Many of our professors are
very pretentious people who claim to have an understanding of many
deep questions of time, space, life, matter and energy. But there
are quite a few paradoxes suggesting that such academic figures may
know very much less than they claim to know. Below is a list of
some of these paradoxes.
The Faint Young Sun
Paradox. It is believed that life appeared more than three
billion years ago, in an event that would have required liquid water
on the surface. However, models of the sun's evolution indicate that
the heat output of the sun should have been much lower billions of
years ago. Based on such models, it seems that it should only have
been about about two billion years ago that the Earth started getting
enough heat for liquid water to exist on its surface.
The Fermi Paradox.
Our galaxy contains many billions of planets. In billions of solar
systems there should be a situation where a planet roughly the size
of the Earth exists at a suitable distance from the closest sun,
resulting in a surface that is neither too hot nor too cold for life
to appear. But despite all these opportunities for life to appear,
decades of searches for radio signals from extraterrestrials have
produced no successes. The Fermi Paradox can be succinctly stated by
asking: where is everybody?
The “Mind from
Matter” Paradox. It is typically believed that the human mind
results from arrangements of matter in a brain. But mind and matter
are two totally different types of things. We can imagine without a
paradox mental things producing mental outputs, and physical things
producing physical outputs. But it seems paradoxical that a material
thing could ever produce a mental output.
The “Winding Problem”
Paradox. A large fraction of the universe's galaxies are
beautiful spiral galaxies. Spiral galaxies rotate, taking about 200
million years to make a full rotation. But stars in the outer parts
of a spiral galaxy should take much longer to rotate than stars
closer to the center of a galaxy (just as planets in the outer solar
system have much longer years than planets in the inner solar
system). This differential rotation should spoil the spiral shape of
a galaxy after after 500 million years. But such galaxies have
apparently managed to keep these spiral shapes for many billions of
years.
The “Protein Origin”
Paradox. In a cell proteins are produced by little structures
called ribosomes. But ribosomes are themselves made up largely of
proteins. So if proteins are built by ribosomes which themselves
require proteins, how could proteins ever have originated?
A ribosome, with its proteins shown in green
The Matter/Antimatter
Asymmetry Paradox. The prevailing Big Bang theory of the
universe's origin maintains that in its first minutes the universe
consisted of highly energetic particles of energy (photons) packed
together at a very high density. Whenever two very energetic photons
collide, they produce equal amounts of matter and antimatter. The
Big Bang therefore should have produced equal amounts of matter and
antimatter. But in our universe we see abundant amounts of matter,
but no naturally existing antimatter.
The Short Lifetime of
Synapse Proteins Paradox. The leading theory of memory storage
maintains that memories are stored in synapses in the brain. However,
it is known that the proteins that make up synapses have short lifetimes, having an average lifetime of no more than a few weeks.
How could synapses be storing memories that can last for 50 years
when all the matter inside synapses is being rapidly replaced, with
such rapid turnover?
The Paradox of High
Mental Function in Highly Damaged Brains. Our professors assert
that our minds are produced purely by our brains. But it sometimes
happens that humans have normal or almost normal mental functioning
even though they have lost very much or most of their brains due to
disease. See here for some examples.
The “You Need a
Language to Establish a Language” Paradox. If the first
language were ever to get established among humans, there would have
to have been some process by which a complicated set of rules got
promulgated and established among a group of people. But (as discussed here) it seems
that no such rules could ever have been established and
promulgated unless a language already existed.
The “Inferiority of
Primitive Speech” Paradox. Before any language was spoken,
humans would have lacked the vocal adaptions needed to speak in an
intelligible manner. Before such adaptions existed, hand gestures
would have been a greatly superior way of communicating. But why then
could spoken speech ever have originated, and been used instead of a
hand-gesture language? See here for more on this paradox.
Levinthal's Paradox.
The proteins inside our bodies have complex three dimensional shapes.
But in a DNA molecule that specifies the makeup of a protein, there
is only a specification of the sequence of amino acids that make up
the protein. Does a chain of amino acids somehow discover its three
dimensional shape through some type of trial and error, settling on
some shape with the lowest energy requirements? Not according to
Levinthal's paradox, which points out that finding such an answer
through trial and error would take many years – actually a length
of time longer than the age of the universe. Instead a newly
synthesized protein finds its characteristic 3D shape within a
few minutes. The wikipedia article on this paradox inaccurately tells us that "the solution to this paradox has been established by computational approaches to protein structure prediction." This is not at all correct -- even using databases and high-speed computers, scientists can't accurately predict the 3D shapes of complex proteins (and cells don't have such databases and computers).
The C-Value Paradox.
