Very recently a new NASA boss swore an oath of office using not the Bible, but a copy of Carl Sagan's book "Pale Blue Dot." Carl Sagan was an astronomer who enjoyed great influence in the period between 1975 and 1995. In books, a weekly column and a television show (the original version of the Cosmos series), Sagan advanced rather dogmatically an ideology that was widely influential. His ideas are summarized in the visual below depicting stone tablets:
An early error occurs in the book's introduction, when Sagan claims that the human species "emerged a few million years ago in East Africa." There is no sound basis for claiming that the human species is even a tenth as old as that. The unique characteristic of the human species is its use of language and symbols. There is no evidence that language or symbols were used earlier than about 100,000 years ago.
We get some nonsense on page 31 when Sagan refers to a photograph taken by the Voyager spacecraft, showing planet Earth as a pale blue dot. Sagan says this:
"Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe, are challenged by this point of plane light...There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world."
Sagan's claims here make no sense. Why should a photograph of Earth from distant space change any person's opinion about how important humans are in the universe? Regardless of whether Earth is the only planet in the universe with intelligent life, or whether Earth is only one of countless such planets in the universe, planet Earth would look like a pale blue dot when photographed from millions of miles away.
The fact is that thus far the human species is the only known example of intelligent life in the universe, and no trace of life has been found elsewhere in space. So it was absurd for Sagan to refer to "the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe." He should have referred to such an idea as "the still entirely viable idea that we have some privileged position in the Universe," and noted that such an idea was subject to revision if future discoveries ruled it out.
Chapter 3 of the book ("The Great Demotions") is devoted to advancing a claim that there were "Great Demotions, downlifting experiences, demonstrations of our apparent insignificance, wounds that science has...delivered to human pride." Among the things Sagan lists as "Great Demotions" are the discovery that the sun is a common type of star, the discovery that our galaxy is a common type of galaxy, and the discovery that there are planets revolving around some other stars. But none of these events were actually "great demotions," because man's status in the universe is not demoted until someone discovers some other planet with beings as intelligent as we are.
Attempting to persuade us that we are not much more than chimps, Sagan says this:
"Human uniqueness has been exaggerated, sometimes grossly so. Chimps reason, are self-conscious, make tools, show devotion, and so on. Chimps and humans have 99.6 percent of their active genes in common."
When Darwinists such as Sagan talk this way, they are speaking in an extremely deceptive manner. The gulf between the minds of chimps and the minds of humans is an oceanic gulf. Chimps don't speak sentences, don't write books, don't build cities, and don't pray to a higher power. The claim Sagan made that "chimps and humans have 99.6 percent of their active genes in common" was untrue. A 2021 study found that "1.5% to 7% of the human genome is unique to Homo sapiens," something very much different from Sagan's claim. Another 2021 paper states this (referring to about a 4% difference between human genomes and chimpanzee genomes):
"The idea of ~ 99% similarity of genomes persisted for a long time, until 2005 when nearly complete initial sequencing results of both human [7] and chimpanzee (Pan troglodytes) [8] genomes became available. It was found that genome differences represented by single nucleotide alterations formed 1.23% of human DNA, whereas larger deletions and insertions constituted ~ 3% of our genome."
When you look at full proteins including their shapes, not just the amino acid building blocks specified in genes of DNA, it turns out that chimpanzees and humans are not so similar. The scientific paper here is entitled “Eighty percent of proteins are different between humans and chimpanzees.”
Around page 34 Sagan gives us a bungled discussion of the anthropic principle. In discussing such a matter, what's important is not to clarify whether or not something called the anthropic principle is true, but to clarify the facts that inspired discussions of such a topic. The facts are that our universe is extraordinarily sensitive to small changes in its laws and fundamental constants: change them just a tiny bit in any of a dozen places, and there could no longer exist humans and no longer exist long-lived sunlike stars. Sagan mentions none of the relevant facts that inspired discussion of such a principle, and he misstates the principle as the idea that "Change the laws and constants of Nature, if you could, and a very different universe may emerge -- in many cases, a universe incompatible with life." No, instead the idea is that universes compatible with intelligent life, long-lived stars and civilizations such as ours are only a microscopic fraction of all possible universes, like maybe 1 in a billion trillion quadrillion quintillion. Later Sagan says this:
"Moreover, we have no access to any of these putatitive alternative universes. We have no experimental method by which anthropic hypotheses may be tested."
