specified answer, zero. 

Restating the Heisenberg result: all events are correlated, they have relationships to things around them. So if we violate energy conservation, the violation can only last for a certain length of time, such that delta-Energy * delta-time < Planck's_constant. That is, if we were to miraculously violate energy by materializing five loaves and fishes, we could only enjoy our feast for a ridiculously short pico-pico seconds of time. 

Conversely, if we tried to insert a miracle into an extremely short interval of time, then the momentum would be very well defined, and the miraculous object would be spread all over creation. We can't localize in energy without losing localization in time and vice versa. Nor can we localize in space without losing localization in speed (momentum) and vice versa. The whole point of QM is not to create miracles out of nothing, but to make fundamental the unlocalizable, wave nature of reality. Or as I prefer to think of it, the entanglement of events, the long-range correlations of matter, the reality of Fourier-spacetime.

[This insight comes from recognizing that Heisenberg's famous relation, delta-x * delta-p < h, is merely the consequence of Parseval's theorem, which states that the product of a function and its Fourier transform (FT) must be 2pi. If reality really is made up of waves, then the FT-space has equal validity, equal reality as space-time itself.

Think of the FT as an "inside-out" operation. If I take a slit and shine a bright light through it, it makes a blob on the wall. As I make the slit narrower, suddenly the blob on the wall breaks up into several blobs that move apart (and get dimmer) as I make the slit narrower. You can do this with your fingers too, squinting through the space between a thumb and finger. Little bars of light appear that separate as you narrow the gap. The point is that the FT does the inverse of the slit, the narrower the slit, the wider the bars.

The same thing is true in time. The FT of the sound wave converts it to a tone or frequency, and the FT of a flute looks like a single spike. But if I play the flute for a shorter and shorter burst, the FT gets wider and wider. The human ear converts sound waves into tones in the cochlea, and the brain processes tones to understand speech or music. So the brain really ignores the information in the sound wave (amplitude, phase), and processes only the information in the FT of the sound wave (tone, frequency). ]

So the problem with Epicurus is thinking that single events can be made probable by waiting a long time, without seeing those single events as correlated to all the other real world events. For if single events are correlated, then they are not random. And if they are not random, we can't calculate their certainty by multiplying their individual probabilities by a time interval.

Let's give a numerical example, so you can see how this works. Suppose we have a 10^-10 rate constant that ammonia and methanol will spontaneously combine to form the amino acid alanine. Suppose we have another 10^-10 rate constant that two alanine's will combine with a peptide bond and make a simple protein. What is the probability that a solution of 0.0001 molar alanine and 0.0001 molar ethanol will form a di-peptide?

Easy, you say, just multiply the concentrations(=10^-8), the rate constants(=10^-20), and bingo, the probability emerges (=10^-28).

Ah, but what is the concentration of alanine, the equilibrium state between the two reactions? Well that depends on all the things that dissociate alanine. So the probability of the final di-peptide depends not just on the probability of the intermediate steps, but a non-linear calculation involving all the processes that make and destroy the intermediate steps. In other words, correlations.

We chose a biological example, but atmospheric chemistry is full of these networks, which can sometimes include surprising catalytic effects. For example, the breakdown of ozone by Freon is hugely accelerated by the catalytic surfaces of stratospheric ice grains. So the results of our alanine example will be greatly altered by any surface catalysis that might exist.

Therefore not only is the problem highly correlated, but there are unknown catalytic reactions that can affect the outcome, not just for making ingredients, but like ozone, for destroying ingredients too. Therefore if the "destruction" pathways outnumber the "construction" pathways, then multiplying by longer and longer time intervals will have the opposite effect, making absence of complexity more likely than the presence of complexity. Without discrete mechanisms that can produce order, we can even make a thermodynamic argument that complexity is forbidden from arising spontaneously.

Why is this? Because it isn't simply the "construction" rate constants that are necessary, but the entire web of rates that construct and destruct. The probability is a product of all paths through phase space, not just the paths that look promising.

This argument applies whether we have eternal time or infinite space. That is, we have just made the argument that time-intervals are correlated, so that it is not possible to multiply all the events together (=multiplying by a time interval) to get the certainty. Now we argue for the same problem with spatial correlations. That is, each pond is not uncorrelated, and therefore we cannot improve the statistics by adding an infinite number of uncorrelated ponds.

I'm not sure how to make this argument more robust, but here's the essence. Two locations in a single pond are not independent of each other because diffusion and convection provide nearly the same concentrations of nutrients to both places. Furthermore, if one location is busy converting methanol, then the second location will have less of this ingredient. So there is a correlation due to transport. Transport includes not just chemicals, but also energy, say, as light or heat. So despite there being many cubic millimeters of water in a pond, there is a spatial correlation among them that prevents us from multiplying the rate constant by the volume of the pond to find the total probability. This spatial correlation also applies to multiple ponds, say, on the same planet. Or multiple planets with ponds around the same star. At the extreme limit, any pond in our universe will be correlated because they will all be less than 13.7 billion years old.

Now physics has made a career of assuming that experiments are "isolatable", and that spatial correlations (even temporal correlations) can be ignored. But it might be more accurate to say that physics only studies those things without temporal and spatial correlations. When there are strong correlations, we call it biology. Or saying this another way, we physicists predict that the entropy of an isolated system will increase, but when it doesn't, we call it "living", and excuse ourselves from the room. [Yeah, I know about "closed systems", but that still doesn't get physicists off the hook.]

Does infinity make everything impossible?

Well if we now know that the probability is a highly correlated function, and that the entanglement of two molecules can branch out and correlate, then every calculation is impossible since we don't know the solution to the entire universe! Even worse, if the universe is infinite in time and/or space, then it is in principle impossible to find all the correlations, and we can't predict anything!

Not exactly, the point is not that entanglements exist, but what is the strength and the correlation of the various entanglements? If we take the FT of the system, in both space and time, what are the frequencies, what are the wavevectors that are the largest contributors? Are daily cycles of night/day most important, with yearly cycles of cold/hot of secondary importance? Are length scales of inches between the mud on the bottom to air on the top most important, or the width of the pond, or the distance from the nearest pond?

These "correlation" lengths and rates are precisely what is captured in those ozone depletion models, where the frequencies of collision with reactive Freon is more significant that collisions with inert nitrogen. Likewise, the correlation with surfaces on ice grains is far more significant that the distance to the nearest Freon gas molecule. The construction of a physical model, then, is all about selecting the most important frequencies and spatial lengths from Fourier space before writing down a rate-reaction between atoms. You might even say that all the creative part of physics is found in the proper selection of FT-space components to make the models, since the space-time bit is mechanical and boring.

In fact, you might say that the problem with materialism is that it makes the simplifying assumption that there are no correlations, so that FT-space is devoid of information. Here's how that assumption works.

FT-space and Laplacian Determinism

Isaac Newton said that the position of an object can be determined from integrating F=ma twice. But there are two "constants of the integration" that must be added to this equation, namely the initial position, x0, and the initial velocity, v0. Many Enlightenment thinkers combined this with Democritus' materialism, to suggest that all of reality was made of atoms, whose motions followed Newton's laws. Laplace famously thought this result was so powerful, that if he had infinite knowledge of atom positions (x0, y0, z0) and their velocities (vx0, vy0, vz0), why everything else was determined. (These 6 quantities became known as 6-dimensional phase space.)

For many scientists, if such a materialist (only atoms) view applied to human beings, then they would have no free will; everything you will think or say will have been determined by the position and velocities of your constituent atoms. This bothered them enormously over the 100 years between Laplace and Heisenberg. But when QM announced in 1927 that the position and momentum could not be simultaneously determined perfectly, there was a collective sigh of relief that determinism had been vanquished, because we could never know both x0 and vx0 at the same time. When in 1966 Lorenz discovered that chaotic systems require enormous precision in x0 and vx0 to predict anything at all, then it seemed we could all sleep safely again, assured that the demon Laplace had unleashed had been reincarcerated.

But neither of these cages address Laplace's other assumption, that six numbers tell you everything you need to know about particles. What about gravity, what about electric and magnetic fields, what about inflation and dark energy? Don't all these other fields have some say on the future of the particles? Well most physicists argue these are mere "perturbations", but QM says otherwise. The existence or non-existence of particles depend on the wave function of entangled states that can span the universe, and this is no mere perturbation. So the mistake of Laplace (and materialist theories such as Darwin's) is to believe that local interactions, collisions of particles in the void, uncorrelated random motion, the zero-order term in the FT-space, is the only one of significance. And the correction of QM, of cosmology, of modern field theory, is to include all these long-range interactions as important if not critical in calculating the future of atoms. In other words, information is not just local, but holographic, distributed, spread over the entire volume of creation, which given the finite speed of light means it is also spread over the entire timeline since creation.

My hypothesis, then, is that information of life is not just encoded in the position and speed of the atoms but also in the FT, the table of "connections" with the rest of the universe.

Am I saying that Laplace and Newton were wrong? No, only that they ignored the long-range interactions that are captured in the FT. To be completely fair, the information must be equally distributed in both space-time and in the FT. The Materialism that propelled the West to such heights of success in the 20th century Modern age, capitalized on the local interactions, and fudged the models to incorporate the FT. This was the era of Physics. But the 21st century Post-Modern is where the long range correlations are important, where the FT turns out to be dominant. We have entered the era of biology.

That is, it isn't the proportion of chemicals in the cell that make it alive. It isn't even the cell seen through an electron microscope that captures the essence of the cell. Rather it is the cycles, the action, the motion of a cell that make it alive, and its interactions with all the other cells that give it  meaning. We say "this is a skin cell" or "this is a brain cell" not because it has a different DNA from the other (because it doesn't), but because of its embryonic history and relation to all the cells around it. Long range forces dictate 99% of the causal history of a cell. Biology is dominated by the FT.

In part 1 of this blog, I argued that the Materialist OOL problem was indistinguishable from the Creationist solution, since they both used improbable events. In contrast, I suggested that panspermia was the classic greek alternative to all creation accounts, and was at least consistent with materialism.

In this part 2, I argued that panspermia actually could not solve the problem of OOL by invoking either eternity or infinity. This problem arose because materialism assumes local interactions, when in fact, all of modern science points to the importance of non-local, global influences which we quantize as the information residing in the Fourier Transform.

