The
book “Universe in Creation” by Roy R. Gould has the pretentious
subtitle “A New Understanding of the Big Bang and the Emergence of
Life.” Given the incredibly mysterious nature of both of these
things, it would seem that no one has any business claiming to have
an understanding of them, and a more modest subtitle might have been
“A New Outlook on the Big Bang and the Emergence of Life.”
Gould
states on page 70, “The Big Bang is not a theory or a hypothesis or
guess” on the grounds that it “is a conclusion supported by many
lines of evidence.” This is not correct; the Big Bang theory is
indeed a theory. According to the Big Bang theory itself, it will
forever be impossible for us to observe the first 300,000 years of
the universe's history, because matter and energy were concentrated so
densely during those years that all light from the first 300,000 years must have been hopelessly
scattered. Not only is the Big Bang a theory, but according to the
theory itself the theory will forever be unverifiable, because we
cannot observe anything in the first 300,000 years of the universe's
history. Instead of “many lines of evidence” supporting the Big
Bang theory, there are basically only two: the existence of the
cosmic background radiation, and the red-shift of galaxies,
indicating the universe is expanding.
It
is conceivable but unlikely that we might one day find alternate
explanations of these two things, and if that were to happen, there
would no longer be any reason for believing in the Big Bang. A major
current problem with the Big Bang theory is that it does not
correctly predict the current distribution of matter and antimatter.
The Big Bang theory predicts that the universe should have equal
amounts of matter and antimatter (or nothing but pure energy), and
this is not at all the case. You can do a Google search for "baryon asymmetry" to read more on this topic. Another major problem with the Big Bang
theory is that it does not correctly predict the amount of lithium in
our universe. An article yesterday at phys.org says, “The standard
models of the Big Bang predict an abundance of Li7, the main lithium
isotope, three or four times more than that actually observed.”
There
doesn't seem to be anything particularly new in Gould's “new
understanding” of the Big Bang. The dust jacket of the book says
that the book will expound the idea that “the cosmos expands
inward, not outward,” but such an idea is barely mentioned in the
text. It seems to have something to do with the idea that the
universe is not expanding into empty space, but such a point has
already been made many times, so it's hardly new.
As
for the emergence of life, Gould advances the idea that life was kind
of foreordained by the universe's laws. There is nothing new about
this claim, it being a piece of wishful thinking that has been long
pushed by those trying to make it look like the origin of life was a
not-too-impressive event or a sure thing. Speaking of his 245-page
book, he says on page 144, “The remainder of this book presents the
chief lines of evidence that life really is written into the
universe's building plan.” Based on chapter 15 of the book
(discussed below), I conclude that when Gould speaks of the
universe's “design” or the “universe's building plan,” he
seems to be speaking merely of the universe's physics and physical
characteristics. The idea that life was foreordained by the
universe's laws and physics is not a correct one, based on the
universe's laws as we currently understand them. To clarify the
matter, we must distinguish between necessary conditions and
sufficient conditions.
A
necessary condition is something that must occur first for something
else to occur. A sufficient condition is something that will
guarantee that something will occur. For example, water and light
are necessary conditions for plant growth, but not a sufficient
condition. If we launch into space a sterile globe of water, that
globe will have two necessary conditions for plant growth (water and
light), but no plant growth will occur.
In
regard to the appearance of life, the universe's physics and physical
characteristics include many necessary conditions for the appearance
of life. There are, for example, quite a few conditions that have to
be just right for stable atoms to exist, for planets to exist, and
for lots of carbon and oxygen and water to exist. But none of these
things are anything like sufficient conditions for life to appear. We
know of nothing in the universe's physics or laws that is a
sufficient condition for life to appear. Given a planet with
suitable temperatures in which there is a mixture of both land and
water, we know of no reason at all why there should ever occur the
“organization explosion” required for life to form. The origin of
life seems to require a fantastically improbable arrangement of
matter. Based on what we currently know, such an arrangement should
be fantastically improbable, even given billions of years and billions of planets for random combinations of matter to occur.
