Yuri Milner is a super-rich scientist, entrepreneur and investor who has donated millions to various projects such as the Breakthrough Prize and the Breakthrough Listen project, one of many SETI projects searching for radio signals for extraterrestrial civilizations. Milner has published a philosophical manifesto he calls the Eureka Manifesto. You can access it by reaching the page here.
You would think that someone with so many millions would be able to put up a bug-free web site that made it real easy for people to read his manifesto. But when I go to the site using a PC, I experience some difficulties. The manifesto is introduced on a short page with a Read button at the bottom. Clicking on that button takes me to a blank page with nothing to read.
There is a Download button that takes me to a page that offers four download choices. Clicking on PDF, I do not get sent to a web page of his site displaying a PDF file I can read. All that has gone on is that a PDF file has been downloaded to my Documents folder. If I remember to look at some list I can get in the top right corner of my Chrome browser, I can read that download. But how many potential readers, we may wonder, simply give up in frustration?
Let's look at some of the mistakes and myths in Milner's Eureka Manifesto.
Page 20: "The journey from the little sphere to the mind that imagines it – and beyond – is the story of everything. The Universal Story. The beats of this story are a series of 'phase transitions': critical changes of state, as when water freezes to ice. These transitions shaped order out of chaos."
Here we have an introduction to the utterly lame explanation attempts that Milner will give. He will be attempting to explain great leaps of biological organization and mental capabilities by appealing to the physics concept of "phase transitions." A phase transition is a change of state like what goes on when water freezes or ice melts. It makes no sense to try to explain great leaps of biological organization by describing them as phase transitions. Frozen water is not very more impressively organized than liquid water; and neither liquid water nor frozen water have any functional information. So you don't do anything to credibly explain some great biological transition requiring a huge amount of new functional information (such as the transition from non-life to life) and a huge leap in organization by saying that it was a phase transition.
Page 22: "And now, on the third planet out, a new phase transition begins. Deep in an ocean or on some ancient shore, spiral-shaped ribbons of molecules, sealed inside bubbles, have found a way to copy themselves. As the bubbles – the first cells – move through their environment, they do something that’s never been done before, possibly anywhere in the Universe. Reacting to the conditions around them, absorbing nutrients and avoiding hazards, they develop an ability to model the outside world."
We have here neither an accurate description of the first living cell nor a credible description of how it could have originated. The language is very misleading language making a self-reproducing cell sound billions of times simpler than it is. And a cell does not have an ability to model the outside world. A self-reproducing cell is something exponentially more complex than a mere bubble with DNA. Even the simplest self-reproducing cell requires hundreds of types of protein molecules, each its own separate complex invention. The origin of something that complex would be something hugely too complicated to be described as anything like any of the "phase transitions" known to physicists.
Milner is a physicist. I could make a joke here along the lines of: "To a carpenter, everything is a hammer or a nail; and to a physicist everything is a phase transition."
Page 23: "The cell, tiny and simple as it is, holds a sliver of knowledge."
Even the simplest self-reproducing cell is something of very great functional complexity, not something "simple." The amount of genetic information required to have the simplest self-reproducing cell is equal to the functional information in about 100 pages of text, each having hundreds of words. That is much more than "a sliver of knowledge."
Page 23: "For over a billion years, there are only single cells. Then comes a leap in complexity – another phase transition: one cell gets inside another and joins forces with it."
This passage refers to the origin of eukaryotic cells, vastly more complex than the simplest type of cells, called prokaryotic cells. Darwinists and materialists have no credible story to explain such a huge leap in complexity, which has been compared in the leap in complexity of making an upgrade from a tiny shack to the mansion of a multi-millionaire such as Milner. Such a huge leap forward in organization and information cannot be credibly explained by the idea that "one cell gets inside another."
Page 23: "Colonies of cells begin to cohere, acting as single organisms."
Referring to the origin of multicellular life, this is the most vacuous hand-waving. The origin of visible multicellular organisms is something trillions of times too hard to explain by such "the cells started to stick together" explanation. Currently biologists have no credible explanation for how there could have occurred a transition from microscopic life to large visible organisms with complex anatomy.
Page 23: "Organisms comprising trillions of cells develop sensory organs and nervous systems, then eventually brains – organs that can build and update more sophisticated models and select the ones with the best predictions."
We have here here no explanation as to how such wonders of biological innovation could have occurred. There is no evidence that brains "can build and update more sophisticated models and select the ones with the best predictions." We merely know that humans can create models that predict things. No neuroscientist has a credible explanation of how a brain could create such models or make predictions.
Page 23: "The next phase transition occurs when intelligent animals find ways to communicate, spreading models beyond the individual brain."
The reference is to the origin of language, something that Darwinists have no credible explanation for. Describing it as a "phase transition" does nothing to explain it.
Page 30: "The simplest cell already had part of the Story to tell, written in its genes. A tiny part, true – a fragment of a sentence, describing a droplet of ocean on a primeval planet. But as genes built brains and brains built cultures and cultures built a shared store of knowledge, more and more fragments became legible."