In the next section, part 3 of this blog, I discuss how this perspective arises naturally from recent biological discoveries, and how it reinterprets the central dogma of biology (information flows from DNA-->RNA-->proteins-->life) Once we understand how life is redefined by the Fourier Transform, then we are ready to apply it to OOL, to demonstrate why OOL is not a well-posed problem.

In a previous blog, I mentioned the fact that meteoritic amino acids are undoubtedly a signature of extraterrestrial life and not abiotic, because they are all chiral. However, they are all L-amino (none are D-amino), which is unexpected from the hypothesis of independent spontaneous generation for each event, which should randomly select between L- and D-. There are three possibilities:
(1) we hit the lottery with a one-in-a-million chance of never having seen a common D-amino.
(2a) there's a "Darwin-of-the-gaps" materialist explanation for the prevalence of L-amino life
(2b) another "Darwin-of-the-gaps" materialist explanation for abiotic formation of L-amino
(3) all these meteorites are actually infected from the same source of life.

Now (1) offends my mathematical sense as it should yours, and (2a) and (2b) require too much faith in materialism for my skeptical mind, but (3) matches everything we know about the ubiquity of life on Earth. That is, despite our best efforts at sterilization, hospitals get infected with superbugs. Likewise, extremophiles grow from -30C Mt Everest to 400C black smokers on the sea floor, even in mines miles deep, along with every square inch of our planet's surface. So am I surprised that these meteorites, widely believed to be extinct comets, are all infected by the same sort of life? Not a bit.

Of course the simplest explanation, is that all these comets were infected from the Earth. The problem then is how to get Earth material everywhere. But we don't have to have huge asteroid impacts that spread Earth material through the solar system, all we need is a spreading infection. Yet if comets can infect comets, then it would seem that extraterrestrial life is not just common, not just ubiquitous, but more abundant than Earth life. How then can we develop a theory of evolution that ignores the majority of life in the cosmos? In fact, I argue that transport of life to the planet Earth is a far better explanation of the fossil record than the opposite--evolution of life on the planet Earth and its spread to comets.

"Oh, so you are one of those panspermia nuts," I can hear you thinking, "but you still haven't explained the Origin of Life (OOL)!"

That's because OOL is just an artifact of the assumptions, a singularity hiding in Darwin's materialism. Remember, the original formulation of materialism by Democritus supposed that time was eternal. Darwin believed time to be eternal. Sir Fred Hoyle (d. 2001) doggedly clung to this axiom, rejecting and ridiculing a cosmic origin by naming it "The Big Bang" despite overwhelming evidence because otherwise he had to explain OOL. That is, a Big Bang cosmic beginning necessarily requires a beginning of life, but if there is no beginning of time, one need not address OOL either. Hoyle evidently feared OOL more than the wrath of his astrophysicist colleagues, because if he had embraced the Big Bang, he undoubtedly would have received the Nobel Prize. Likewise, panspermia advocate Brig Klyce refuses to address the OOL problem, writing,

What strong panspermia does not do is account for life "in the first place." Similarly, neither does the big bang, nor any theory, answer the question, "Why is there anything instead of nothing at all?" In our opinion, science has nothing to contribute on questions pertaining to the origin of physical reality or the origin of life. These matters are properly part of religion and not of science.

And the OOL problem only gets worse the more we learn about life's complications. Whatever you may think of panspermia, at least like Darwin, it is consistent with materialism. The one position that is completely indefensible is that of Neo-Darwinian Theory (NDT) which insists on materialism everywhere except a hugely miraculous OOL. But if you want to be a consistent materialist, you will have to join Epicurus, Lucretius, Darwin and Hoyle in abandonning the Big Bang.

Unfortunately, I don't have that escape, my theology excludes it. Nor would I want to incur the wrath of the astrophysics community. So how do I handle OOL?

First, let me expand on Klyce's comment that OOL is a religious question, which he uses to dismiss it. I agree with Klyce that it's religious, but argue that this insistence on separation is the real myth that has plagued the Creationist vs OOL debate.  As we examine these myths, it will become evident that there really are only two solutions to this debate, and we have already seen both of them. This will clear the way for a restatement of the OOL problem as a singularity, an oxymoron, a self-contradiction more the result of bad syntax than scientific paradox. With this barrier circumvented, I hope to show that we have the solution already at hand, though perhaps not all the details.

Myth #1

The first myth is that there is a distinction between the supernatural and the natural. I have addressed this in many other posts, but the short version is that Quantum Mechanics (QM) says there are only probabilities, not certainties. Accordingly, we can only distinguish between the improbable and the probable. Then a supernatural creation is indistinguishable from an improbable OOL, and there is no scientific way to separate them. It is not as if miracles come with brand labels saying "Manufactured by", and QM is notorious for spawning bizarre interpretations. Plantinga even affirms the inverse, that there is no theological or philosophical reason to dismiss the supernatural, arguing that the entire concept of "no divine intervention" is incoherent. The distinction is invalid both scientifically and theologically.

Then the only way to resurrect OOL as a "non-creationist" event is to make it probable. But  Louis Pasteur 150 years ago and then Fred Hoyle 15 years ago demonstrated by experiment that this was not so, a conclusion we amplified by another factor of 1000 using the two dozen extractions of L-amino acids from meteorites.  Behe's calculation of the mutation rate of malaria parasites adds another 21 zeroes. Since these sorts of experiments are all independent of each other, we should be able to multiply the probabilities of their many OOL failures to estimate the likelihood of a finding a random ordering to be alive. That is, the density of "living" configurations in the phase space of all configurations of atoms/molecules/proteins is so low as to keep OOL highly improbable. Therefore scientifically, theologically and experimentally, OOL is indistinguishable from miracle, which collapses NDT and Creationism to be flavors of the same model and only distinguishable from a Lucretian materialism with infinite time.

Myth #2

The second myth is that there are two kinds of ignorance, one malignant and one benign. For example, when a theist says that God created life, but can't explain how, this is often impugned as malignant ignorance; a God-of-the-gaps who only operates when we are unable to explain scientifically. Since scientific knowledge has been growing exponentially, the argument goes, the gaps have been shrinking exponentially, so that a God-of-the-gaps has shrunk so much in the past century, He is unworthy of our worship or belief. However, when similar gaps appear in the materialist narrative, say, with respect to the fossil record, there is no hesitation invoking a "Darwin-of-the-gaps" which we are assured, future science will fill. Why is one ignorance any different than the other?

We had earlier blogged on the duplicitous nature of this argument, but here we simply point out that ignorance of efficient/material causes does not necessarily imply ignorance of final causes, so the theist may be certain "God did it" without knowing "How He did it". Likewise, the atheist is also asserting "Random did it" without necessarily knowing "How it happened".  In neither case is ignorance of material/efficient causes a reason to change the belief of a (non)final cause, and therefore the two types of ignorance are completely equivalent.

Myth #3

For completeness, we attempt a brief summary of the post-modern critique of OOL and Creationism. With Post-Modernism has come a third myth, that knowledge (and even ignorance!) is a social construction and therefore OOL and Creationism have to be evaluated ethically. That is to say, if materialism leads to enlightened Sweden while creationism leads to benighted Pakistan, then it is irresponsible to promote creationism and doom society to poverty and sickness. Sometimes the preferred criteria are "pragmatic" or "sustainable" or "carbon emitting", but all are making a distinction between "good" and "bad", and are therefore ethical. For example, such arguments have been advanced in print recently by both Christopher Hitchens and Richard Dawkins.

Several counterarguments have been proposed. Fifty years ago C S Lewis argued that ethical claims cannot be defined by a community but must be external to it, thereby nullifying the idea that we can choose our ethics, anymore than we can choose our knowledge. Remember Moynihan's dictum, "Everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not his own facts." For if we can choose our ethics, we will naturally justify our actions, and Nietzsche's curse "might makes right" will triumph, as it did in all the great modernist wars of the 20th century. Needless to say, Lewis was speaking to modernists 50 years ago, so his concerns are generally dismissed by post-modernists today. (I would rephrase Lewis as saying that recursion is more often a curse than a blessing.)

We would merely observe that Hitchens' and Dawkins' argument could more persuasively be made in the reverse, that theist knowledge has been historically far more liberating and enriching than materialist, with only the bloodiest 20th century out of the past thirty dedicated to materialist causes. At the very least, if we accept the post-modern relativization of truth, we can only conclude that Creationism (Western Christianity) usually triumphs over OOL Materialism (Communism, Nazi Fascism, Fabian progressivism).

You will notice that my reply to Myth #1 and Myth #2 are restating the same claim, that metaphysically and epistemologically there is no difference between NDT and Creationism.  Likewise Myth #3 seems to refute itself, with most ethical indicators favoring Creationism over OOL. It is no accident that despite a pedigree extending 25 centuries, materialism has triumphed over theism in only one. But in any case, post-modernism removes any intrinsic differences between the two.

OOL = Creationism <> Panspermia

Having dismissed these red herrings as to the necessity of Materialism over Creationism, we can get down to brass tacks and say that Creationists are no closer than Materialists to solving the efficient/material causes of OOL. To say "God did it" as Creationists do, is a final cause that is no more enlightening of material/efficient causes than to say "The UnGod did it" as Materialists are wont to do. (Well, almost. To say that God is Triune actually does have some material implications, but for the sake of unity and inclusivity we'll ignore these ramifications, as well as the information gained by direct revelation, restricting ourselves to general revelation. Why all these overlooked factors? Because St Paul says they aren't necessary to make the argument.)

Well since we are intentionally ignoring the subject let us instead examine the verb and the object. What happened in OOL, and what/who was the recipient of the action?

To answer this question, let us use the canonical example of the Miller-Urey experiment which attempted to validate the Oparin-Haldane hypothesis. A collection of amino acids and organic materials was in a warm pond, when Bingo! lightning struck and they arranged in a self-replicating pattern that persisted long enough to complexify into life. So "it" was chemicals, and "did" is arrange. This is the enzyme-first approach. Alternatively, the "RNA world" model suggests that "it" was RNA molecules, and "did" was self-catalysis. This is the code-first approach.  

Generalizing from these examples, we have "it" being a material information carrier, and "did" being a moment in time at which information was injected through spatial ordering. The Creationist has the finger of God doing the injection, the Materialist has the fist of the gambler Chaos doing the injection, but otherwise they are identical. When the right pattern is arranged from the right ingredients, Voila! life.