As cosmologist Luke Barnes has pointed out, such claims are erroneous. There is an experimental method -- theoretical physics -- by which ideas about cosmic fine-tuning can be tested. A physicist can plug in alternate numbers into equations, and figure out what disastrous effects would occur if the numbers of nature were slightly changed.
Sagan's faulty discussion of cosmic fine-tuning is a warmup to a chapter entitled "A Universe Not Made for Us." But all the cosmic fine-tuning that inspired talk of the anthropic principle suggests rather the opposite: either that the universe was made for us, or was made for carbon-based civilized beings such as us. Sagan says "there is much in this Universe that appears to be design" but that the explanation is that "natural processes" such as "natural selection" can "extract order out of chaos, and deceive us into deducing purpose where there is none." So-called "natural selection" as described by biologists is not at all something that can "extract order out of chaos," but mainly something that within a time length of a few generations make tiny gradual changes in existing living organisms.
The limits of so-called natural selection might have been clear to Sagan if he had had a proper understanding of DNA. But Sagan had (or at least repeatedly stated) the delusional idea that DNA was a blueprint for making an organism. He repeatedly stated this utterly false idea in his books, TV shows and interviews, as I document in my posts here and here. In episode 11 of the original Cosmos TV series, Carl Sagan made the very fictional claim that DNA is "a complete library of instructions of how to make every part of you." DNA (where our genes exist) does not specify how to make any organ or any cell of a human, and does not even specify how to make either the organelles that are the building blocks of cells, or even the protein complexes that are the building blocks of such building blocks of cells. In Pale Blue Dot, Sagan stated his DNA delusion on page 53, when he stated, "We read the genetic language in which is written the diverse skills and propensities of every being on Earth." DNA does not specify the anatomy of any visible organism, does not specify the structure of any cells, and certainly does not specify any of the skills of any human being. DNA contains merely low-level chemical information such as which amino acids make up a protein. Most of our skills are acquired through education or experience.
In all of his voluminous writings, Sagan never seemed to realistically discuss a topic of central importance to his speculations: the likelihood of chance processes producing a living thing. What we got again and again from Sagan was "biological baby talk" that made it sound like all you needed for life to originate is an accumulation of the right ingredients. Sagan frequently misled us about the abundance of such chemical components, saying things like the statement below he made in an interview:
"The carbon-rich complex molecules that are essential for the kind of life we know about, are fantastically abundant. They litter the universe. We see them in asteroids, and comets, and the moons and the outer solar system, and even in the cool dark spaces between the stars. So the stuff of life is everywhere."
Similarly, in his best-selling book Cosmos, based on his TV series, made these false claims:
- " The abundance of these molecules suggests the stuff of life is everywhere."
- "The stuff of life, it turns out, can be very easily made."
"What we need is ... a world in which organic building blocks of life are being massively generated in our own time, a world we can go to seek our own beginnings. There is only one such world in the Solar System. That world is Titan, the big moon of Saturn."
The mass spectrometer of the Cassini probe detected about 20 organic molecules in the atmosphere of Titan (as described here), but did not detect any of the building blocks of life. It failed to find any amino acids or DNA components. Building blocks of life are not massively generated on Titan.
Sagan's Pale Blue Dot is mainly a sales job for more space exploration, but Sagan keeps reiterating atheistic themes here and there. On page 296 he says this:
"Our world does not seem to have been sculpted by a master craftsman. Here, too, there is no hint of a Universe made for us."
No hint of a Universe made for us? So how did scientists such as John Barrow and Frank Tipler and Paul Davies and Luke Barnes fill up books (including one very long book) discussing all of the many ways in which the universe seems to be fine-tuned to allow creatures such as us to exist? Any why were physicists so bothered by all of the many indications that our universe is fine-tuned that physicists resorted to the desperate measure of postulating some multiverse infinity of universes, to try and sweep under the rug all such hints? The hints of a universe made for us or beings like us must have been numerous and very weighty.
