A critique of Mr

A critique of Mr. Mukul's essay on creation etc

Aparthib Zaman
E mail : aparthib@yahoo.com

Mr. Mukul's essay made some erroneous assumptions. It is not true that the universe is a world of four-dimensions. It appears so at our level of resolution. Fundamentally the universe can have many more higher dimensions that are curled up at our current state and may not be detectable.

This is the what the super string theory is searching for. And his discussion of two-dimensional beings embedded in a higher dimension didn't make any point and arrived at an irrelevant conclusion of scientists vision of the universe. A modern view of universe can conceive of much higher dimensions, dimensions as high as 26. A two dimensional being can figure out if they are embedded in a three dimensional space simply by measuring the local curvature, no need to step outside of the two-dimensions. This is the lesson of differential geometry.

I am not sure what point was he trying to make by such irrelevant and inaccurate discussions about dimensionality? Mr. Mukul's essay further resurrects a now defunct simplistic view credited to William Paley who said that if one comes across a watch in a forest he cannot but arrive at the obvious conclusion that such a device must have a designer (watchmaker), so why not of life that we observe to have a similar if not higher complexity?

This has been totally refuted by modern Biology and it is not even debated anymore in scientific circles. Evolution is well understood and is fully supported by observational evidence. Books after books by reputed biologists have painstakingly explained this process of evolution using irrefutable logic and evidence, NOT FAITH or naive intuition that have always proven to be prone to error as history teaches us. Just like the earth is round even thought it appears flat to a layman with naive intuitive thinking.

A beautiful snowflake looks like the work of a skilled designer. A beautiful gemstone seems impossible to be designed without a "designer" with a superb sense of beauty. But who is the designer? "Someone" with a "mind", consciousness?, feelings, emotion etc? It is understood beyond even any debate how these are formed. They are both the product of the design of none other than the unconscious yet profound LAWS OF PHYSICS. More exactly, the inviolable law of the increase of entropy and the laws of quantum mechanics combine to give such shape and beauty to snowflakes/gems. And the same is true for the colorful cloud formations, rainbow etc. They are all the results of the laws of physics at work. No conscious humanlike designer is involved here.

Now come to the intricate work of human body with all its complex organs. What/who is the designer of it? It is the same laws of Physics, but now working over billions of years instead of few hours (snowflakes) or few hundred/thousands for gemstones. Natural selection and Random mutation is nothing but a manifestation of the simple laws of physics tending to maximize entropy and satisfying other emergent forms of the basic laws underneath. Life is a dissipative structure that has achieved the threshold of complexity to become an autopoietic system, is the modern jargon for the scientific view of Life. The purpose of life is to faithfully obey the Second Law of Thermodynamics by increasing entropy (Even eating and sex are dictated by this requirement, although our brain translates it into a sense of desire and pleasure for us, hiding the real underlying purpose from our conscious mind).

Now one can preserve his/her life by doing a complete genome sequence and saving it for eternity as an information in a database. Human cloning is a reality, not a science fiction anymore. So life is nothing but a process, the program being run being that of the genetic code using the entire genome sequence of each unique life form. A similar analogy of software running on a hardware is a nuclear bomb. The spectacular mushroom cloud, the blast, the destruction is just nothing but a materialization of an information or code (The laws of nuclear physics and relativity) with some hardware ingredients (uranium etc). Behind any natural or artificial wonders are nothing but some code (ultimately reducible to the laws of Physics) at work. Some programs need human intervention to run (Like nuclear bomb), others (like life, snowflakes, stars etc) are initiated by nature itself through chaotic effects. But it is only a matter of perspective.

If we take the big picture of humans as being part of nature obeying laws of physics then every materialization of code in nature is spontaneous, and human intervention is also a result of natural laws at work. The ultimate example of materialization of physical laws is the Big Bang which created the entire universe together with all its life forms and other structures. The Big Bang was the materialization of the Physical laws (Software) using the hardware of tiny quantum bubble created through fluctuations of quantum vacuum. Thus a tiny Quantum Bubble ended up as the observable universe we wonder at today, thanks to the laws of Physics. Big Bang is certainly a speculation, albeit a scientific one. It is predicted by the same principles of Physics that predicted nuclear bomb which was also successfully tested (Any doubter?).