Note that there are two points and one line in this picture. The first point is an instant of time before which life didn't exist, and afterwards it did. The second point is a cell or protocell location inside of which the right chemistry exists but outside of which the wrong chemistry exists. The line is the storage of information in long chains of serial code, either the peptides in a protein, the codons in the RNA, or the phospholipids in a membrane. The picture consists of time, space and information. Why, what else could it consist of?

Well, when you solve a jigsaw puzzle, do you put it all together at once? Or do you do the edges and an interesting section in the middle, in a sort of modular way? So the idea of assembly in an instant of time doesn't do justice to the assembling of puzzles, cars, or anything more complicated than a milkshake. Likewise, when the lightning struck, why couldn't the whole pond have come to life? Why a single cell? When you turn on your computer, do you switch on the CPU separately from the hard disk and the monitor? So in our designs, we put things together modularly, but we expect them to operate unitarily, but for OOL we want the Ungod Chaos to "do it."  Since a string of steps is less likely than one step, and a very small bubble of the right stuff is more likely than a whole pond, we assume these conditions to give our god all the gifts we can assemble as proof of our devotion.

Human design then, is the opposite of OOL, which is expected to fall into place without assembly from working modules, and to operate asynchronously, becoming a unity later. In fact, OOL theory better resembles the way in which rust attacks my car, or my two year-old attacks the jigsaw puzzle. That is, if we were to film the rusting of my car, the addition of cream in my coffee, or the decay in my jigsaw puzzle, and then play the movie backward, this is the paradigm of OOL, with random events leading to order. And everyone would immediately know "That's playing backward!".

In contrast, if we were to film my assembly of a jigsaw and play it backward, there would be less certainty which direction was correct. After all, I could be taking apart a jigsaw puzzle intentionally. So it isn't nearly as obvious which way time should move. This is called the "arrow of time" problem, and scientists usually argue that for random events, the direction of time is defined as the one in which "entropy" or "disorder" increases, and the more pieces involved, the more obvious the right direction. For OOL to work at all, the number of pieces in space and time has to be minimized, or the movie will never play backward in the lifetime of the universe.

But is that what recent biology has been telling us, that like Frankenstein, all the pieces are available and only one ingredient is needed to bring it to life? I don't think so. And that's why I don't think OOL asking "what is the minimum number of pieces for life?" is a well-posed question. Sort of like asking the cop who pulls you over, "What is the standard bribe for speeding around here?"  If life could be broken down into pieces, then surely we could reverse the process, and like Craig Venter, put all the pieces back together and claim Dr Frankenstein's mantle. But despite the concerted effort of many brilliant scientists over the past two or three centuries, artificial life, or even the resuscitation of life, has eluded us.

The OOL, like Creationism, must be recognized as a miraculous event, which despite the best efforts of science, has only become more and more miraculous as the "essential part count" keeps getting larger. While this result may not convince an atheist in the existence of teleological final causes, it certainly doesn't make material causes any more transparent. In contrast, panspermia distributes the OOL question over space and time to avoid the miraculous instant. This is not merely equivocation, nor a smoke screen, nor what Stephen Meyer calls the "Cat in the Hat" approach to divide and subdivide the problem into many just-as-insoluble problems. Rather there is a logic to the Cat in the Hat approach, and that is the character of "Vroom!" which works best on distributed systems. This will be the topic of the next post.

Oddly, the people who voted for Obama to remake politics, never expected him to be remaking science. After all, his cabinet picks were all non-private sector  academics. But despite this expectation, it would seem that the politics is as political as ever, and now in the nuclear devastation where ideology trumps tradition, scientific agencies are getting the fallout. We've seen how the unpromising embryonic stem cell research employed politicization to garner support, we've seen how AIDS research (and its suppression of anti-AIDS work) has profitted the medical field, how global warming has gamed climatology (not to mention Al Gore's naked exploitation). Now we are seeing the chickens come home to roost for NASA. It's a long a twisting tale, and we are in the middle of a paradigm shift, so the outcome is still uncertain. Nevertheless it will be instructive to tell it as it has presently unfolded.

We begin in 1961 with JFK's stirring speech after the formation of NASA and its goal of putting a man on the moon within the decade. Which we did in 1969, and thereby established NASA as the premier agency in the world for manned space.  Long before the Moon speech however, in 1956 the director of NASA, Werner Von Braun, had wanted to go to Mars, and in 1972 outlined to  NASA employees how to do it in 13 years (=1985): with a nuclear rocket.  NASA had built and tested four of five nuclear rockets over the preceding 5 years, even setting a record for the most powerful nuclear reactor that lasted 30 years! But the economic collapse of America (in part due to OPEC) ended not just American support for the war in Indochina and the Apollo program, but also the NERVA manned mission to Mars.

In this twilight of the gods the US began to experience economic decay, stagflation and the loss of discretionary funds that made NASA possible.  Manned spaceflight was scaled back. The mission of NASA redefined. Unmanned or "robotic" missions become the priority. NASA changed its logo to "the worm". The manned Mars program went "underground" (the original name of the society). Physics bachelor and PhD degrees peaked. And Jimmy Carter told us all to put on a sweater if we felt a chill.

Nevertheless, the dream stayed alive, and when Reagan became president he asked the old timers at NASA what we needed to do to keep the agency relevant. They told him, resurrect the manned program with the Space Station as the core and Mars the goal. Well the goal kept getting more expensive ($400bn for chemical to Mars without a nuclear rocket), and so the Station became the de facto centerpiece of NASA, albeit a shrinking one.

In the roaring 90's NASA had steady growth, but the new administration gave lip service to the manned program, preferring once again to fund robotic exploration. So when Bush met with NASA administrators in 2001, he found a more serious problem than Reagan two decades earlier. Not only had all the old timers retired, but the agency was saddled with a voracious Station in a tight federal budget with epidemic health care costs, a growing bureaucracy increasingly unable to adapt or even meet milestones, an aging and unmaintained Shuttle fleet that was soon to lead to disaster, and aggressive European and Japanese space agencies eager to scoop NASA's robotic missions. In other words, an unaffordable government agency fast losing its global brand.

[As an aside, my US mentors in satellite hardware were wined and dined by Europeans in the middle 70's eager for their NASA technology, but when I went to Europe in the early 90's there was an unstated belief that American dominance had faded, and Europeans would now be the leaders in launchers (Ariane 5 vs Titan IV), exploration (Cornerstone vs Observatories (e.g. Hubble)) and even manned programs (Hermes vs Challenger).]

So Bush's advisors suggested reinstating the Reagan goals, a manned mission to Mars using the Space Station as a launch platform. Immediately the bureaucracy kicked in, seeing it as a stealth move to gut the robotic missions. I'll never forget the 2004 conference I attended in which all the NASA-funded scientists (robotic missions) bemoaned the injustice of a Kerry loss with its consequent four more years of Bush-directed manned programs. The shrinking NASA budgets (not absolutely, but as a percentage) had caused the robotic  program (rockets, sub-orbital, scientists) to view the manned program (astronauts, Shuttle, Station, engineers) as competitors in a zero-sum game. There was foot-dragging, a blizzard of whitepapers, a glut of engineering studies, a thousand powerpoints of flight, but no progress on the manned program.

So Bush hired an old-timer engineer to manage NASA and get the show on the road and the result was the Constellation program: a remake of the 1969 triumph. It wasn't nuclear, it wasn't new, it wasn't even Mars, but it did get the manned program out of LEO again. For NASA had stalled and Griffin believed it was easier to steer a moving car. But the scientists hated it. So the polarization at NASA between scientists and engineers increased, with many scientists in my workplace humiliated to discover they had been reassigned as engineering support.

Therefore it came as no surprise when one of the earliest actions of the Obama administration was to dump administrator Griffin and cancel Constellation. (Mind you, NASA is a puny government agency compared to NIH, or NSA, yet its administrator was shown the door before these others were evaluated, even before the inauguration. By contrast, a previous NASA administrator, Goldin, had served three presidents.) Why the rush? Because the infighting within NASA had become lethal.

But with the cancellation, Obama had another problem. NASA was founded as a manned program, and at the completion of the Apollo manned program, the justification that Reagan and Bush found for continuing the agency was being removed. What would NASA's mission become without astronauts? Why even the Chinese were working on rockets for their astronaut corps, and the US was planning to rent seats on Russian rides? We knew how this was going to turn out. When the Shuttle disasters caused the US to rely on Russian launchers to supply the Station, the price suddenly skyrocketed. And what if we get into a trade dispute with Russia? Nope, it just wasn't going to fly.

Obama's brain trust was working feverishly on this one. They decided that the new mission for NASA would be a manned mission to Mars. No, I wasn't surprised that the media decided this was a noble goal, despite excoriating Bush for the same plan. The puzzle rather was how Obama would accomplish this goal that had evaded 3 Republican presidents dedicated to the manned program. Evidently he didn't have a solution either, because a week later he switched to an asteroid mission. Oh sure, the press is selling it algore, "Mission could save the planet!" But face it, it's pretty dumb, and even worse, boring, because an asteroid is a lot like the Moon, only smaller.

Then Tuesday we get the message that NASA is going to hold a press conference about extra-terrestrial life the next day. On Wednesday Steve Squyres (of Mars Rover fame) goes on NASA Select cable to tell us that he has new evidence for life on Mars: calcium sulfate. This announcement lit up my inbox. All my biology friends know that I've been involved in Astrobiology, and they all want to know what calcium sulfate (aka blackboard chalk) has to do with life. Precious little, as they know, so they all suspect NASA is trawling for dollars. This was the same conclusion as they had reached in 1996 when NASA announced a Martian meteorite with signs of embedded life. But the real story is far more convoluted.

In 1976 Gil Levin's instrument, which he had developed to test for contaminated sea water off the beaches of California, found life on Mars. It had been calibrated in Antarctica and after the Mars mission returned good results, recalibrated in the Atacama desert. The instrument was very simple. Sterilized agar Petri dish with C14-labelled nutrients had a sample dropped on it. Some oxygen was wafted across the dish, and the gas directed into a Geiger tube. If radioactive CO2 was emitted the Geiger tube recorded the intensity. When there was bacteria, the signal rose in a classic exponential way. Additional nutrients could be injected to see if it were really the nutrients that produced the signal. On Mars, dirt was the sample, and a second sample was baked in an oven to 350 or so before being put on the agar. The baked sample was the control, and it gave no signal. The unbaked one produced the classic growth curve. It was done twice by two landers in two different locations for a total of 8 data sets. Every one of them gave the same result. Not only so, but one could see a diurnal modulation of the CO2 signal, which is also a characteristic of light-sensitive life with an internal clock.