In Chapter 20, Sagan attempts to argue for two of the main tenets of the Sagan Creed, the idea that our galaxy has something like a million other civilizations living on other planets, and the idea that we should be trying hard to communicate with such civilizations by using radio antennas (SETI). There have been many such attempts, which have searched very many stars and galaxies, and all have failed. Such searches have found no evidence of any extraterrestrial civilizations.
But Sagan uses a little clumsy statistical sleight-of-hand to try and persuade us that maybe he or his friends got something other than interstellar noise. Sounding like some cloud watcher who gets excited one out of 500 cloud-watching sessions by some shape he sees in the clouds, Sagan talks about "goose bumps" he got while analyzing some of the data, and how he got a chill down his spine. The reasoning is extremely slight: that 8 out of 11 radio blips he identified as "candidate signals" came from the galactic plane. That's hardly very unlikely even if only natural radio sources were the source. We then have this piece of laughable Sagan-speak:
"Let's imagine that all of our surviving events are in fact due to radio beacons of other civilizations. Then we can estimate -- from how little time we've spent watching each piece of sky -- how many such transmitters there are in the entire Milky Way. The answer is something approaching a million."
Talk about your funny math. Sagan has conjured up his favorite "number of aliens" estimate of a million galactic civilizations (an estimate he gave many times over many years), by virtue of having made the little starting assumption that most of his non-repeating never-deciphered short-lived radio blips were from an extraterrestrial civilization. It's kind of like a line of reasoning used by a palm reader trying to prove the truth of palmistry, a line of reasoning that starts out with the premise "Let us suppose that lines in your hand really do foretell what kind of life you will have."
There was never any good basis for Sagan's frequent claims that there are about a million other civilizations in our galaxies. It was always just a number Sagan had arbitrarily "picked out of a hat." A realistic discussion of the vast amount of organization and complexity in even the simplest living cell will lead you to the conclusion that unless something very special occurs that scientists don't understand, something resembling purposeful agency, we should expect life to never appear by chance anywhere else in the universe. But we got no such realistic discussions of biological complexity and biological organization from Sagan, who did not discuss things such as the fact that our bodies contain more than 20,000 types of complex inventions (the more than 20,000 different types of protein molecules in our body that each have an average of about 400 well-arranged parts), and the fact that our bodies are built of cells comparable to large factories in their complexity. Pale Blue Dot does not even use the word "cell," and has no mention of the complexity of protein molecules. Sagan kept trying to convince us we are kind of just bags of "star stuff" or "the stuff of life," phrases he kept using over and over again. The last thing he wanted us to realize is that we are arrangements of matter with engineering more impressive than the engineering of a 747 aircraft.
A few years after Pale Blue Dot was written, a scientist named Bruce Alberts gave us the real scoop in his widely-cited paper "The Cell as a Collection of Protein Machines: Preparing the Next Generation of Molecular Biologists":
"We have always underestimated cells. Undoubtedly we still do today...The chemistry that makes life possible is much more elaborate and sophisticated than anything we students had ever considered...Proteins make up most of the dry mass of a cell. But instead of a cell dominated by randomly colliding individual protein molecules, we now know that nearly every major process in a cell is carried out by assemblies of 10 or more protein molecules. And, as it carries out its biological functions, each of these protein assemblies interacts with several other large complexes of proteins. Indeed, the entire cell can be viewed as a factory that contains an elaborate network of interlocking assembly lines, each of which is composed of a set of large protein machines....Why do we call the large protein assemblies that underlie cell function protein machines? Precisely because, like the machines invented by humans to deal efficiently with the macroscopic world, these protein assemblies contain highly coordinated moving parts....We have also come to realize that protein assemblies can be enormously complex. Consider for example the spliceosome. Composed of 5 small nuclear RNAs (snRNAs) and more than 50 proteins, this machine is thought to catalyze an ordered sequence of more than 10 RNA rearrangements as it removes an intron from an RNA transcript....Given the ubiquity of protein machines in biology, we should be seriously attempting a comparative analysis of all of the known machines, with the aim of classifying them into types and deriving some general principles for future analyses. Some of the methodologies that have been derived by the engineers who analyze the machines of our common experience are likely to be relevant."
No comments:
Post a Comment