Based
on what we now know about the universe's physics, it seems false to
make statements implying that life was foreordained by the universe's
physics. It could conceivably be that there are dramatic undiscovered
laws of nature that make the appearance of life probable, but we have
not discovered any such laws yet. On page 150 Gould states, “The
extreme stability of life's infrastructure suggests that, far from
being an 'accident,' life is a necessary part of the universe.”
This statement makes no more sense than claiming that the extreme
stability of your house in the woods suggests that the house was a
necessary part of the woods.
On
page 179 to page 180 Gould tells us about an experiment done by Jack
Szostak at Harvard. Gould claims that Szostak “generated one
trillion different protein molecules,” and found a handful of them
were capable of binding to the molecule ATP, a molecule that provides
energy in the body. Gould says, “These experiments provide further
evidence that life can arise naturally from the universe's initial
conditions.” There are two errors here. The first is that the
“universe's initial conditions” were the incredible density and
heat of the Big Bang, which were, of course, totally inhospitable to
life. Even if we amend Gould's statement to be simply “these
experiments provide further evidence that life can arise naturally,”
it is not a correct statement.
The
Szostak experiment Gould describes actually states that it started
out with a random generated library of 4 X 1014 sequences, which is
400 trillion. This library was then whittled this down to a library
of 6 trillion. The “ATP binding” functionality in question
(found in four of the random molecules) was not something terribly
complicated. According to the Szostak paper, it involved merely “a
core domain of 45 amino acids sufficient for ATP binding.” By
comparison, the median number of amino acids in a human protein is
about 400, and the median number of amino acids in a yeast protein is
about 400. Getting by chance a functional arrangement of 400 amino
acids is very many times more difficult than merely getting an ATP binding functionality.
The functionality described in the
Szostak paper was found in only about 1 in a hundred trillion random
molecules, about 1 in 1014.
Why
is such an experiment not at all “evidence that life can arise
naturally” as Gould claims? In order for a living thing to arise
from chemicals, you would need (among other things) many functional
proteins, more than 100 of them. You would need these to appear more-or-less simultaneously, to produce a cell capable of self-reproduction. It
would not at all be a case that if you got only one of these
incredibly unlikely “long shots” producing a protein, that such a
protein would stay around until you got the next one many years
later. Instead, you would have to get about 100 of these incredibly
unlikely long shots occurring at about the same time in the same little
space, so that a single cell had everything needed for
self-reproduction. We can roughly calculate the odds of that, using
a figure suggested by the Szostak paper of a 1 in 1014 figure for
the chance of one of the proteins being functional (although the
chance of each functional protein appearing by chance would almost
certainly be some vastly smaller probability such as 1 in 1025 or 1
in 1050). It's something like 1 in 1014 to the hundredth power,
which has a probability of something like 1 in 101400. We wouldn't
expect something that improbable to happen by chance even once in the
history of the universe.
Gould
states this on page 183:
Nature
says, Give me a trillion bacteria, and I'll guarantee that one of
them has resistance to your antibiotic. Give me a trillion
antibodies, and I'll guarantee that one of them fights the invader.
Give me a trillion protein molecules, and you can count on finding
the function you are looking for.
But
it is extremely misleading to insinuate that given a trillion random
protein molecules you'll get any function you're looking for. The
functionality of the more complex protein molecules is unlikely to be
found even once in a billion trillion random protein molecules. The
type of functionality discussed in the Szostak paper is some of the
simplest functionality that you could experiment with. Since “ATP
binding” is merely connecting to another molecule, you can compare
it to the simplicity of an electrical socket. There are countless
proteins that have functionality vastly more complex. Protein expert
Douglas Axe has estimated that the chance of getting a functional
protein from the set of all random proteins is 1 in 1074. This
a probability more than
1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000
times smaller than the “1 in a trillion” probability that Gould
is suggesting to his readers.