Levin published the first results as the discovery of life, and Carl Sagan threw a hissy fit. He was not on Gil's instrument group, and in fact, Gil didn't even have a PhD. So Sagan claimed "extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence" and said Gil's experiment wasn't as extraordinary as his mass spectrometer, which didn't see life. Later calibrations showed that Sagan's mass spec was about 3 orders of magnitude too insensitive and couldn't see life in Antarctica nor the Atacama desert either. But based on the negative result from Sagan, NASA changed the press release to lack of convincing evidence for life; claimed that "supermetalloperoxides" could explain Gil's data (it couldn't, as Gil published over the next 10 years), and forbad anyone from trying to send another instrument to Mars to search for life. Water they could look for, just not life.

So that's where the official stance stood for 30 years. The Mars rovers have gone all over Mars and found many water-generated minerals. In fact, many minerals like clay require the breakdown of rocks by bacterial action, and are very strong evidence of life. The rovers found these "biominerals" in many places. NASA took pictures of algal like discolorations of ice in the polar caps. ESA (european space agency) took pictures of algal like growth in craters, ESA measured unstable methane production in the atmosphere. But NASA still did not announce life. In 1996 David McKay found that a meteorite, collected in 1984 in Antarctica and known to have come from Mars, possessed carbonate inclusions with organic molecules indicative of life. Again, accidental release of the embargoed paper led to an announcement of Mars life that was later retracted and McKay disparaged.

So it was a great puzzle that on Wednesday's NASA Select presser about life on Mars, Steve Squyres of Mars rover fame, a politically savvy scientist, stood up and said Calcium Sulphate is evidence of life. Because:
a) Nasa hasn't done this for 30 years;
b) Squyres has no intention of biting the hand that feeds him;
c) Calcium sulphate is gypsum, with about as close a connection to life as it has to education. ("It's educated life!");
d) It's been known forever--it isn't new, it isn't even the best data Squyres has, why on internal cable channel NASA Select only, and why now?;

Then the following day,  Thursday, when Jim Green, the director of the Planetary Division at NASA HQ gave press release on CNN that NASA was now looking for life on Mars, the light bulb went on.

Obama had destroyed the Moon program (since it was Bush's idea) and NASA is adrift. So I imagine Obama is up late, unable to sleep over the criticism he's getting from his formerly appreciative academics, idly channel surfing when he hits the Discovery Channel's four-part series by Stephen Hawking. (Hawking, you recall, is the wheelchair-bound physicist who sat in the Lucasian chair of Mathematics formerly occupied by Isaac Newton. Being about the most famous physicist since Einstein and greatly admired by academics everywhere, he had decided to make a film of his most religious sci-fi dreams and share it with us. Not only does Hawking believe in ET life, he believes it will be hostile, and we should not attempt to communicate with it, but rather find it before it finds us.) Suddenly Obama is sitting ramrod straight in bed hollering for Rahm. 

Life on Mars would be sufficient cause for abandonning the Moon!

So after 30 years of suppression, NASA now needs experts really really badly. Squyres was the first one they could find. And he wasn't given very much time to prepare his talk. Nor did Squyres know whether Rahm was being level with him. Perhaps this was a putsch, and someone wanted him compromised and defenestrated. Now its Squyres turn to be up all night agonizing over this talk that would either make or break his funding. In the end, Squyres complied but with the worst data he could muster, so that he could deny it all on Thursday if he had to.

Jim Green, on the other hand, is a division director, which is both more political and less pecuniary. He doesn't worry about getting funding for his job, which is by limited appointment anyway, only about pleasing his boss, which in this case, is President Obama. I imagine he also had more time to prepare his speech, which Rahm told him to do on CNN to help their abysmal ratings. Including Mercury in his presentation on NASA's new mission to find life was pure vanity though, (Mercury being far too hot for liquid water) and revealed that despite his administrator role, one couldn't quite take all the scientist out of him.

Rahm likely perused the newspapers the next day. The press releases have barely made a ripple in the generally dour mood about NASA. But he didn't get Obama elected with CNN. I imagine he made a phone call to the NYT and WashPo. I imagine NYT said "No, we'd have to consult our science writers." meaning, "we're distancing ourselves on Obamacare, and side with NASA." WashPo said sure, they'll run an article on Tuesday, tapping a reliable hack, Marc Kaufman, who had written favorably of Obama's asteroid plan the previous week. The headline was chosen for its sobriety: NASA team cites new evidence that meteorites from Mars contain ancient fossils. The very thing McKay was denied has now been admitted. (As well as a veiled reference to Hoover's work.)

In other words, NASA has just done a 180.

Now as you might imagine, there's a lot of people at NASA who actually thought there was a reason for denying life on Mars. They weren't consulted, and are making the usual flabbergasted noises while they try to discover which way the wind is blowing. If it weren't so sad, it would be funny, but here's the money quote from WashPo: 

Because the stakes involved with any announcement of possible or likely extraterrestrial life are so high -- both for science and for the societal and religious implications of such a discovery -- the issue brings out very strong feelings. At the conference, a leading cautionary voice in astrobiology proposed that a special protocol be established to oversee release of any journal articles making dramatic extraterrestrial claims.
Andrew Steele, of the Carnegie Institution for Science in Washington and once a member of the McKay team, compared the absence of astrobiology review with the formal procedures set up by scientists involved with the search for extraterrestrial life, or SETI.
He said that SETI leaders understood the societal sensitivity of their work and that it was time for researchers in astrobiology "grow up and do the same."

In case you are wondering what Steele just said, he is suggesting a censoring committee to prevent papers like McKay's from ever making it into the peer-reviewed literature. (East Anglia anyone?) The stuff about society and religious implications has been addressed on this blog before, and is just smoke screen. The reality is that Andy was already doing this censoring (which is how he got his job), and he's really just complaining that this recent midnight revelation of Obama didn't get his vetting.

It's been a wild week, and if you had asked me, I would have said the Obama administration would be the last one on Earth to reverse NASA's stance on ET. But for obscure reasons, he has. Which is why one should just stick with the truth, for eventually the worm will turn--back into the meatball.

A recent op ed by Stanley Fish caught my eye, as I am including some of Stanley Fish's material in my ThM thesis "Is there a Text in this Class?" in which he records his long journey into PostModernism. And this from a law expert! So this post by Fish struck me as rather surprising.

To anyone who has been following First Amendment jurisprudence in the past 40 or 50 years, the recent Supreme Court decision (United States v. Stevens, April 20) striking down a statute criminalizing the production and sale of videos depicting animal cruelty in a manner intended to satisfy a particular "sexual fetish" will come as no surprise.
The proverbial ordinary citizen, however, may be surprised to learn that, according to Chief Justice John Roberts' majority opinion, the First Amendment must be read to allow the production and dissemination of so called "crush videos," videos (and I quote from Roberts' opinion) that "feature the intentional torture and killing of helpless animals" often by women wearing high-heeled "spike" shoes who slowly "crush animals to death" while talking to them in "a kind of dominatrix patter" as they scream and squeal "in great pain." How has it come to this?

For a fellow who doesn't believe in absolutes, why shouldn't a pragmatic approach to enforcing the 1st amendment, or for that matter, an elevation of the 1st amendment to dogma status, be of any concern at all? Surely the people have spoken, what higher jury does Fish recognize?

But despite my surprise at seeing Fish on the religious side of the aisle, there are some silver linings in this cloud, some reasons Roberts has that Fish doesn't want to discuss. I see at least two:

a) Pragmatic. Let's suppose that there are two extremes to be avoided in any law-abiding country: legalism and license. The first is so many laws that people are afraid to take initiatives, afraid to innovate, afraid to express themselves. This might occur in a Communist country, or an overly-litigous society. Alternatively, we may have the opposite extreme of the Wild West, with the populace taking justice into its own hands because of the perceived impotence of the law. Aggressive picketting of abortion clinics, sit-ins, laying down in the street to stop the bulldozers, etc. If the law steps aside, then we have rule by mob.

So we are trying to find a happy medium, someplace between lawyers and lynchings. But the more laws we enact to clarify our position, the more litigous we become. Thus the law is a blunt instrument for restraining the law, and indeed grows ever blunter the more often it is employed. Now clearly there are things that must be made illegal (if kitten snuff movies are bad, surely baby snuff factories are worse!), but what do we do as we approach that gray line that lies between the evil and the permissible? Because the law is a blunt instrument which daily grows ever thicker, it is prudent and necessary that we stop far short of the gray line, permitting the barely impermissible, lest by over-zealous application we destroy (by smearing) its distinction. Already the gray line has blurred considerably, and Roberts would spare us the embarrassment (nay, the shame) of blurring it even more.

b) Speech Acts. My thesis deals with the special importance of speech acts that do more than communicate or persuade. To a certain extant, this is what post-modernism is all about. For example, when we make a promise, we have done more than communicate, more than persuade, we've made a verbal construct that now has an independent existence. Our children are apt to remind us of it, "But you promised!" The law is apt to punish us for it. Wall Street is apt to reward us for it. So words do much more than provide a connection between two persons, they provide, as it were, a tertium quid, an objective thing that exists outside us and the recipient. Now it is true that many speech acts require a community to validate them. A promise to my kids, for example, holds no weight in a court of law (though great weight in my family), whereas a promise to my mortgage lender has a wider community of enforcers. This is why Fish doesn't think there is anything objectively real in literature, there isn't "a text in this class", only a meaning the community assigns to it.

But if Fish included in his community the Creator of the Universe, then he would recover all the objective content he had earlier dismissed. If kitten snuff movies offend the Creator of kittens, then we are endangering more than our internet freedoms by downloading them. Surely if this is true of kittens, it ought to be even more true of people. And indeed, baby snuff movies must be propagated under some other euphemism, which is a specialty of Planned Parenthood (already an oxymoronic euphemism!)

But now this brings up an important point. People are not kittens. If we make a careless equation of the two, we bring in all sorts of serious conundrums. If we ban torturing kittens, do we ban torturing all mammals? How about slugs? (Over my objections, my brothers would douse them in salt.) How about cockroaches? What is the criteria for separating "things-that-can-be-tortured" from "things-that-cannot-be-tortured"?

