At the site www.biocosmology.earth we have four scientists (Stuart A. Kauffman, Lee Smolin, Marina Cortês and Andrew Liddle) offering some new thing they call "biocosmology." There is a link to a press release claiming that biocosmology will be "remagining life's place in the Cosmos." The page has a link to three scientific papers and a plain English article by one of the four scientists. One of the papers is entitled "Biocosmology: Towards the Birth of a New Science."
The article (by Marina Cortes, one of the four scientists) opens up with some grandiose talk, stating this:
"Biology. Cosmology. Biology and cosmology. Two fields that are normally thought to have nothing in common and nothing to teach each other. We — Stuart Kauffman, Andrew Liddle, Lee Smolin and I — are putting an end to this. By reformulating cosmological physics to include biological systems, we have developed a common currency with which their respective systems can be counted and compared. This ‘currency’ allows us to quantify the value of biologicals systems when set against the character cast of cosmology: galaxies, dark energy and black holes."
Wow, so is now someone going to do some quantification thing allowing us to tell the worth of a biological system such as a human being compared to the worth of, say, a black hole? Put me down as being very skeptical about the possibility of such a thing. My confidence is not increased when the article by Cortes states, "The new way of thinking makes sense of complex systems and their evolution by considering the number of possible future states those systems could take." For example, you don't explain how we got humans who can do philosophy by pondering the possible number of future states that humans can have.
Later in the article we have this strange claim:
"This means that life already surpassed the universe in complexity already 3.5 billion years ago, in the RNA world. As cosmologists we could never, in a billion years, have anticipated that such a number would stem from the evolution of living organisms. It took us three years of calculations, endlessly revising and double-checking our mathematical models, before we can now support the numbers we present today."
This doesn't make sense. Life is something in the universe. So how could it be that "life already surpassed the universe in complexity"? Should you not always be calculating everything known to exist in the universe if trying to calculate the universe's complexity? If you do that, then you cannot correctly be calculating that life has surpassed the universe in complexity. The article then ends up with this silly statement about our planet:
"A tiny, insignificant, barely there, corner of the Universe can create diversity and complexity that compares with that of everything else in the Universe. Through this, cosmology can contribute to the climate change debate by conveying an idea of what we are worth and are risking to lose."
The first sentence quoted above is unwise for two reasons: (1) very, very far from being insignificant, our planet is the only planet known to have any type of life; (2) because we do not understand the contents of the universe (whether there are other planets with life or life far more advanced than ours), we should not be making claims that we are as complex as anything else in the universe. As for the second sentence quoted above, it does not at all follow from the first statement. Why would people be more likely to fight global warming if they thought our planet was an "insignificant, barely there, corner of the Universe"? If people thought that, they might be more likely to do nothing about climate change.
One of the three scientific papers listed on the www.biocosmology.earth site is a paper co-authored by the four scientists, one entitled "The TAP Equation: evaluating combinatorial innovation." We read about some "model of combinatorial innovation" that includes some speculative equation that seems designed to make us think that wonderfully functional combinations of matter can occur accidentally. We read this: "It
is assumed that at each timestep, new objects can
be created from any combination of the existing objects, while some fraction of existing objects expire
(extinction or obsolescence)." Kind of like what would happen if all the alphabet letters in a house-sized vat of Alpha Bits were to suddenly leap up and accidentally form into a long, wise philosophical essay. We read, "The equation permits dramatically-explosive behaviour, much faster than exponential, because not
only do the combinatoric terms rapidly become vast,
but so too does the number of terms in the summation." It seems like what we have in the paper is a little math that is trying to encourage the "crumbs into castles" explanations that are most implausibly advanced by modern scientists. Such math work does not change the rules of probability calculation, which still prohibit such "crumbs into castles" combinations from having any appreciable chance of accidentally occurring.
Another of the three papers on the www.biocosmology.earth page is the paper here, entitled "Bicosmology: Biology from a Cosmological Perspective." Page 16 makes this very strange statement: " You exist in the Universe for and by means of your heart, liver, kidney." Speculating about what a person exists for is not science but philosophy or religion, and it makes no sense to say that a person exists for his heart, liver or kidney. On page 21 the paper attempts something that has proven to be notoriously difficult, which is to make a definition of life. We read this:
"Then our definition of life is:
A living organism is a Kantian Whole within a Type III system that is a non-equilbrium
self-reproducing system with a metabolism, an identity and a boundary, and which is
capable of open-ended evolution by heritable variation and selection or drift."
The definition is sloppy and incorrect. There are individual organisms such as microbes that are self-reproducing systems (for example, a single amoeba manages to split into two different organisms). But a human being is not a "self-reproducing system." It requires two humans to reproduce rather than just one. And the term "open-ended evolution by heritable variation and selection or drift" is a term used in connection with a species of organisms considered over multiple generations, not an individual organism. If you are going to try to define an organism, use terms that only apply to an organism; and if you are going to try to define a species, use terms that only apply to a species. Don't carelessly mix up characteristics of the two, and call that a definition of an organism (like someone mixing up a definition of a lifetime and an event, and calling that a definition of an event). Eager to spout some Darwinist phrases, our authors have made a mess of their definition of life.