One
of the extremely complex protein molecules used by living things is
the hemoglobin molecule. It consists of two “alpha chains” of 141
amino acid residues each and two “beta chains” of 146 amino acid
residues each. Getting functionality that complex to appear by
chance would require some set of random protein molecules enormously
larger than the 400 trillion random proteins in the Szostak
experiment – probably
1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 or more random
protein molecules, more than the number of random protein molecules that would be produced in the history of our planet.
On
page 156 Gould says something about the origin of hemoglobin –
something goofy indeed. He states this:
But
in practice, nature selects for proteins that automatically fold into
a single shape, step by step, as they are manufactured by the cell.
An example is hemoglobin, the protein that carries oxygen in the
bloodstream.
This
type of speech is extremely erroneous. Natural selection simply means
differential reproduction, the superior reproduction that can result
once an organism gets some biological innovation. A trait or
characteristic can only be “selected for” through something like
natural selection if the trait or characteristic already exists in
one or more organisms of a population. We cannot explain the origin
of any complex biological innovation by saying that “nature
selected it” or “nature selected for it,” for there can be no
natural selection going on in regard to that biological innovation
until after it appeared. The sequence of events is:
- First a biological innovation appears.
- Then (if other conditions are right) that innovation may cause some organism to have a better survival rate or reproduction rate (natural selection).
Anyone
who inverts this sequence and suggests that “nature selected”
some complex biological innovation or that nature “selected for”
that complex biological innovation is making the elementary error of
speaking as if something was caused by a consequence of that thing.
It's the same same type of error a person commits when he says that
the dark thundercloud was caused by the summer downpour that appeared after the dark thundercloud.
The idea of "nature selecting for" hemoglobin molecules becomes all the more absurd when we consider that such molecules are only beneficial if there exists a very complex circulatory system that would have no reason to exist until there were already molecules such as hemoglobin molecules, the interdependence of the two being a kind of "which came first, the chicken or the egg" problem defying our attempts at explanation.
In Chapter 15 (entitled “Design Without a Designer?”) Gould asks, “Can simple rules – for example, the rules with which the universe was born – create something as complex as a human being?” Gould then discusses at length something that he thinks “bears on the question”: the Mandelbrot pattern. Mandelbrot patterns are beautiful patterns that can be produced by simple mathematical rules. But there are two reasons it is laughable to be citing Mandelbrot patterns to shore up the idea that “simple rules” can create something as complex as a human. The first reason is that Mandelbrot patterns are totally non-functional, and are created purely for beauty reasons. The second is that Mandelbrot patterns do not naturally exist in nature, but are produced only by graphical computer programs designed by humans.
In Chapter 15 (entitled “Design Without a Designer?”) Gould asks, “Can simple rules – for example, the rules with which the universe was born – create something as complex as a human being?” Gould then discusses at length something that he thinks “bears on the question”: the Mandelbrot pattern. Mandelbrot patterns are beautiful patterns that can be produced by simple mathematical rules. But there are two reasons it is laughable to be citing Mandelbrot patterns to shore up the idea that “simple rules” can create something as complex as a human. The first reason is that Mandelbrot patterns are totally non-functional, and are created purely for beauty reasons. The second is that Mandelbrot patterns do not naturally exist in nature, but are produced only by graphical computer programs designed by humans.
On
page 238 Gould tells us “there is every reason to believe that
within our lifetimes, we'll hear the historic announcement of the
first evidence for life on another world.” This is not at all
correct, because of the math I previously discussed. If the most
primitive living thing requires 100 proteins, and each has a
likelihood of no better than 1 in a hundred trillion of appearing,
the chance likelihood of life appearing in some particular spot is
less than 1 in 101400. Given such odds, and the failure of all SETI
radio searches so far, it is quite absurd for Gould to be saying
“there is every reason to believe that within our lifetimes, we'll
hear the historic announcement of the first evidence for life on
another world.” Certainly Gould has not cited any facts or made any
arguments justifying such optimism. Life might well exist all over
our galaxy and all over the universe, but only if there is some
dramatic teleological causal factor at play different from any Gould
has discussed.
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