Our laws do more than separate evil from indifferent behavior, they are constructing a reality in which our children will inhabit. A reality that implicitly and explicitly identifies what it means to be human, what it means to have value. Every law, every statute is another brick in the society that we pass on to our children. Frivolous laws do more than clutter law books, they blunt the law as a whole, while they construct a society of trash. We can neither afford the pain of blunt surgery nor the trashy construction of our children's future. Roberts' saw this kitten law (which had never been implemented despite being on the books for over 10 years) as an example of the latter. I tend to agree. Words matter. Laws even more.

One of the smaller mysteries of life is that it is built out of asymmetric building blocks. The amino acids that are chained together to make proteins are asymmetric, as are the sugars that are chained together to make starch, cellulose, and other useful polysaccharides. The standard way to show this, is by making a solution of the specific molecule, shining polarized light through it, and demonstrating that the "plane of polarization" has rotated. Those that rotate the light counter-clockwise are "left-handed" and those that rotate it clockwise are "right-handed". Using the letters "l" for left, and "d" for right, we now can label the mirror-image molecules with their appropriate chirality. (The amino acids are labelled L or D not by their rotation of light, but by their chemical synthesis from l- or d-glyceraldehyde. All L-amino acids do not rotate light the same direction, but they can all be derived from l-glyceraldehyde.)  

A science fair project that deeply impressed me as a junior high student, was to take two plane polarizers (such as those found in sunglasses) and put different thicknesses of ordinary cellophane tape in between, by taping it to a clear sheet of acrylic (overhead transparency for those old enough to remember). Each thickness of tape (D-sugar!) would rotate the light more, and when viewed through "crossed" polarizers, different colors would appear as if by magic. The explanation was even more magical, and I spent an enjoyable hour playing with tape, polarizers and white Karo syrup.

Evidently, this also impressed chemists in the early 1800's, since inorganic crystals did not show these colors. They took this as evidence of one more way that living things were different from non-living things--they turned colors under polarized light, as well as multiplied, fermented, decomposed, and otherwise did miracles with common substances. Which is why they separated "inorganic" from "organic" chemistry. Darwin, of course, refused to acknowledge any separation between organic and inorganic chemistry, and this intransigence has plagued his theory ever since.

The actual explanation is more mundane, but still amazing. In order to affect polarized light, a molecule has to have a fundamentally asymmetric shape, but with the same chemistry. Suppose we have an inorganic salt, Na-Cl. Can we distinguish it from Cl-Na? No, because a simple rotation brings it back to itself again, and in a water solution, the molecules are spinning rapidly. How about something like water, ^H-0-^H, which looks like a bent paper clip? Nope, once again, rotation brings it back to itself. Okay, what about three different atoms like  Br-Ca-Cl or the triangle molecule F-B^Cl_Br, are they different from Cl-Ca-Br or F-B^Br_Cl? No, we can still rotate them back into the other kind. What it takes to be rotationally distinct is a tetrahedron, a chemical with 4 bonds that has different elements on each bond. Halon (a fire-extinguishing gas) is a good candidate: H-^FC_Cl-Br is different from H-^FC_Br-Cl, and no amount of rotation will make the two molecules the same despite the same chemical formula. Only reflection in a mirror will get them to look the same, hence the name "stereochemistry". Now coincidentally, the only atoms in the periodic table that regularly take 4 bonds are C, Si, and Ge. Since silicon chemistry is relatively rare, and germanium even rarer, only carbon is routinely capable of optical stereo-isomers, confirming the idea that only life shows polarization effects.

At age 29, Louis Pasteur, one of my all time hero scientists, was working with tartaric acid, a  byproduct sediment of wine production, and discovered that he could get tartaric acid to rotate polarized light but identical "paratartaric acid" didn't. Being an objective scientist, he got out his microscope and discovered that a sample of crystallized paratartaric acid had two kinds of crystals that appeared to be mirror images of each other. He painfully separated them into two piles with a tweezers and a microscope, and when he dissolved the two piles, lo-and-behold, one rotated light "l-" and the other "d-".

So in fact, paratartaric acid _did_ rotate light, but being an equal mixture of L and D ("racemic"), it appeared to do nothing, that is, until it was manually separated. Today we have separation columns (chiral beads packed into a big cylinder) that can slow down the transport of D more than L, so we run the solution through a separator and the first stuff out is enriched in L. Keep doing this separation, and we get pure L without the painful approach used by Pasteur.

But the peculiar point of all this nomenclature, is that life always makes L-type amino acids and it always makes D-type sugars. All the inorganic chemistry in the world--cooking with acids, neutralizing with bases--makes equal amounts of L and D. Nothing in inorganic chemistry excepting carbon itself, is stereoactive. So despite the great advances of 20th century chemistry into the synthesis of organic molecules, none of these syntheses produce pure L-amino acids or pure D-sugars the way life does. The Miller-Urey experiment, for all the organic material it made with electric sparks and methane, produced only trace amounts of racemic amino acids.

Why is life different? Because the chemistry of life is made possible by catalysts, by enzymes, which speed up the reactions millions and billions of times over what inorganic chemistry can do. And these enzymes are made up proteins that are made up of L-amino acids, so the enzymes select for L-type amino acid formation. So this becomes a chicken-and-egg problem: the stereoactivity of life's chemicals is caused by their formation by stereo-active enzymes which are in turn made by stereo-active life....

Well that explains that all life will remain the same chirality, (Greek for handedness), but where did that homochirality come from originally? Why from the first life of course. So in typical Darwinian reductionist fashion, we say that all life descended from one common ancestor who established the chirality of biochemistry. This ancestor was the first cell, the OOL who first showed up (never say "created"!) some 3.8 billion years ago.

It all sounds neat and pretty, and fully consistent with Darwinian materialist philosophy.

There's just one problem. OOL is still highly unlikely.

Pasteur, again, demonstrated this by building a flask full of "pasteurized" nutrient broth that did not spontaneously generate life. His experiments finally silenced all the critics as well as began the canning industry, and biology accepted his conclusion: life only comes from life. But a short decade or so later, we find Darwin arguing that the origin of life must be accidental, spontaneous. Which is it?

When we consider the very simplest cell, the most stripped down, bare-bones, hardly recognizable cell, we still have at least 100 protein machines working away in this Darwinian factory. The numbers vary, since no one has actually made such a stripped down cell, but estimates come from examining, for example, Craig Venter's Mycoplasma laboratorium which began with a very small parasitic bacteria M. genitalium of 482 genes in 580,000 DNA base pairs. By removing those that seemed unnecessary, Venter reduced the count to 382. Three hundred and eighty two genes are at least 382 proteins, (more likely 1000 proteins since the cell performs lots of after-market modifications on proteins) which by dividing the base pairs into codons, demonstrate that these proteins average some 401 amino acids long. So in Venter's "artificial life" we are talking at a minimum 153,000 amino acid sequences, chosen from a menu of 21 possible amino acids. Mathematically this is 21^153000 power, which is 10^200,000.

But life doesn't require one long protein, but a minimum of 100 separate proteins in any order, so the odds are more like (21^401 )^100=21^501. (We note that this is a best case using the average protein length and in a minimal 100-protein cell, because if some of the proteins are longer than 401 amino acids or more than 100 in number, the odds go up rapidly to approach our worst case above.)  Converting to base 10, we have 10^1107 is the number of possibilities or 1 in 10^1107 odds.

Just how small is this chance? Well suppose we built a computer out of every atom in the known universe, 10^80 atoms. And suppose we did a computer calculation, a clock cycle, at the fastest physically possible speed, a Planck time of 10^34 per second (which is much faster than any known process, but anything faster would destroy quantum mechanics). Then we would have only completed 10^130 trials since the beginning of the known universe. That is, we would still have 10^977 more possible lifeforms to calculate before we could be certain of randomly discovering our hypothetical "stripped down" cell. Even the "cosmic landscape" of baby universes being formed at the fastest possible speed at every possible location in the known universe and making babies at the same rate since the Big Bang only knocks off 500 zeroes. That leaves us 10^477 more tries to go, and we've filled up every possible baby universe with massive computers all trying to make that hypothetical simplest cell.

Nope, we aren't even close.

One objection is that we don't need _exactly_ the right combination of amino acids, that there are many _nearly_ similar solutions that will construct a simple cell and work just fine. (BTW, this requires that life not be "optimal", which is contrary to experiment.) For example, there is no law of physics that says the mirror image amino acids wouldn't also make viable life. Life could evolve L or D, whichever it randomly hit first. So the "density" of viable stripped down cells in the landscape of possible combinations might be high enough that in the 1 billion years after the Earth was formed, life showed up with probability 1.

That sounds reasonable until Sir Fred Hoyle demonstrated why this solution doesn't work. All inorganic reactions have a speed that depends upon the concentrations of the reagents. Rate = constant * concentration_n * concentration_m, or in chemical notation, R=k [n][m], So when life showed up, what was the expected concentration in the "pond" of all the important amino acids needed? A solution with parts per thousand, parts per million, parts per billion? Miller-Urey suggests that a realistic concentration would be at the very best parts per billion, though maybe, just maybe, we could get parts per million in a dehydrated pond somewhere, sometime.

Okay, take all your favorite ingredients. Put them in a flask at the parts per hundred level. This is somewhere between ten thousand and ten million times more concentrated than anything available in the primitive earth. Since there are two ingredients that have to react, this means the rate of the reaction is somewhere between 100 million and 100 trillion times faster than on the primitive Earth. It took less than a billion years (some would argue less than 100My) for life to show up after the Earth cooled down to room temperature from a molten blob (the Hadean), so that means our reaction should produce life in about, oh, 10 minutes to 10 years. Add in the fact that many of the reactions involve a third or fourth component, and this calculation suggests life should form in microseconds in our flask. Did it? Hoyle gives the obvious answer.

So the fact that Pasteur could make nutrient broth that didn't spontaneous produce life in 10 years is real proof that spontaneous generation is not so easy.

Can we wiggle out of this? Can we suggest that life is harder to make than it looks, but not so hard as to prevent it from happening on Earth? Let's suppose that it take 100 years for our nutrient broth to generate life, wouldn't that still be consistent with Pasteur and laboratory experiments?

Okay, let's accept this hypothesis. Life, by whatever means we have yet to discover, is likely to form from non-life because there are many routes to viable cells. One of those viable routes involves mirror image amino acids. That is, before there was life on Earth, all production of amino acids through non-living or "abiotic" Miller-Urey methods, would produce racemic mixtures of L and D amino acids. Since no physical or chemical or biological barrier exists to mirror life, we would expect a 50% chance that life is like ours, and 50% chance that it is the mirror image.