The description of the information content in the simplest cell is wrong by a factor of about 10,000 times. The amount of functional information in the simplest cell is equivalent to about the information content in a book of 100 pages -- vastly more than "a fragment of a sentence." The claim that "genes built brains" is false. As discussed here, DNA and its genes do not specify how to make any human organ, do not specify how to make up any of the tissues that make up organs, do not specify how to make up any of the cells that make up tissues, do not specify how to make up any of the organelles that make up such cells, and do not specify how to make up any of the protein complexes that are crucial to the construction and maintenance of cells.
Page 31: "In the dance of chance and time, we found ourselves in a form that can explore and understand. This is our gift. Our precious birthright. To be awake. To have minds formed from matter. To look out at the world and understand."
Chance and time are not credible explanations for human bodies, and nothing Milner has said bears any resemblance to a credible explanation for human bodies or any type of simpler life. A mind is an immaterial thing, and is not "formed from matter."
Page 32: "We have the opportunity to embody that extraordinary transformation, to embrace it and carry it forward into the future. To stay awake. To explore and understand our Universe. That means all of us."
Because of all of the many ocean-sized shortfalls in our current understanding of matter, life and mind, it is overconfidence to claim that we currently can "understand our universe."
Page 32: "Without our commitment to the Mission, the Universe could close its eyes and drift back into sleep."
This statement makes no sense at all.
Page 36: "It seems inevitable that evolution will, over time, create life, minds, and civilizations that will keep expanding the scope of their discoveries."
Nothing in the manifesto justifies such a statement, nor does anything in the explanation of Darwinists or materialists. Darwinian evolution cannot occur until life exists, so evolution does not "create life" from nonlife. Nor does evolution create minds or civilizations. Human minds are not credibly explained by human brains, for reasons very abundantly discussed at my site here. Human minds are not credibly explained by the theory of evolution by so-called natural selection. This shortfall was explained at length by the co-founder of that theory (Alfred Russel Wallace) in his essay "The Limits of Natural Selection as Applied to Man," which you can read here and here. Milner donated many millions to the Breakthrough Listen project, which spent quite a few years searching thousands of stars looking for signs of extraterrestrial life. No such signs were found. This is the opposite of what we would expect to happen if "it seems inevitable that evolution will, over time, create life, minds, and civilizations."
Page 37: "Let’s step back to that moment on primeval Earth when two cells merged together. That union, which was the genesis of all complex life, came most likely over a billion years after the appearance of the first cells."
This is a reference to the origin of eukaryotic cells, things a million times too complex and organized to be explained by some mere story that "two cells merged together." The claim that the origin of eukaryotic cells was "the genesis of all complex life" is hugely mistaken. Even the simplest type of cell (a prokaryotic cell) is an enormously complex system.
Page 46: "Jill Tarter, a pioneer in the search for intelligent life, famously compared the searches undertaken in the decades since the Green Bank conference to dipping a single glass into the ocean and wondering why you don’t catch a fish."
The history of SETI searches is by now very extensive, with very many thousands of observation hours. The entire sky has been searched multiple times by large expensive projects. So it is very misleading when SETI enthusiasts try to make us think that the search for radio signals has only just begun. To the contrary, it has been well-funded for more than 50 years. You can read my post here for a list of many of the main searches that have occurred.
Page 53: "We now have a glimpse of the bounty of worlds the Universe has to offer. Even beyond the Earth-like planets identified so far, we know there are super-Earths, water worlds, probably planets made of diamond."
Here the manifesto incorrectly claims that there have been Earth-like planets discovered. No such discovery ever occurred. A planet should never be called Earth-like unless life has been discovered on it, and life has not been discovered on any other planet.
Page 68:
On this page we have a Plan of Action which consists of these items:
- "invest resources into fundamental science and space exploration
- enable artificial intelligence to drive scientific progress
- celebrate scientists as heroes
- focus education on the universal story and use the power of art to tell it
- spark a new enlightenment in which everyone can contribute to a shared culture of knowledge"
In the culture of Darwinist materialism there has been too much deceit and conceit. The deceit occurred through the nearly 100 types of deception I list in my post here. The conceit occurred when people went ego-tripping by wrongly crowning themselves as Grand Lords of Explanation, without ever deserving such a crown.
Page 68 -- 69: "There is ultimately only one field of inquiry: the Universal Story, which contains the history of our Universe, our planet, and our civilization, including the realm of the social sciences and humanities."
This is very bad nonsense. There are very many fields of inquiry. If Milner had studied more of these fields of inquiry, he might understand some of the mistakes he has made in his manifesto.
Based on what I read about him on wikipedia.org, Milner seems like a fine fellow who is very well-meaning and generous. It's a shame that his manifesto seems lacking in original and noteworthy thought. He sounds like someone who is much better at technological innovation and making money and philanthropy than at philosophical innovation or philosophical insight. A second effort by him might well yield much better results. Good original work in philosophy related to origins or grand questions tends to require diligent effort over long periods of time, along with a willingness to make a deep study of many fields of inquiry.
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