The online publication Aeon often gives us extremely misguided essays. Recently it had two consecutive essays in the philosophy of science, both of which pushed warped perspectives.
The first essay by philosopher David S. Oderberg was entitled "Life Makes Mistakes." It starts out by telling a baloney narrative seeming to suggest that biology is all about mistakes, but physics is all about getting things right. The essay begins by saying this:
"We forget where we parked. We misplace our keys. We misread instructions. We lose track of the time. We call people by the wrong name. ‘To err is human,’ as the English poet Alexander Pope wrote in his Essay on Criticism (1711). But it is not exclusively human. All animals do things that prevent them from surviving, reproducing, being safe, or being happy. All animals get things wrong. Think of a fish that takes the bait and accidentally bites into a metal hook. Think of dogs that forget where they have buried their bones, or frogs that aim their tongues in the wrong direction. Birds build flimsy nests. Whales beach themselves. Domestic hens try to hatch golf balls.
But not everything in the Universe can make mistakes. While living things navigate a world filled with biological errors, the fundamental building blocks of the cosmos adhere to the laws of physics with unwavering consistency. No one ever caught an electron erring, let alone an atom, a sodium ion, a lump of gold, a water droplet or a supernova. The objects that physicists study, the pure objects of physics, do not make mistakes. Instead, they follow ineluctable laws."
I don't see how any objective and thorough student of biology and biochemistry could ever advance so warped and misleading a narrative. The existence of large living things requires for physics, cosmology and astronomy to have done things correctly in a hundred different ways, as scholars of cosmic fine-tuning understand. The existence of a biosphere with many types of large living things requires biology to have done things correctly not merely in a hundred different ways but endless millions of different ways. For example, inside each of our bodies are 20,000+ complex inventions, the different types of protein molecules in our body. Each of these inventions is a very hard-to-achieve result that biology got just right. A full discussion of the things that had to go just right for large organisms to exist would require many volumes.
Oderberg's attempt to list mistakes in the world of biology is laughable. "We lose track of the time"? That is not a biological mistake, and we should hardly expect to be like clocks. "We call people by the wrong name"? That isn't any mistake of biology, and the ability of the average person to instantly name thousands of faces he might see on a computer screen is a wonder beyond the explanation of any neuroscientists. "Birds build flimsy nests"? What did he expect them to build, nests of steel? The nest-building ability of birds with tiny brains is actually an example of a great success of biology.
Examining a biosphere so very richly packed with so many millions of the most astonishing marvels of hard-to-achieve successes, and telling some warped narrative that biology is mainly mistakes, Oderberg sounds like some woman living in a palatial mansion, complaining about trivial mistakes in her vast residence, by saying something like this:
"My goodness, so many mistakes my servants are making! Why I looked under each of my 23 beds, and I found under one of them some dust had gathered! And the other day I was in one of my five kitchens, and I found a fork in the spoon tray! And not long ago I went to my third library room, and found that one of the 6000 books there had been not placed in the right book shelf. There was a novel in the Science book shelf!"
When he states misleadingly that "organisms are bundles of atoms," Oderberg sounds like he has no inkling at all of the oceanic levels of organization, component interdependence, and fine-tuned functional complexity in living organisms No, physically organisms are not "bundles of atoms" but enormously organized arrangements of matter. Atoms are organized into simple molecules such as amino acids, which are organized into many thousands of different types of very complex fine-tuned special large molecules called protein molecules, which are organized into protein complexes, which are organized into organelles, which are organized into cells, which are organized into tissues, which are organized into organs, which are organized into organ systems, which (along with a skeletal system) make up the main part of the physical structure of the human body. All of this biological organization cannot arise unless things go just right in a million different ways.
In Aeon magazine the essay by Oderberg is followed by an essay by associate professor Brian Klaas entitled "The Forces of Chance." Klaas attempts to convince us that we live in "a Universe defined by disorder, chance and chaos." That is quite the opposite of the truth. None of us could have existed if we lived in such a universe. The existence of creatures such as humans requires nature to have produced the most glorious type of order and oceanic levels of precise fine-tuned arrangement of matter, with the most organized organisms having a hierarchical arrangement consisting of many different levels of organization. The physical universe and the earthly biosphere is the opposite of disorder and chaos.
What would a universe look like if it were "defined by disorder, chance and chaos"? It would be a disorganized sea of particles floating about without any special arrangement of anything, like sand swirling about in a sandstorm. Such a universe would be lifeless and lightless, because there would not exist the very special fine-tuning of nature needed for radiant stars to exist. Such disorganization is the exact opposite of what we have on planet Earth.
"Computers don’t actually do anything. They don’t write, or play; they don’t even compute."
Nonsense. Of course computers actually do things, and they do actually compute. Oops, it seems that these days some professors in academia are making very bad mistakes. And many of those mistakes are ending up in Aeon magazine.
A recent article in Aeon magazine tried to sell us the Fake Physics of the Everett "many worlds" theory, the supremely irrational nonsense that there are an infinite number of copies of you in an infinity of parallel universes. The idea has zero basis in any observations, and all arguments for such an idea are examples of the worst type of reasoning. The fact that sites such as Aeon publish such rubbish is another sign of the degenerative spiral of materialism, which sometimes seems to grow ever-more-delusional and ever-more-deceptive in its witless attempts to dehumanize humans and rob human existence of its meaning.
The degenerative spiral of academia materialism
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