So if life has spontaneously been created twice, there is a 50% chance of finding mirror life. If it has been spontaneously created three times, there is a 75% chance of finding mirror life. If it happened four times, we are up to 88%. And quickly you can see that if life spontaneously arose anywhere close to 10 times or more, we have virtually a 100% chance of finding mirror life.

We looked. Pasteur looked. Richard Hoover and Paul Davies looked. Have they found it? No.

Well, maybe the fact that life is flooding the environment with L-amino acids prevents mirror life from forming. In that case, we should find mirror life on isolated locations, such as deep rocks or islands, or geothermal vents. Nope. How about if life were spontaneously created on other planets? (See Stephen Hawking's new video.)

Now we're talking. But we _have_ actually looked at extraterrestrial samples that fall to Earth. They are called meteorites. And some meteorites that are black and crumbly and full of carbon, called "carbonaceous chondrites", are also full of amino acids. And these amino acids are predominantly L, that is, they always have more L than D in them. (The D variety appears as heat and cosmic rays "scramble" the L-variety, but all such random processes can never turn majority-L into majority-D, at best they leave it 50/50 racemic.)

That is, either there's an abiotic process on carbonaceous chondrites that makes chiral amino acids, (which if demonstrated, would win a chemistry Nobel prize) or there's chiral life on those meteorites that is always L-amino. This could arise from contamination from Earth, except that those amino acids are million or more years old, and are made from non-Earth carbon (with too much C-13 for Earth). So it looks like there is non-Earth life that is always L-amino.

So far our prediction about mirror life is not working out too well.

Okay, maybe we were too quick to jump from physics to chemistry. Perhaps there is some "emergent" chemistry law that prevents D-amino acids from forming life. Say, the D-amino is less soluble than the L-amino acid. (Actually, we can check that out and it doesn't work.) But if it were true, there might be a reason why spontaneous generation always produces L-amino life.

A recent paper came out in an American Chemical Society journal that essentially made that claim. Homochirality is a consequence of chemistry, it argued. L-type life is simply a result of spontaneous generation in an abiotic homochiral chemistry.

Whew! That was a close one. We can go back to our random OOL, and keep our Darwinian belief in spontaneous generation!

Or can we? A closer look at the paper reveals that it is playing word games with "racemic" so as to achieve the impression that it is a solution to the homochirality problem. What they actually discovered was that there are two different kinds of a racemic mixture of an essential amino acid--aspartic acid. One type of racemic mixture is formed the way Pasteur did, mixing crystals of L and D aspartic acid into a solution. The other kind of racemic mixture is a curious "twinned" crystal "dimer" made of one L and one D molecule that cling together in a LD arrangement. They had expected that solutions made from the Pasteur piles and the dimer pile would lead to the same result, since they thought water would tear apart the dimers into individual aspartic acid molecules. But contrary to all expectations, the dimer preferentially crystallized from solution as a dimer, and the Pasteur mixture crystallized as separate L and D crystals unless they cooked the solution at high temperature (and tore apart the dimers). The simplest conclusion for this result is that the dimer is more stable in solution than expected.

But does this mean that non-racemic crystals can form from a racemic solution? Of course, which is what Pasteur did when he was 29, separating L-tartaric from D-tartaric acid after crystallizing "paratartaric" acid. Does this mean that abiotic chemistry can make a solution non-racemic? No, unless that chemistry includes a pair of tweezers and the patience of Pasteur. Whether one can or cannot start with a dimer and end up with tweezer piles is irrelevant, because there is no abiotic path from a racemic solution to a stereo-active solution of amino acid that doesn't involve a biotic chiral agent, be it chiral beads or Louis Pasteur himself. Like many critiques of ID, the problem with these "Darwinist" solutions is that they always smuggle in some information, in this case, chiral agents.

If those 12 carbonaceous chondrites represent 12 separate OOL events, then the probability of finding at least one with D-amino acid overabundance should have been 99.97%. Does not finding a single D-amino mean OOL is disproven? Not if one is willing to overlook 1 in 10^1107 odds in the first place. After all, what are a mere three more zeroes? We've merely moved it up to 1 in 10^1110 odds.

Recently Stephen Hawking finished a video series with the Discovery Channel which, in his paralyzed state, took him 3 years to finish. According to the news releases, he insisted on rewriting large sections of the script. One wonders how long it took a man who communicates to his computer through eye-blinks to write a new script. But however long it took, we are now blessed with yet another "science for the common man" video.

My college-aged children all have a "Great American Video" waiting for them to make. When I was in school, everyone wanted to be the "Great American Garage Band". And as far as I can tell, the previous generation all had a "Great American Novel" that was going to make them the next J. D. Salinger.  So perhaps Stephen Hawking is merely reflecting the current age, after writing the surprise best-seller "A Brief History of Time", he now wants to finish with a video. Will it be a best seller? I'm not sure, but it certainly is even more speculative than his book, if not downright sci-fi.  Which is not to denigrate the truly innovative "brain-storming" that makes a good sci-fi book work, such as Arthur C. Clarke's invention of "geostationary" satellites, or Star Trek's invention of the telescoping sliding door. But what makes for good sci-fi rarely makes for good science, namely, selling copies of your video. Avatar not only broke the record for theater sales, but apparently has broken the record for DVD sales as well, but clearly not because of the "science" in the movie. The science of "unobtainium" is, well, unobtainable.

In the same way, Hawking brings up several "unobtainium" solutions in his video, which are rooted deeply in his materialist metaphysics, his atheist religion. Am I saying that atheism can be a religion? Most certainly, because belief in a god is not a requirement of religion, merely the firmly held belief in some metaphysical absolutes. And for the atheist, the metaphysical absolute is that there be no gods. The materialist goes even further, and believes that there cannot exist any immaterial stuff that could be fashioned into gods, or to put it more colloquially, metaphysical absolutes absolutely cannot exist.  (Yes, you're right, but the answer to _that_ observation is the Emerson condescension, "A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds.")

What makes the Hawking position more poignant is that he did not start out a materialist atheist, but Anglican. But as his Lou Gehrig's disease progressed, he became increasingly atheistic and belligerent. One can see the development from an agnosticism in "A Brief History of Time" to the more militant atheism of the video. Suffering, as I have said before, is neither cause nor consequence of sin, but should rather be seen as the currency of heaven. For those who see heaven as their destination, suffering purifies the soul and reveals an inner reality. But for those who see the grave as their destination, suffering is the removal of meaning, the victory of entropy, the destruction of life. For one, suffering refines, while for the other, suffering corrupts. Hawking, despite his four decade longevity in the face of a disease that normally kills in 5 years, has followed a long, protracted appointment with the grave.

Facing his inevitable dissolution, Hawking has made a religious movie, a documentary of his religion. In every religious myth there are unchanging subjects: Creation, Fall, Salvation, the End. Joseph Campbell made a career talking about these topics, and Hawking does not disappoint. He invokes "unobtainium" solutions to the problems of Creation, Salvation, and the End as he explains his religion.

Creation

The most widespread creation myth of materialism, is that order can arise spontaneously out of disorder, that life can spontaneously begin from non-life. Now nearly all the physicists who have cared to calculate this probability are in agreement that it is spectacularly improbable. The late astronomer Sir Fred Hoyle refused to believe in the Big Bang because he could not believe that even 15 billion years were enough time to make OOL likely. In his mind, it was more likely that the science of the Big Bang was wrong and the universe was eternal, than that life should spontaneously begin. Unlike Hoyle, Hawking is an advocate of the Big Bang, and therefore must disagree about the likelihood of spontaneous generation. It had to be likely, both to dismiss the need for a creator, and to explain the existence of life on Earth.

But if it is likely, then why isn't it happening all the time? Why are Louis Pasteur's flasks full of nutrient broth bug-free? Hawking's answer, like fellow physicist Paul Davies', isn't so much a rational calculation as a statement of belief that the laws of physics must have a secret organization, a mysterious drive to impose order on chaos, a hidden vitality that "breathes fire in the equations". So if we live in a universe with such vitalism, other planets must be teeming with spontaneous life forms, which he imagines for us on the moons of Jupiter in his video. (Prediction: the moon Europa will have life, but it will look nothing like Hawking's imagination. Why? It will look amazingly like the "pond scum" seen at Earth, since it will have travelled to both places in identical fashion.) So his first  "unobtainium" is the belief that laws of physics necessitate life--a metaphysical vitalism added to his materialism.

Salvation

His second Campbell topic, Salvation, looks a little bit different than the standard Carl Sagan approach. Sagan famously wanted the big radio telescope at Arecibo to contact extraterrestrial intelligence and find from them how to avoid nuclear holocaust. Arthur C Clarke, in sci-fi classic "Childhood's End" suggested that while ET might be benign, we may not get what we want. Hawking thinks that ET is far less likely to be benign, and more like the marines in Avatar, only interested in exploitation. Hawking suggests that if we find aliens we refuse to communicate with them, since they are more likely to be Darwinian predators than Darwinian altruists. (I just love these "social Darwinism" debates when they go cosmic!)

To restate the positions, Sagan sees the Fall as the discovery of nuclear bombs, and Salvation as the civilizational skills to advance beyond nuclear holocaust. (In defense of Sagan, he was merely stating a very common 60's worldview in a country where people built bomb shelters in their backyards and schoolkids practiced air-raid drills in the hallway.) Hawking no longer fears nuclear holocaust, but he does fear "global warming", so for him, the Fall is the capability of man's disruption of "spaceship Earth" through ecological exploitation. (See Avatar.) This exploitation is precisely what Darwinian survival is postulated on. So paradoxically, Salvation lies in the rational avoidance of Darwinian pitfalls by choosing a better future reward than an ephemeral present success. Why Hawking doesn't see this anti-Darwinism as applying to other inimical lifeforms is a bit of mystery, unless it is just to differentiate himself from Sagan, who wrote the foreword to Hawking's bestseller. The unobtainium that Hawking offers here is the possibility to outsmart the Darwinian Fates and survive a brutal future.

Eschatology

This brings up the third of Campbell's myths, the End of History, or the Mankind's Destiny, or suchlike. Hawking, I suppose, wants to avoid Clarke's quasi-religious "Childhood's End", he wants to provide a picture of rational success but without the hubris of a Sagan. He wants a rosy future, but at the same time, a believable future. This is akin to the problem of telling a future employer how both humble and intelligent you are, or the problem of selling gold as a rational alternative to stocks: if you over- or under-do it, the opposite effect is obtained.