Do we dare question the reality of nuclear bomb? We cannot question the validity of the laws of Physics while placing complete unquestioning confidence in the reality of a nuclear bomb whenever one is built, since the latter is nothing but a materialization of the former. So Big Bang, or some possible variation thereof in future (As dictated by Physics), which is predicted by the same laws of Physics that gave rise to nuclear bomb cannot be dismissed by non-scientific reasoning. Saying that "It is God's miracle", does not "explain" life, it only puts a closure by hiding the ignorance by inventing a new word. Inventing a new word to reflect an ignorance does not define the new word in meaningful way. It is a common human instinct to put a closure to any unresolved questions because they feel uneasy living with mysteries and unanswered questions. A scientific inquiry goes against this instinct and strive for further insights, incremental advance being the goal, not a closure necessarily.

The kind of thinking typified by William Paley and Mr. Mukul are reminiscent of the time when our intellects were primitive that such simplistic answers were put forth. But humanity have come a long way since then. Engaging in vague metaphysics does not get us much further in the quest for truth. Now a genuine understanding should involve a scientific study spanning across a host of disciplines. Every day a new insight is being added to the knowledge base and getting us incrementally closer to the final understanding. Quantum jumps of insight do occur in history. For example Darwin's Theory of Evolution, Mendel's theory of heredity and most importantly the almost legendary discovery of DNA and deciphering of the genetic code in 1953. The experiments of Urey and Miller showed how chemical and physical process can create the ingredients of life if not life itself (as yet).

Although Darwin explained beautifully how life evolved from simple to the complex but only vaguely mentioned about a possible mechanism of the origin of life itself (The primitive pond). The first scientific attempt to understand the origin of Life was by the Russian scientist Oparin in his 1929 classic "The Origin of Life". He extended the Darwinian theory of evolution backward in time to explain how simple organic and inorganic materials might have combined into complex organic compounds and how the latter might have formed the primordial organism. The first attempt to understand life in a more fundamental way was by the Nobel laureate physicist none other than the founder of quantum physics Erwin Schroedinger in his epoch making book "What is Life?

The Physical Aspect of the Living Cell With Mind and Matter" written more than fifty years ago. He anticipated DNA in that book even before its discovery (He called it some kind of aperiodic crystal). Although now dated, it is a mark of amazing insight for its time. This book was the inspiration for all later generation biologists and physicists interested in life's mystery like Watson and Crick who materialized their inspiration into is covering the "DNA", Schrodinger's aperiodic crystal. About fifty years later another physicist from Princeton, Freeman Dyson improved upon Schrodinger's idea and wrote the book "Origins of Life". His ideas have been based on much more insights gained in Biology and Physics since Schrodinger and others. There has been a continued increase in our understanding of life and its origins by scientists all around the world. One of the most creative of them all was the Sri Lankan born American chemist/biologist Ponnamperuma, who was the director of the laboratory of the chemical evolution of life at the University of Maryland until his premature death in 1995. He along with Carl Sagan and Ruth Martiner was able to produce ATP, one of the fundamental building block of DNA, and thus life. His insights into the chemical nature of life's evolution signifies a quantum jump from the days of Schroedinger and Oparin.

A nice article on the origin of life with some description of Ponnamperuma's work can be found at the site: http://www.rit.edu/~flwstv/biology.html. Another pioneer in life research is Nobel Laureate Eigen. He was able to induce (chemically) RNA molecules to replicate in the lab. This is very close to producing a virus. Viruses are in between living and non-living. Two more pioneers that should be mentioned are Stuart Kauffman (A Biochemist) and Nobel Laureate Ilya Prigogine (A physical chemist) both of whom have shown how order can spring out of chaos. At the base of it all is the most profound aspect of life which is the Second Law of Thermodynamics and the law of increase of entropy.

In fact the purpose of life if one has to find one is to satisfy the second law and to maximize entropy production as I said before. The main attribute of life is autopoiesis mentioned before, a tendency of aggregate molecules of matter to maintain its identity through metabolism and replication/reproduction. And autopoiesis is the inevitable result of a dissipative system trying to maintain its far from equilibrium (thermodymanic) state to maximize entropy generation.

A dissipative system is one that requires continuous input of energy to maintain itself. Life is not simply an entity created from scratch from conception to birth. Life is an evolving process that has been going on over billions of years in an incremental way. Our body may have been formed in matter of years after conception, but the program (our genome sequence) that builds us (our body+mind) has taken billions of years to perfect. The most insightful discovery by Darwin was that natural selection and mutation can give rise to a complex life form as human through a prolonged and cumulative action of those laws.

The complicated body and brain of ours are not just a creation from our birth to date. We have inherited the blueprint of life (the genetic code) that has evolved and perfected through billions of years of evolution. That’s why life is so precious. It contains huge information collected over an incredibly long span of time. Our genome sequence will take thousands of pages to write down in paper. Like a complex software that starts with few simple lines but eventually is perfected into a sophisticated program of millions of lines with contributions from many people over a long time, the genetic code of life took billions of years to be developed and is still evolving. Life will look different and more advanced in another million years.

