Sunday, April 20, 2008
I saw Expelled, because, frankly, I have issues with Darwinism as a complete explanation of life on Earth. I don’t believe in God, but I also think the probability of cellular life is so small, that I just don’t think random mutation plus selection gets us there, and my lack of alternative doesn't mean I should believe the current theory. It’s one thing to turn off a protein (sickle cell anemia), or select for the length a finch's nose, or basically modify an existing structure into various subspecies, which really only takes a couple of flips in the genetic sequence, quite another to create new tissue.
As the movie notes, the first replicating organism needed at least 250 proteins in a specific order, each of which needs at least 20 and probably 400 amino acids in a specific order, and a specific rotation. This structure is needed for selection to guide random mutations--prior to this, natural selection merely destroys. When you listen to the current contenders for how this happened, it’s basically the same ‘a miracle happened’ hand waving no matter which side you are on (the most specific Darwinistic theory offered is that they arose from 'backs of crystals').
Staney Miller's famous experiment showing that he could create a couple of amino acids from methane, hydrogen, ammonia and water, has proven a dead end. You can create some amino acids, and these are also found in meteorites, but then, they need to be assembled into proteins, and then the proteins into a compound. Further, submarine volcanic vents don't make organic compounds, they decompose them. Indeed, these vents are one of the limiting factors on what organic compounds can be created in the primitive oceans. At the present time, the entire ocean gets cycled through those vents every 10 million years. So all of the organic compounds get zapped every ten million years. That places a constraint on how much organic material you can get via merely simmering.
Anyway, I really gave up the Darwinist explanation of creating all life after after reading about some philosophers in the NY Times, who believe we could be living in the SimCity of some giant alien race (one guy put the odds at 20%, which I thought was great, because usually the number is 1%, 99%, or 50%). Anyone who programs writes new code by copying and pasting, or opening and saving, old code. Thus the fact that organisms appear to have a common progenitor is merely from lazy (ie, all) programmers [note to Telluride Asset Management lawyers reading this—that means all my Telluride code is from prior experience, which I look forward to showing to a jury—I did not invent the ‘do while’ loop at Telluride]. So the fact that humans appear to have common ancestry, just means that a resource constrained creator (a design team in the 10-th dimension), merely borrowed a lot of code, or had a template library, and the lower the level of borrowing determines the taxonomic relation. This also explains why there are lots of inefficiencies in code: the great designer is not omniscient and omnipotent, he just has a resource constraint and technology team that makes Google look like a nematode, large but still finite. Like my programs, genetic instructions are a kluge.
But in the movie I found the performance of Richard Dawkins, atheist extraordinaire, most refreshing. First, because he is so honest. He doesn’t say evolution has ‘absolutely nothing to do with religion’ as many like to presume, but rather, it profoundly impacts one view of religion. I’m not religious myself, so that implication doesn’t really affect me, but I do think many people’s views on religion are decided by evolution or vice versa. Indeed, the subtext is that not believing in God can lead to Nazi atrocities, about as likely as believing against Darwinism as explaining all life leads to bible-thumping homophobia. But most importantly, Dawkins said while he thinks Intelligent Design is not science, he would entertain that life on Earth was seeded from aliens, his only concern being those aliens (or the aliens who seeded them) at some point were primordial ooze. In that way, my creationism is perfectly consistent with a type Dawkins would allow.
I think, fundamentally, Dawkins hates the 'arguments by authority' of religion, and anti-empirical nature of religion. Again, I agree with him. But I just don’t buy the current Darwinism that waves its hand and says the complexity of eukaryotes is merely a sequence of random plus selection. For example, in the most famous case in the past 10 years, the Discovery Institute’s Michail Behe argued against Darwinistic explanation of the bacterial flagellum, which Kenneth Miller from Brown argued against Behe's argument. The flagellum involves a constellation of 50 parts very much like an outboard motor, with a rotor, engine, etc. It seems improbable these things arranged together by natural selection. Miller argues that several of the component (ie, proteins) of the flagellum have ‘directly homologous’ proteins that have other purposes ('Directly homologous' is like 'kinda isomorphic'). One, for example, is used as a secretory system in some bacteria, allowing or disallowing various specific toxins. But I found this proof very unconvincing, like saying the outboard motor of a boat could come together, because, you could use the propeller to cut grass, and the carburetor tin to work as an ash tray, the pistons as medicine dispensers. Could happen, but the odds seem really low. Every protein will be similar to some protein (ie, 'homologous'), but the probability that natural selection favored species with individual C-A-T-G errors that slowly took 50 different complex proteins, adjusted them appropriately (remember, each protein contains usually hundreds of amino acids), moved them next to each other, and also kept the supply chain within the cell in lock step with these changes (every part needs a supply and removal chain), seems more improbable than the thought that we are created by really smart aliens in the 10-th dimension.
It has often been noted that the complete works of Shakespeare could by written by a bunch of monkeys, but they have estimated that even this would take 1E183800 keystrokes to write Hamlet. The universe has only 1E79 (ie, 10^79) hydrogen atoms, and only existed for 4E17 seconds. There’s a big difference between infinity and these numbers, especially related to 1E183800. For the human genetic code, it seems like similar odds to writing Shakespeare given the complexity of our various cellular, immunological, and endocrine processes. But the counter argument is that because I’m conscious, and there are many universes, and perhaps the big bang happens again and again, etc., I am really looking at a conditional probability, and I've basically won the most improbable PowerBall in the multiverse (good to remember on bad days). My speculation is that it’s a set of creators, of unknown form, using templates (probably like in Dreamweaver, under C:\users\The Creator\templates\organic\eukaryotes folder), and drinking the 10-th dimensional version of coffee, while cranking out the next beetle (asked what could be inferred about the work of the Creator from a study of His works, the British scientist J.B.S. Haldane replied, that He has "an inordinate fondness for beetles", given there are so many different kinds (conservatively about 350,000). These are probably training exercises for those new to the team).