Hawking solves this problem by first saying how humans can outsmart their galactic competitors, and then by saying that humans are still humbly in trying to figure out the science. To sell this humble second point, he makes the absurd claim that life may exist in the center of stars. Now this clearly goes against the dictum that liquid water is essential to life, because this is pure sci-fi, straight from Clarke's "Out of the Sun" short story. To defend Hawking, the idea was given a boost in the 1920's when Irving Langmuir looked through a microscope at the glowing gas of a fluorescent lightbulb, and thought it was remarkably similar to biology, so he confusingly named it "plasma". The physics of charged particle physics (tokomaks and magnetic fusion) has been cursed ever after by "long-range interactions" so that a blob of glowing gas behaves in very "non-materialist", non-ideal-gas manner. All this leads sci-fi writers and Hawking to suppose that some of the complications of plasma physics may permit the sort of information seen in the watery environment of biology.

And while I sympathize with their awe and wonder of plasma physics, they only say this because they haven't looked at biochemistry recently. A bacterial flagellum is still many many orders of magnitude more complicated than the worst three-component dusty plasma which so
baffles physicists. I hate to say it, but when it comes to information content, biology trumps physics without even trying. Hawking may not realize it, but he's just engaging in "biology envy".  So the unobtainium of a limitless science, of lifeforms inhabiting not just the lucky watery planet around some fortunate G-sequence star, but beating in the hearts of the billions of stars in the billions of galaxies is but a green light, the orgiastic future that year by year recedes before us. It eluded us then, but that's no matter - tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther … And one fine morning - So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past."

But of all Hawking's unobtainia, the one that is most unphysicalium is also the most widespread, the idea that life is sprouting up all over the galaxy. We have samples of life from all over the galaxy, known as carbonaceous chondrites, or CI meteorites. These are thought to be extinct comets, because they are composed of black, crumbly and wet materials. They are called "chondrites" because of their "graininess", thought to be the soot from Wolf-Rayet stars, or the dust of red-giant stars in their death throes, now collected into a comet. And every one of the dozen or so C-I meteorites collected at Earth have shown evidence of "micro-fossils", physical fossils of microbial life. Each has also contained amino acids, the building blocks of life. And every amino acid residue has shown left-handed optical activity, the "homochirality" characteristic of all life on Earth. (Amino acids left-handed, sugars right-handed, sort of like batters and pitchers.)

So if life is spontaneously erupting in the cosmos, why is it uniformly left-handed, why don't we see some right-handed amino acids occasionally? Why are the 400+My fossils indistinguishable from microbes on Earth? And how is this "spontaneity" of OOL a required outcome of highly improbable random processes? I would like to think that Hawking is merely unaware of the data, but from his sci-fi discussions, it would seem he is instead increasingly unconcerned with data.

The fate of all who would make their creation an absolute, is the fate of idolators throughout history, the eventual inability to create at all. When we distort language to equivocate, we eventually cannot speak at all. When we manipulate data to fit a theory, we soon are incapable of incorporating any data at all. When we call war peace, or peace war, we soon lose the ability to separate either.

When materialism invokes unobtainium, it has essentially become what it abhors: a metaphysical religion.  

When we encounter an "unsolved" problem in some branch of science, it is often because we haven't stated the problem properly, or as they say in mathematics, it is an "ill-posed problem". Zeno's paradox, for example, is trivially solved in introductory calculus as the finite sum of an infinite series. But for Zeno, the problem was what to do with the concept of infinity. The historical mathematicians all concluded that the Greeks just had a metaphysical problem with the concept, and couldn't advance, until someone recovered a palimpsest (a reused parchment) whose "erased" original was a proof by Archimedes that used infinity. So in reality, the Greeks did understand infinity, but chose not to apply it to Zeno. This is what I would call a religious scruple to a metaphysical concept. So many of the unsolved problems in biology, or sociology (Christopher Chabris), or physics are religious scruples on metaphysical concepts.

Starting with the Physics unsolved problems:
 1  Accelerating Universe
 2  Cosmological Constant
 3  Dark Matter
 4  Baryon Asymmetry
 5  Electroweak symmetry breaking
 6  Entropy
 7  Neutrino mass
 8  Proton spin
 9  QCD
 10 Strong CP
 
1-4 are cosmological problems all related to the Einstein General Relativity equations, and of course, the Big Bang solution to these equations. The religious scruple is that Einstein must be right, (so we are trying to force-fit the data to his equations) and that the Big Bang cannot be planned (e.g. it must be high entropy without information content) These scruples are generating all the problems with the first four.

5-10 are all consequences of reductionist materialism that assigns reality to random particles bouncing in the void. The religious scruples are that neither the particles, nor their constituents are allowed to possess information. So for example 5, 7, 8, 9 all suggest that the construction of "elementary particles" appears somehow to have information that isn't random. Whereas 6 and 10 suggest that particles behave in ways that possess information. The first 4 have to do with the beginning of time (=Creation) and the next 6 with the conduct of matter (=materialism). Two highly charged religious topics.

What about the sociology issues raised by Chabris, who doesn't present a list by an anecdotal account:
 1) Oster's Diabetes Dilemma: the more diabetic patients know about their disease, the worse off they become. E.g. men are not just irrational, but anti-rational.
 2) Goldin's Gender Dilemma: women still get paid less than men for the same job title, despite decades of "gender equality" legislation and education.
 3) Fryer's Racial Dilemma: blacks and whites as population groups have educational outcome differences in their averages despite "racial equality" legislation and education.
 4) Swidler's Sociological Dilemma: we don't know how societies create/recreate sociological institutions despite a century of data and research.
 5) Bostrom's Epistemology Crusade: we've reversed sociological trends that teach incorrect theories in the past, and we need to get better at it (presumably to cure the above problems.) Of course, Bostrom doesn't think his crusade could be the subject matter of itself.
 6) Chabris' Hubris Conundrum: how to teach scientists to be humble.

What are the religious scruples? #1 assumes people are rational, which is to say, it has no appreciation for the anti-rational thing that St Paul called "sin". This is related to #2 and #3 which attempt to put human value in the rational, and in so doing are upset that different people groups are then dissimilar in "value". Perhaps the solution is to allow people groups to vary, because their value is locates elsewhere than the rational.

Likewise #4 assumes that people create their own institutions in some sort of rational way. If people are neither rational (see #1) nor value it exclusively (#2-3) then why should institutions be considered constructs and not "outgrowths" or "mistakes" or "crude implementations"? In other words, by restricting sociology to a materialism view of man, then society constructs must also be materialist implementations, which in fact, does not explain them very well.

#5 is the downfall of all materialists: the theory does not include itself in the things it explains. This is sort of the answer to #6, where humility comes from not assuming exhaustive knowledge or the potential of exhaustive knowledge. But then, Chabris seems to think he has the knowledge to teach us about humility! This is why #5 and #6 work better as a joke than as a program for science.

So if physicists are consumed with Creation and Matter, sociologists are consumed with the value of man. All religiously charged questions.

Finally, taking a biology list, we have:
  1. OOL: The origin of life.
  2. Morphogenesis in embryo development  
  3. Differentiation in embryo development
  4. What is the origin of species
  5. What are the cause[s] of macroevolution?

The obvious answer to #1 is design, which has been the answer for about 3900 of the past 4000 years of recorded history. Why then it catapulted into first place has more to do with our current religious scruples than the difficulty of the question. If we reinterpret the problem as the origin of information, then we see it is the same question for 1-5. For if I can design a machine that takes a sheet of steel and folds it into a Toyota Camry, then surely morphogenesis, differentiation, macroevolution, and speciation could all be instances of an overall plan.

Putting all three science fields together, then we can see an overall trend. Physics is concerned with creation and (information-rich) conduct of matter, sociology with (information-rich) conduct of man, and biology with (information-rich) conduct of matter-into-man. Teleology undergirds all of these "unsolved" questions, and teleology is the religious scruple of materialists. Thus the "ill-posed" nature of all these fields, is that they refuse to accept teleological answers.

My twin daughters, of whom I am inordinately proud, are graduating with double majors at UPenn in Physics this spring. As freshmen, I suggested that they negotiate the difficult job of deciding a major by registering as Physics majors while they scoped out the various options. Should they get guff from a freshman "academic counsellor" about the necessity for taking "gender studies of self-mutilating lesbians of the 19th century" they should put their nose in the air and say haughtily, "but I'm a physics major".  Not only will this be the ultimate putdown for liberal art feministas, but the physics dept professors will bend over backward to accommodate two female majors.

This gambit worked better than expected, and they found their niches in "Jewish studies" and "medieval history". But they also decided not to drop their physics courses, perhaps out of a desire to prove to their father that physics wasn't just for boys.

Double-majoring has its drawbacks, and in their case it meant that they still needed one more physics course to graduate in their last semester. Alas, the only course available was "General Relativity" taught at a graduate level. The prof wasn't too accommodating, and soon I was getting melancholy voice mails about dropping the physics major and looking for jobs as an elementary school teacher.

This called for decisive action, and my wife sent me out to visit armed with Bernard Schutz' "A First Course in General Relativity" which was considered much easier than their textbook by Sean Carroll. It was also a lot easier than my textbook "Gravitation" acquired 25 years ago when I flunked my grad school course from the author and took it as a sign to head for seminary. So for two weeks I worked my way through the first 100 or so pages, and by the time I understood their homework, it was time to leave.

"Did I help at all?" I asked them anxiously. "Oh yes, Dad," they replied, "your being here was the best help of all."

I think that was a "No," but my pride wouldn't allow me to verify it.

But those 2 weeks weren't wasted, having awaked a realization that no one has made much progress on black hole magnetic plasmas since my graduate school days. And it also revealed the deceptive simplicity of general relativity. It really is a field that relies more on clear mathematical logic than messy empirical data.

Thus the recent paper in Nature, entitled "Thought Experiment Torpedoes Variable-Speed-of-Light Theories" by Adrian Cho. Evidently, Cho figured he could demonstrate that NASA was wasting its time looking for empirical evidence that different frequencies of light might have different speeds in the vacuum, just as it does in glass or water. It was a neat little "special relativity" proof that reeked of textbook logic, or what Einstein called "Gedankenexperimenten".

The only problem was that it was wrong.