There is no relation between the complexity of an organism and the
size of its genome. Organisms much simpler than humans may have
genomes larger than the human genome. For example, some amphibians
and flowering plants have genomes 100 times larger than humans. Such
a fact is completely at odds with the idea that the genome or DNA of
an organism is some kind of blueprint for the organism.
The Natural Selection
Paradox. Attempting to account for biological innovations,
biologists offer as an explanation natural selection. But natural
selection, which requires the existence of life, cannot account for
one gigantic example of biological innovation: the origin of life
itself. In fact, it seems that natural selection cannot in general
explain any complex biological innovation, for the reason that such
an innovation will not produce any survival benefit or reproduction benefit until it has
already appeared.
Lewontin's Paradox. Only a certain number of random mutations will occur per 1,000 organisms. So Darwinism would seem to predict that genetic diversity should be proportional to the number of organisms in a population. So, for example, a species with billions of organisms (such as humans) should have many times more diversity in its gene pool than a species with only thousands of organisms (such as lions). But a recent study found this is not at all true, and that the degree of genetic diversity is pretty much the same for any species. This discrepancy is known as Lewontin's paradox.
Lewontin's Paradox. Only a certain number of random mutations will occur per 1,000 organisms. So Darwinism would seem to predict that genetic diversity should be proportional to the number of organisms in a population. So, for example, a species with billions of organisms (such as humans) should have many times more diversity in its gene pool than a species with only thousands of organisms (such as lions). But a recent study found this is not at all true, and that the degree of genetic diversity is pretty much the same for any species. This discrepancy is known as Lewontin's paradox.
The Paradox of Fast
Retrieval of Old Memories. Accounting for short-term memory is
relatively easy, since we can imagine that there is a kind of very
small “scratch pad” storing things you learned in the last few
minutes. A brain might be able to search that tiny little “scratch
pad” very quickly. But how is it we are able to instantly remember
information learned years ago, as contestants do so effectively on
the TV show Jeopardy? If you have millions of items that you
have learned, there would seem to be no way for you to instantly find
an exact location in the brain where a memory was stored, nor would
there be time within a few seconds to scan all of the items in
your long-term memory to find a particular memory.
The Homochirality
Paradox. Amino acids and sugars
can exist in two forms: what are called left-handed forms and
right-handed forms. The left-handed forms are kind of mirror images
of the right-handed forms. In earthly life amino acids are all
left-handed, and sugars needed for life are all right-handed. But
when these chemicals are created through laboratory processes, they
appear with left-handed versions and right-handed versions in equal
numbers. The odds against life getting started with all amino acids
left-handed and all sugars right-handed seem astronomical.
Paradoxes of the Origin
of Sex. Sexual reproduction
seems to offer no clear advantage over asexual reproduction. Also it
is hard to imagine any progression that could have led to functional sexual
organs that differ among males and females, as any change in the
anatomy of one gender would be useless unless complemented with reciprocal changes in the other gender (with there being only an
incredibly low chance of complementary random changes in both
male and female occurring within a few generations). For example, a mutation producing a little bit of a penis in an organism would not achieve fixation in the gene pool if it occurred when no organism in that species had any vagina; and vice versa.
The Cosmological Constant
paradox. In outer space a
vacuum is devoid of energy, as far as any astronaut is able to
measure. But when quantum physicists add up the quantum contributions
that should be made from what are called virtual particles, their
calculations tell them that ordinary space should be very dense
indeed – even denser than steel. This discrepancy between theory
and observation is still unexplained.
The Double-Slit
Paradox. The physical world
outside of our bodies is supposed to be something existing
independently of whether or not it is observed.. But one of the most
famous experiments of modern physics suggests this may not be true.
Experiments with passing light or electrons through a double slit
consistently show an effect in which the outcome is completely
different, depending on whether or not there is an observer.
Energy Conservation
Paradoxes. It is supposedly a
law of nature that mass-energy cannot be created or destroyed. This
law is called the law of the conservation of mass-energy. But it
seems that in the Big Bang, such a law must have been violated, with
a huge amount of mass-energy suddenly coming into existence.
Moreover, as the universe expands, more and more space comes into
existence. We have been told many times that the expansion is not an
expansion of matter within space, but an expansion of space itself.
But every volume of space has its own tiny amount of energy, caused
by a non-zero cosmological constant. This means that an expanding
universe must constantly be leading to a creation of new space, and new
mass-energy, with the total amount of mass-energy increasing every
second. But how can this be, if there is a law saying mass-energy
cannot be created or destroyed?
A web
site discusses this issue:
Excellent list of paradoxes.
ReplyDeleteThank you!