We can never understand life without understanding the history of how life has evolved from the primordial earth with single cells becoming more and more complex by incremental steps. But the process of this evolution of life from simple to complex is purely natural. Down at the bottom it is nothing but physics. Natural selection and mutation is nothing more than a manifestation of the laws of Physics at work on cell/gene level. As Watson of DNA fame said "In the last analysis, there are only atoms. There's just one science, Physics; everything else is social work" in his lecture at the London Institute of Contemporary Arts in 1985.

This view is also echoed by Stephen Hawkings and Steven Weinberg. Hawking nicely summarizes this view as: Biology<-Chemistry<- Physics. Biologist Richard Dawkins (see reference 4 at the end) states that Physicists have to come into the scene at the end of the long chain of reasoning to explain evolution of life to complete the last but not the least significant step. (In this context also refer to reference 7 at the end ). A caveat must be issued that it is never implied that Physics is complete and all that can be known is known already. There will certainly be insights gained in Physics in future and current concepts and laws may be revised or subsumed under a more comprehensive scheme of laws (Theory of Everything). But it will not at least invalidate what is certainly known and tested today, like nuclear Physics and relativity since nuclear bomb is the litmus test of its validity, among many others.

We are misled by apparent beauty and complexity of a product to immediately conceive of a designer with a human attribute. But it is nature which is the designer. Sure, humans as yet cannot create life, but that does not automatically imply life must be a direct product of a divine act. Humans cannot make a naturally beautiful snowflake or a natural gemstone with beautiful patterns either. But we know these are all results of the Laws of Physics as mentioned earlier. Similarly, life, in all its complexity, impossible for humans to create, is nothing but the result of the laws of Physics, although acting over a long (billions of years) period of time, unlike snowflakes where it acts over a much shorter time span. If there has to be a divine designer for life then it is the Laws of Physics. A beautiful snowflake with its artistic and symmetric pattern is just a result of the laws of thermodynamics and Quantum mechanics.

So is life. Life is an EMERGENT behavior of matter. Life is a result of self- organization of matter driven by the requirements to maximize entropy and reduce the gradient of temperature difference between sun and earth. What is the origin of the laws of physics? Nobody knows! Not even the physicists themselves. But do they say "God made the Laws of Physics"?, no- because it is not a statement that adds anything to an ignorance other than hiding the ignorance inside a newly coined term (God) as I said before. If one really has to contemplate a designer, then its the law of Physics that one has to wonder who is the designer of. But at this primitive level it hardly makes any difference whether one postulates a grand designer that exists necessarily without itself (himself?) requiring a creator, or postulates that the Law of Physics exists necessarily without a creator. The former just provides a consolation to mortals in the form of a hope of a personal God looking after each human who will resurrect him someday and bestow eternal life along with the fulfillment of all desires unfulfilled in this life. So this question of the designer of the Laws of Physics has no answer, or better yet, it is not a meaningful question even.

Just saying "God" made these laws is another way of saying we don't know. It sounds better than admitting ignorance. But it does not increase our insight by phrasing it that way. Its a pretentious cop out. We can "label" the unknown as "GOD", but that’s an affirmation of our ignorance, not a deep realization. Not only that, if the wonderful design necessitates a wonderful designer, then by the same logic, a wonderful designer (which itself is a wonderful design in its own right) necessitates a yet more wonderful designer. Where do we stop in this infinite regress? Isn't it more sensible to stop at something that we understand and know (i.e Laws of Physics, including its possible extensions in future) or admit that we don't know where to stop, rather than stopping at an ill-defined thing by coining the word God? we as human can still spend our lifetime learning and discovering just the natural laws that exist and understand how it (Natural Laws) works and give rise to the marvelous phenomena of evolution, formation of stars, galaxies, snowflakes etc and try to understand life in an incremental way.

There is no reason (other than faith, which does not require reason) to assume that the phenomenon of life cannot be ever understood in terms of natural laws. Mr. Mukul's assertion that "If any one claims that human species have learnt (collectively) everything that is humanly possible to learn, then I would declare him the most ignorant man in this universe." is really misapplied. It really applies to the dogmatists, who claim to know the answer of it all with a one liner "It is the work of God". Scientists on the other hand claim ignorance as to ultimate questions of existence and origin issues. They only claim to know as much as it can be and has been known, and occasional speculations based on known laws.

