COMMENTARY: GEORGE TEMPLETON
Evolutionary
John Dewey wrote, “Every thinker puts some portion of
an apparently stable world in peril, and no one can wholly predict what will
emerge in its place.” He felt that past doctrines always require some
reconstruction because of cultural, technical, and political evolution. For
him, the scientific method, and democracy in politics, education, and
journalism embodied a single ethical ultimate ideal for humanity.
Education
was a balance between content knowledge and experiences that would help man to
understand his relationship to facts and truths, thus acquiring the tools
needed to become the informed citizenry that would drive social evolution.
Dewey’s views are an anathema to anti-evolution
creationists who on a recent radio program demonized him as nothing short of
the anti-Christ. There was no way that his attack on certainty could be
divorced from their emotional reality. It is as Georgia’s Republican representative
Paul Broun, who sits on the House Science, Space, and Technology committee said:
Evolution, embryology, and Big Bang cosmology are lies from the pit of hell.
The Genesis story about eating the forbidden fruit of the
tree of knowledge suggests that people are innocent and virtuous when they are
unsophisticated. Knowledge introduces temptations and opportunities that lead
to sin. Ecclesiastes 1:18 says, “For in much wisdom is much grief and he
that increases knowledge increases sorrow.”
Is ignorance really strength?
Twilight Zone
Mathematics is more than numbers. It is a language and a
refinement of everyday thinking. It cannot prove every truth. Certainty is
subordinate to truth. Uncertainty is not always a consequence of ignorance.
It was Lord Kelvin who maintained that measurement and quantification were the
first steps to understanding, but quantification does not capture reality as
much as it creates it. Certainty seems to be an artifact of human psychology
instead of an attribute of our world. Uncertainty is the friend of curiosity
and discovery.
More than fifty years ago an aging mathematics professor
emeritus explained to his beginning class that they could enter the twilight
zone at any time. You didn’t need a doctorate. Wonder and mystery existed
everywhere if we would only open our eyes to see.
Simulation
Computer games are evolutionary.
A student can write a computer subroutine about half an inch
long to quickly solve problems that would otherwise require years of science
and classical math study. The method is listed below to show that it is simple
and obviously true.
1. Regeneration: Where you are at depends on where you have
been.
2. Continuity: What comes in must go out or it will pile up.
3. Temporality: The fastest wins the race and comes first.
4. Linearity: Make long journeys with a large number of
small steps, each resulting in miniscule changes.
5. Evolution: Obey nature’s simple laws. They define
the rules but not the complex outcomes that evolve.
Scientific
Science is not about making an informed decision based on
evidence that fits in with your beliefs. Life is a dynamic pattern of
organization and patterns are what math is all about. Our lives are about
bringing the world outside into harmony with our gut feel. Science is about
changing our gut feel to harmonize with the world outside.
Efforts to discredit Darwin’s
theory fail to understand that evolution does not claim that life arises purely
by chance. Intelligence and creativity are built into the fabric of the cosmos
and did not follow the creation of mankind. In nothing more than chance we
find structure. In contrast, our efforts to make life more predictable and
explainable lead us to see patterns where none exist. Uncertainty and
ambiguity are universal and imply a feared lack of control, but they are also
the fuel of wonder, freedom, and creativity. We can’t avoid
uncertainty. We must learn how to live with it.
Probably
Ivars Peterson’s book The
Jungles of Randomness describes how we see a lack of intent in
anything irregular and disordered, but patterns exist when we are not aware of
them. When we see no clear relationship between cause and effect, we assume
that some element of randomness must be present. However, we must distinguish
between a random process and the results of that process.
Walter Bagehot, the nineteenth century Social Darwinist,
journalist, and banker, ignored the debauchery of gambling when he claimed
“Life is a school of probability.” Risks versus rewards are the
realities of investment. Uncertainty is the price of being alive.
We think of randomness as having no pattern, but that is not
true. Pure chance can lead to highly ordered results, and a completely
specified deterministic process can lead to unpredictability. When we have
only results we cannot know their cause. A random coin can come up heads ten
times in a row even though that is unlikely.
Computer programs can create
lists of random numbers that come from a completely determined program. What
seems random can be intelligent design, and what seems to be the act of a
creator can be pure chance subject to an unknown and unseen probability
distribution such as the bell curve that teachers grade by.
Statistical probability that uses sampling techniques, such
as in voter polls, has to provide the same results as common sense probability,
the kind that comes from counting the number of ways an event can or fails to
happen, but it does so only when we roll the dice an infinite number of
times. Infinity is important, and thought to be the realm of God, because only
it guarantees the stable long-term behavior of nature’s laws. It was
Georg Cantor, the developer of modern set theory, who proved that some
infinities are larger than others! His mathematical correspondence would later
be used in proofs about the limits of human knowledge.
Data and Law
There is a young child’s toy consisting of successively
smaller concentric disks mounted on a rod so that a conical pyramid is formed.