I know I shouldn't inflict this on my readers, but for lack of a better venue, here's the story, its analysis, and my comments:

The "NASA result" cited in this article was a paper published by the fellows down the hall from me. But trying to compare the "journalese" with the science is an exercise in reverse-engineering.

The problem being addressed by the weird theories of "quantum gravity", was how those 11 dimensions of string theory can be "curled up" to the 4 we see. Most theorists suggest 7 dimensions are invisible, like a 2-D sheet of paper curled to look like a 1-D line, so from a distance we can't tell the paper is a 2-D sheet. If this happens to those 7 missing dimensions, then it is possible that light having a wavelength short enough to approximate the "curled up dimension" would see the vacuum of space not as smooth highway, but as an opaque foam. The assumed size of the "curled up dimension" is around a Planck length, somewhere smaller than a proton. So knowing the relationship between energy and wavelength, E = hc/λ, we can calculate the energy to be above the gamma ray range. (Which is not to say that gamma rays must remain unaffected.)

Not having enough to do, the gamma ray team decided that a short burst of gamma rays from a "gamma ray burst" (itself of uncertain origin), would provide a test to see if the gamma rays arrived after the X-rays (because they got trapped in the "foam"). To within experimental uncertainty (since we don't know what caused the burst, and therefore we don't know if gammas are formed at the same time as X-rays) they arrived at the same time.

All this was advertised 6 months ago, but that paper got a theorist to thinking about "simultaneity". The idea is that measuring two events in "spacetime" involves either a space-like, time-like or light-like interval. Here's how you can find out. A 4-D distance, s,  looks a lot like a 3-D distance, you square all the components and add them up, with the slight twist that the time-dimension comes in negative:
s² = x² + y² + z² - (ct)²
If s² is positive, it is spacelike, if it is negative it is timelike, and if it is zero, it is lightlike. (Modern notation reverses the sign, but I learned special relativity from a dinosaur who wrote the fourth dimension as ict.) So our theorist argued that if the different light colors travelled different speeds, then we would end up with space-like interval. But in space-like intervals, neither endpoint is "first" in time, because it would depend on which direction a zooming rocket ship passed by the endpoints. Therefore, we can have no idea about which color photon arrived "first". And if we have no idea, then the whole experiment described by my colleagues down the hall is meaningless.

Does this bother them? Of course not. They got a publication in Nature, free PR, and are anyway as civil servants, not beholden to "publish or perish". Besides which, how does any theorist know gamma ray bursters are spacelike and not light-like? Maybe special relativity doesn't work in 11 dimensions. More grant money please.

The first casualty of government-driven research is clear logic.

I had an exchange recently that brought up the subject of life on comets and its implications. As I reviewed the work on comets, it brought up some surprising connections that I had not seen before. I thought it was worthy of a blog, so here's some (relatively old) material for long-time readers of this blog.

It wasn't comets. This is like Carl Sagan saying we came from some other place. Well where did that other place come from!

I tend to agree with you, comets don't really solve the origin of life. They merely move it to a distant place. I was as surprised as you that comets had fossilized life on them, I felt like the theoretical physicist who was confronted with the muon and remarked "Who ordered that particle?" Sorta reminiscent of Arthur C Clarke's "Rendezvous with Rama", or Fred Hoyle's "Black Cloud". In other words, bad science fiction. In fact, when I heard from Dr Richard Hoover that he'd found these things, (http://rbsp.info/rbs/RbS/PDF/spie04.pdf) my first attempt was to disprove him by demonstrating that comets can't have liquid water on them. I ended proving him right in more ways than he had anticipated; not only can comets have liquid water, they can't avoid it, and most of their celestial dynamics is controlled by liquid water. Weird. (http://rbsp.info/rbs/RbS/PDF/spie05.pdf)

Then in 2005 several missions to comets confirmed everything we had predicted, and the science community went quiet while they tried to make sense of the data, since they had affirmed many times that comets can't have water. BTW They're still quiet, though they are beginning to voice some interest. (http://rbsp.info/rbs/RbS/PDF/spie06.pdf)

So then my next attempt was to show that comets must be infected from Earth, and can't possibly bring this stuff from distant places. Once again, that effort failed, and I derived a diffusion speed of life of about 1 galaxy width per billion years, or about 12 transits through the galaxy since it was formed. That calculation depends on lots of things, but I think it is accurate to a power of ten. (http://rbsp.info/rbs/RbS/PDF/spie07.pdf)

So what to do next? Where exactly did life come from? Some have suggested that the universe is "front-loaded" with information, so life was inevitable. How exactly it was "front loaded", nobody could tell me. So I went on the assumption that comets must be the information carrier, seeing as they were the only one we had, and looked at how information might flow, with the Earth as the test case. Once again, I had assumed that we'd find that the diffusion rate limited the "home planet" to be within a few parsecs of Earth, but instead I found a bootstrap process of exponentially increasing information. (http://rbsp.info/rbs/RbS/PDF/spie08.pdf)

What does all this mean?

First, it means that data drives the theory, and not the other way around. There may still turn out to be discoveries of distant "earth-like" planets with life on them, but I no longer think it is necessary.

Second, it means that bootstrap processes are designed from the top-down, not bottom-up. There is still an overlying reason for this cometary communication network, and I don't know what that is. For example, comets ejected from globular clusters will have much higher (about 3-5x) speeds than from the galactic arms, enabling not only faster diffusion through the galaxy, but possibly inter-galactic cometary travel too. Globular clusters are usually much older than galactic arms. Could globular clusters be the location for life in the galaxy? How exactly do they form, since they aren't due to supernovae shocks, or other processes that make stars? Is it possible that there is a stellar equivalent of comets that seeds the universe with globular clusters? (Think, dark matter, dark energy, and some low entropy mechanism.) That would throw the "origin of information" all the way back to the first billion years of the universe. Pure speculation of course, but that's how we formulate the next set of questions to ask of Nature.

Third, asking these questions reveals that the "dark energy" and "dark matter" problem might actually be relevant to astrobiology! The interrelationship of disciplines indicates that there are deeper symmetries than initially expected, which is, once again, possible evidence of a stronger anthropic principle than presently anticipated. So your initial question about the origin of life, turns into an even bigger question about the origin of a finely tuned universe.

I stopped publishing only because I no longer have travel funds to the San Diego conference, not because I've stopped being interested in the problem. Two areas that interest me as possible avenues of research are: comets as the solution to the "dark matter" problem, which requires the Big Bang Nucleosynthesis model to be modified to make far more oxygen (and therefore, ice) than presently expected. A second area is the role of entropic processes in stellar formation, where stellar evolution has the equivalent of biologic evolution --> the decrease in entropy caused by self-propagating "machines". In this case, the magnetic field of stars and black holes causing them to convert gravity into work, inflows into jets.

What does it mean that biological and stellar evolution are "equivalent"? The idea is that one has a big pile of energy, say, a sand pile. And at the end of the day, all that sand is now evenly distributed on the ground as a minimum energy state. What process will turn the sand pile into a sandbox the fastest? Why the process that is most "unstable". Now a physicist might assume that the path of maximum entropy is the "most random", and therefore the most likely. Say, the thermal energy of each sand grain causes it to hop, and as it hops around eventually it spreads out the sandpile evenly. The problem is that this is v-e-r-y slow.  What the blog on "Fourth Law" discusses, is that the "most unstable" process, is the one that has the fastest change in entropy. Avalanches turn out to be a way that one grain affects the next grain, and the next thing you know, all the sand grains are moving the same direction. That's a "low entropy" way that rapidly changes the sandpile, and is much more efficient than our thermal "hopping" model. This principle is called "MEPP" for "maximum entropy production principle".

Applying this to life, the energy gradient is "lots of sunlight, CO2 and liquid water" and the MEPP process that goes fastest is "pond scum". Applying this to galaxies, the energy gradient is lots of cold hydrogen gas clouds, and the process that goes fastest might be "stellar cloud seeding". (For old galaxies like our own, supernovae-driven shocks as a method of star seeding might be the fastest processs.) What that means is the the globular clusters may have seeded themselves in the early galaxy, and the cometary clouds associated with galaxy clusters would have been particularly effective at transmitting life through that fledgling galaxy as well as to neighboring galaxies. Now if that life actually accelerated cloud seeding, say, by encouraging cometary acceleration by forming a black coating on the outside of comets, then we would be discovering a MEPP method for quickly forming galaxies. In other words, the Gaia hypothesis would apply not just to life on Earth, but to galactic evolution.

Whoa. Cosmology meet Astrobiology; Astrobiology meet Cosmology. Everyone got their ID badge?

There are lots of ways to try to decide which religion is the dominant one. You could ask the President, the Parliament, or the Census Bureau. You can go over to the CIA world factbook too. The problem is that religion and politics are inseparably connected. Riots in Jos Nigeria, or Gujarat India are invariably political with religion as an excuse. Even if one took a poll or a survey, it would be heavily influenced by politics.

For example, the self-reporting of religious views in the US 2010 Census is affected by "whether our special interest group gets more government funding", which is the overt message of the $340M Census ad campaign. This affects how people will self-report themselves. In Switzerland, the only way to avoid the "church tax" is to declare yourself "atheist". So how does one get an unbiased estimate of popular religion?

By using Google.

Over at Floatingsheep.org blog, they have used data about Google searches for 4 different key words to rank each location as more "Jesus", "Allah", "Buddha" or "Hindu" to create a map of the favored search word. The continents are as you expect, but not the details. Note especially the enclave of Muslims in the Netherlands, Hindus in South Africa, or the Buddhists in Switzerland and San Francisco. (Switzerland? Maybe self-declarations do work.) Seems like Buddhism is far more likely to penetrate the West than Islam, despite what you might have heard. Here's the graphic (click to enlarge):


Religions of the World


The breakdown in Europe is of particular interest, so here is a blowup of just Europe:
Europe


And of course, inquisitive minds want to know how we do with atheist. Alas, Floatingsheep didn't map that keyword. But they did map the most popular stand in for the a-religious: "sex". According to Procrustes, it is a very good replacement, because it is the most relevant religious word of polytheism. (You will notice the Susan Sontag quote on the Floatingsheep.org website.) Here's the graphic:

Polytheism

(The comment thread over at Floatingsheep pointed out that "Jesus" is a common name in Spanish speaking countries--Spain, Latin-America--and one should not conclude that they are the most Christian countries on the globe.) But it kinda changes your perspective on the dangers of foreign religion, doesn't it? It isn't Islam, but PoMo, aka Polytheism, that is the dominant threat to our culture today.