At the web site telling us about biocosmology, there is a link to a press release. In that press release we read these incorrect claims:
"Nowhere in the one-hundred-year-old history of Cosmology does the
fact of the existence of life enter the story....When
we account for the Universe, life is nowhere on the ledger."
To the contrary, in the literature of cosmologists we have a great deal of discussion in which cosmologists ponder how the fundamental physical constants of the universe (and some early universe parameters such as the universe's expansion rate) seem astonishingly fine-tuned for the existence of life. Cosmologists and physicists wrote many papers on such a topic, often using the term "anthropic principle" in their discussion of it. Cosmologists and physicists such as John Barrow, Frank Tipler, Luke Barnes, Geraint F. Lewis and Lee Smolin wrote long books on such a topic (including Barrow and Tipler's opus The Anthropic Cosmological Principle and the book A Fortunate Universe by Barnes and Lewis). A search for "anthropic principle" on the Cornell physics paper server gives 176 matches, and a search for "multiverse" gives 225 matches, with most of those matches resulting from physicists and cosmologists paying very much attention to the life and its requirements. Many similar papers linking together cosmology and biology can be found using a search phrase of "fine-tuning." So it's not true at all that cosmologists have been ignoring biology for a hundred years. An example of one of the papers mentioned above is the excellent paper by Luke Barnes here, entitled "The Fine-Tuning of the Universe for Intelligent Life."
In the same press release announcing biocosmology, we read this:
"The new papers report the first, and stunning, evidence that this standard view of Cosmology is, to put it bluntly, wrong. We will have to think – and count - again. The way to demonstrate this claim is to count up how complex the total universe is without life, and to count up how complex is just our own planet Earth."
But it has long been very evident to careful students of biology that earthly life is vastly more complex than anything found in the non-biological universe. We don't need any new calculations to know that.
At first it might seem that there is no clear and obvious connection between cosmology and biology, making the prospects of such a thing as a science of "biocosmology" seem rather dim. Cosmology deals with the origin of the universe and the large scale structure and composition of the universe. Biology deals with something very different: living things. But there is one big thing that cosmology and biology have in common: in both issues of fine-tuning frequently come up.
The physical nature of our universe and its current habitability depend on fine-tuned fundamental constants of nature, such as a proton charge that is the very precise opposite of the electron charge. In biology we see fine-tuning everywhere, particularly in fine-tuned protein molecules. Your body has roughly 20,000 types of fine-tuned protein molecules, each of which requires a different "just right" configuration of hundreds of amino acid parts to allow that type of molecule to have a particular functional role in the grand scheme. The first priority of someone claiming to link together cosmology and biology might be to somehow link these two giant classes of fine-tuning, perhaps under a common explanatory framework. But our four scientists announcing a "biocosmology" program seemed to have done no such thing, and don't seem to be very cognizant of such a similarity in biology and cosmology.
Somewhere in the three scientific papers listed on the biocosmology web site there may be some great novel insight, but the average person will have difficulty finding such a thing. The fact that the biosphere is gigantically more complex than lifeless matter is an important insight, but it is one that was widely stated long before anyone coined the term "biocosmology."
It seems that biocosmology is a rather low-ambition affair. One of the four scientists involved (Lee Smolin) previously had much grander ambitions regarding a program that would link biology and cosmology. In a book entitled "The Life of the Cosmos," Smolin discussed a speculative theory he called cosmological natural selection, one he thought might explain the fine-tuning of our universe's fundamental constants. Speaking crudely, we can say that at the core of the theory was the idea that Mommy universes produce baby universes. Smolin was never clear as to how such reproduction could occur. Not very credibly, he tried to appeal to the strangeness of black holes to advance this speculation, kind of reminding us that very weird things happen around black holes.
Smolin's theory did not gain traction, partially because one of its predictions failed (as discussed here). In the three papers listed at the biocosmology site, we have only a single passing mention of this theory of cosmological natural selection. It seems that Smolin has now trimmed his sails quite a bit. Rather than offering a grand speculative theory as to why the fundamental constants of our universe are so fine-tuned, his biocosmology program now seems to be only much less grand statements, such as making the rather obvious claim that living things are far more complex than the nonliving parts of the universe.
One of the four biocosmology scientists (Stuart Kaufmann) made this prediction in 2003:
"...It's only going to be a matter of perhaps 10, 15, or 20 years until, somewhere in the marriage between biology and nanotechnology, we will make autonomous agents that will create chemical systems that reproduce themselves and do work cycles. This means that we have a technological revolution on our hands, because autonomous agents don't just sit and talk and pass information around. They can actually build things. The third thing is that this may be an adequate definition of life."
It's now roughly twenty years after such a statement, and no progress has been made in creating any living things from scratch. There is no realistic prospect that in the next 50 years scientists will be able to make a living thing from some combination of lifeless chemicals.
Perhaps we can best understand this word "biocosmology" if we think of it as a publicity device. Scientists face the big problem that the average scientific paper gets almost no readership. It has been estimated that the average scientific paper is read by only about 10 people. So how do you attract readership if you have a few scientific papers finding nothing very new or interesting? One way is to coin some neologism and announce the birth of a new science. So, for example, if you have three papers that discuss some astronomy and also deal with podiatry (the science of feet), you can announce the birth of a new science called "astropodiatry." The term "biocosmology" and hype about the birth of a new science will probably help these three papers attract higher-than average readership.
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