Hindus give us two more empty rods and a total of sixty-four discs. They explain
that the world will end when we finish transferring the disks to another needle,
provided that we move only one disk at a time and we never allow a smaller disk
beneath a larger one. Examination quickly shows that each transfer requires
twice as many moves as the previous. If we try to describe the step by step
movements we are met by increasing complexity and incomprehensible huge
numbers. Two to the sixty fourth power minus one moves are required. If we
made non-stop movements every second it would take fifty-eight thousand billion
years, more than ten thousand times the estimated age of the earth, to
accomplish the task.
A simple structure subject to a few rules can generate huge
amounts of confusing data. Data cannot be trusted apart from context.
However, science is called upon to infer context given only data.
Omega
Kurt Gödel’s “Incompleteness Theorem”
showed that math could not prove all truths. Alan Turing’s computer “Halting
Problem” proved that certainty is not computable. They laid the
foundation for Gregory Chaitin’s extension of what computers can’t
do to what man can’t know.
Complexity, an argument for intelligent design, is difficult
to quantify. If we can find the underlying laws, complexity goes away.
Scientists use computer programs to draw a curve through the data points trying
to find a simplifying relationship. If this can be done, the data is not
random and a computer can always find the original law, the conical pyramid and
its rules. Math can always draw a complex curve that goes exactly through the
data points but if the explanation is as complex as the data there is no
simplification. Then the data is random by definition. Without
simplification, no theory explaining the data exists.
Gregory Chaitin generalized the Halting Problem to all
possible computer programs. He calculated a precisely defined but unknowable number
called “Omega”. In so doing, he proved that pure randomness is an
intrinsic part of mathematics. No mathematics will ever be able to grasp ultimate
reality.
Chaotic
A butterfly flapping its wings in Beijing in March makes the August Atlantic
hurricane season completely different. Everything is complex, intimately
connected, surprising sensitive to, but ultimately independent of beginning
conditions. Order, not chaos, is the foundation of everything.
The math of chaos begins with simple equations expressing
underlying laws, like those used by our student. As the simulation begins, its
behavior is certain, but then accumulated tolerances drive it into wildly
unpredictable patterns. More information will not make the uncertainty disappear.
It is not a matter of our inability to know the present in all its determining
details.
In nature, chaos is the rule. Order is the exception. Uncertainty,
felt to be incompatible with the Almighty, evolves out of certainty even though
the emerging patterns express an extreme order, as in snowflakes, instead of an
expected random structure.
Entropy
Time is a consequence of change giving birth to causality. As
the arrow of time irreversibly moves from past to the future, organization
decays into disorder and formlessness.
Entropy comes from the laws of thermal physics. It is
demonstrated by a drop of ink in a glass of water that diffuses and spreads
throughout, and never reorganizes into the beginning droplet. The large number
of molecules in the glass causes a gradual spreading of the ink instead of the
unseen erratic motion of individual particles. The certainty of entropy comes
entirely from the fact that it deals with immense numbers. Although entropy
wins in the long run, structure arises at the expense of chaotic increase
elsewhere. Locally, the universe has a built-in tendency to order. However,
order is subjective, not objective. It requires an observer.
Degeneration
We proudly think of evolution as ascendency instead of
adaptation. Man in the future will be a far more perfect creature. Could God
use evolution as his method for creation?
Drummond, in his 1891 work, Natural
Law in the Spiritual World, argued that deterioration is the law of
nature. He saw a cycle of youth, maturity, aging, and final decrepitude. Death
is nature’s natural state. A universal force leads us to incivility, imbecility,
and madness. We are like the man who falls from a fifth floor balcony. The
same force that caused him to fall the first foot will surely make him fall the
remaining fifty feet.
Drummond may not have realized that nothing in Darwin’s theory is
clearly directional describing an upward force toward improvement.
Evolution
Our mind and substance are different perspectives on a single
unified mysterious reality. William Byers’s book, The Blind Spot, explains it. We are
unavoidably both participants and observers, both subjective and objective,
unavoidably implicated in a river of continual evolving flow, changing the
course of history while being part of it.
Knowledge does not come into being fully formed. Creative
solutions have always been step by step. Ideas replicate, mutate, and evolve.
They don’t just proliferate and survive or die in disputation. They
change qualities creating new paradigms.
Explanations take time and
resources. They always reveal new questions requiring further explanation. In
this respect, evolution is an emergent property, like Chaos, depending on many
facts, math, and all the sciences. It is not constrained to biology, but
rather can be recognized as the unifying foundation of life, thought,
complexity, and ultimate reality.
nd
so we bid a not-so-fond farewell to the bow of 2012, another large
unwieldy year, as it sinks slowly over the horizon, wobbling unsteadily
towards the graveyard of memory. And cheers erupt from we folks on shore
waving the double-handed "L for loser" sign above our heads. "So long.
See ya. Don't let the door slam you in the butt on the way out. And if
you got any brothers or sisters, don't give them this address."
he entire premise of the 1990s movie "
ight-wing
resistance to meaningful gun control is driven, in part, by a false
notion that America's Founders adopted the Second Amendment because they
wanted an armed population that could battle the U.S. government. The
opposite is the truth, but many Americans seem to have embraced this
absurd, anti-historical narrative.