The fact that we do not completely understand life now does not imply that it is not understandable in physical terms. We don't understand weather too, in spite of all the technical advances. This lack of understanding is rooted in the complexity of weather and life. The chain of reasoning based on laws of physics that links a simple molecule to a living organism is broken in the middle due to the enormous complexity of cumulative effects of over billions of years of evolution. In weather, it is the enormous number of air molecules that is at the root of complexity preventing an exact understanding.

Gone are the days when arm chair philosophers were idly talking about their pet theories of life, consciousness etc. Without the new language of genes, DNAs, entropy, Second Law, autocatalysis, autopoiesis any talk of life would now sound like childish babble, trapped in words going in circles, getting one nowhere. It would require a super philosopher today (There are a handful, Paul Davies, Daniel Dennett to name a couple) well versed in all these disciplines to pool together all these separate insights into a coherent story of life. Thousands of pages of results of scientific research into consciousness, mind, life are being published monthly in journals of evolutionary biology, evolutionary psychology, biomathematics, biophysics, molecular genetics, artificial intelligence, quantum consciousness etc.

The best approximations to date of the truth of life are distributed among these separate database of knowledge that is rapidly expanding. Some of the key words vital to the understanding of life are:

COMPLEXITY, EMERGENT PHENOMENA, CHAOS, SELF ORGANIZATION, DISSIPATIVE SYSTEMS, AUTOPOIETIC SYSTEMS, AUTOCATALYTIC PROCESS. etc.

The books by Dawkins quite convincingly demonstrates how complex life can arise out of the simpler ones and ultimately be traceable to inanimate physical laws. He also has an interesting on line article debunking such design arguments at:

http://www.secularhumanism.org/library/fi/dawkins_18_3.html

Some more references containing the detailed source of the ideas discussed above:

1. What is Life? - Lyn Margulis and Dorion Sagan [A book of incredible insight in to life. A very appropriate title]

2. What is Sex? - Lyn Margulis and Dorion Sagan [This is not a book on ordinary sex as most undertsand it. But an evolutionary explanation of how sexual reproduction evolved from bacteria to higher organisms over billions of years and how genders became separated over time. Lyn Margulis is a distinguished scientist with hundreds of publication and is affiliated with many Nasa projects in exobiology. She has original ideas in biology and is also in touch with Dyson and other physicists about the latest research in life and evolution. By the way she was married to Late Carl Sagan. Dorion Sagan is her son]

3. The Selfish gene - Dawkins. (An eye opener, take a gene's eye view of life) 4. The Blind Watchmaker - Dawkins (Clearly shows how complex life can evolve from simple through small natural steps)

5. Climbing Mount Improbable - Dawkins (uptodate and more convincing than above)

6. Vital Dust: Life as a Cosmic Imperative - Christian De Duve(Nobe laureate) . Written both in a scientific and philosophical way

7. Life's Other Secret: The New Mathematics of the Living World - Ian Stewart Below is a summary of a talk by Ian Stewart with the same title as the book above ( Given on 4/23/98 at the Univ. of Minnesota):

What is life? Why is the world of living creatures so different from the inorganic world? The discovery of the first secret of life, the molecular structure of DNA, in the middle of this century, showed that Life is a form of chemistry - but chemistry unlike any that ever graced a test tube. Some secrets, however, lie deeper that the genetic code. It is the mathematical law of physics and chemistry that control the growing organism's response to its genetic instructions.

That is Life's OTHER Secret. Its full understanding will come only when we combine the mathematical and physical sciences with biochemistry, genetics, and developmental biology. One of the most exciting growth areas of twenty-first century science will be biomathematics. The next century will witness an explosion of new mathematical concepts, of new kinds of mathematics, brought into being by the need to understand the patterns of the living world.

8. Seven Clues to the Origin of Life : A Scientific Detective Story - A. G. Cairns-Smith [A pioneer in life's origin. Originator of the clay theory of Life]

9. At Home in the Universe: The Search for the Laws of Self-organization and Complexity - Stuart Kauffman

10. The Fifth Miracle - Paul Davies (Speculates on life's possible extraterrestrial origin)

11. Life Itself - Francis Crick(Nobel Laureate)

12. Steps Towards Life : A Perspective on Evolution - Manfred Eigen(Nobel Laureate)

13. Physics of Immortality - Frank Tipler [An intriguing book that postulates on the possibility of immortality based on pure physics]. For a review click on: http://niazi.com/resurrec.htm or

http://www.doesgodexist.org/JanFeb96/PhysicsOfImmorality.html

14. Web Link: http://www.historyoftheuniverse.com/origlife.html

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