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Richard Dawkins on
Intelligent Alien
Design
May 2008
Intelligent Alien Design? You can't be serious? Well actually I am. Richard
Dawkins, one of the world's most famous champions of Darwin's Theory of Evolution and a
staunch atheist, has recently been discussing the possibility that life on
Earth could be the result of advanced alien engineering!
Dawkins has said that he still believes that life most likely originated on
earth, but he has also said than an alien designed start is an "intriguing
possibility". Intelligent life, he has explained, could have evolved
elsewhere in the universe according to modern Darwinian theory, and this intelligent life could have
eventually learned to engineer new life, and an engineered seed could then have ended up
on earth and subsequently evolved into to all the life found here today.
Dawkins appears quite serious about the possibility of Intelligent Alien Design and has
mentioned it on a number of occasions. From a recent documentary called "Expelled"
we have:
BEN STEIN: What do you think is the possibility that Intelligent Design might
turn out to be the answer to some issues in genetics or in evolution.
DAWKINS: Well, it could come about in the following way. It could be that at
some earlier time, somewhere in the universe, a civilization evolved,
probably by some kind of Darwinian means, probably to a very high level of
technology, and designed a form of life that they seeded onto perhaps this
planet. Now, um, now that is a possibility, and an intriguing possibility.
And I suppose it's possible that you might find evidence for that if you
look at the details of biochemistry, molecular biology, you might find a
signature of some sort of designer.
Why on earth would someone who vehemently argues against the existence of
God by quoting Occam's Razor talk about space aliens designing and seeding
life on planet earth?! Well, Darwin's Theory, although still hugely popular
with the scientific masses and the educated public, is coming under
increasing attack. A few very eminent and very serious scientists are
arguing that the theory just doesn't work. Of course no one is talking about
the world being made in seven days by a God with a beard, it's just a great
big question mark. There are several major problems with Darwin's Evolution
but for the sake of brevity I will detail here only the most popular one.
Some notes on other problems can be found at this
footnote.
At the heart of Darwin's Theory is random change and natural selection.
Computer Scientists have been experimenting with "Genetic Algorithms" for a
long time now, and its clear they have enormous limitations. A computer
program to play chess, for example, looks several moves ahead and chooses
the move that will lead to the strongest position in the future. The power
of a chess playing computer is determined by the number of moves it can look
ahead. Any modern computer can beat the average human chess player, but it
took a massive supercomputer to beat Kasparov in 1997. As the computer looks
further into the future the number of combinations it must analyse increases
exponentially. Chess playing algorithms regularly make short term sacrifices
for longer term goals but Genetic Algorithms can not do this because they
are concerned only with the strength of the
next generation. Playing Chess is only one of the many problems Genetic
Algorithms can not solve. Most of the scientific resistance to evolution in the past has
come from mathematicians and engineers who have complained about this
problem. Biologists, on the other hand, tended to wave the theory through -
but recent scientific advances in microbiology have been changing that.
Since the discovery of DNA Biologists have been gradually learning that the
basic cellular unit underlying all known life on earth is enormously
complex. Far more complex than the latest Intel CPU for example. It's so
highly mechanised with concepts such as hardware and software that many at
the forefront of microbiology believe a genetic algorithm could not possibly
have produced it. Time does not help, its technical structure, they say,
simply exceeds what genetic algorithms are capable of ever producing.
Indeed so controversial has the theory of evolution now become that the famous philosopher Anthony
Flew, who for many decades flew the flag for atheism, recently declared
himself a believer in, well, something. In Feb 2008 (about 7 years after rumours of
his 'conversion' first surfaced) he said at interview:
FLEW: I think that the most impressive arguments for God’s existence are
those that are supported by recent scientific discoveries. I’ve never been
much impressed by the kalam cosmological argument, and I don’t think it has
gotten any stronger recently. However, I think the argument to Intelligent
Design is enormously stronger than it was when I first met it.
HABERMAS: So of the major theistic arguments, such as the cosmological,
teleological, moral, and ontological, the only really impressive ones that
you take to be decisive are the scientific forms of teleology? [teleology is
the philosophical study of design in nature]
FLEW: Absolutely. It seems to me that Richard Dawkins constantly overlooks
the fact that... the findings of more than fifty years of DNA research have
provided materials for a new and enormously powerful argument to design.
Dawkins, and many others, subsequently described poor old Flew as "senile"
(Moral: don't fight the establishment when you are over 70!).
Nevertheless, maybe Dawkins now feels his old friend Anthony Flew and others
have a pretty strong point on design. Indeed what else can he have meant by: "I suppose it's possible that you might find
evidence for that [Intelligent Design] if you look at the details of biochemistry, molecular
biology, you might find a signature of some sort of designer".
Dawkins didn't invent the Alien Design theory himself. During the 1960s the
molecular biologist Francis Crick who won the Nobel Prize for discovering
DNA in 1953 became concerned with the origins of life. Crick believed the DNA molecule could not have evolved and must have been
intelligently designed. In 1973 he, along with Leslie Orgel, proposed the
theory of "directed panspermia" which is the alien design and seeding of
Earthly life. Crick was criticised as a militant atheist whose inability to
explain the origin of life had driven him to make speculative and
unscientific conclusions. Crick dropped the theory and later said he may
have been overly pessimistic about the chances of abiogenesis on Earth.
Alien Design then mostly disappeared from the radar, now Dawkins appears
to be reviving it.
Dawkins once said Darwin enabled the intellectual atheist to sleep at night,
now the Alien Design theory can step into the breach. Even if Darwin
doesn't work on earth, Dawkins can now sleep soundly dreaming of godless
evolution elsewhere followed by alien design. What's more, no one can ever prove him wrong,
the goal posts, so
to speak, have been moved to outer space where the opposition can never
reach them. He could point out that today's earth scientists are
experimenting with making new life. If
godless evolution does work, intelligent engineered life seems an inevitable
outcome, and to that life it would appear as if god had made it. It's a
shame we have no evidence of aliens, advanced or otherwise. Still, they
could be so far away we haven't noticed, or they could have died out long ago. Nevertheless,
no matter how well these ideas would work in Hollywood, or how many books
they might sell, this is science fiction, not science fact.
This brings me perfectly to my favourite quote on evolution. It's from Michael
Denton's book "Evolution A Theory in Crisis" which, incidentally, is a
reasonable read on the subject (footnote). I love this quote
because, leaving aside the implications for the existence of God, it sums up
what I find so fascinating about the wrongness of Darwin's Theory- it's one of my
favourite topics- the
enormous irrationality of the human race.
The truth is that despite the prestige of evolutionary theory and the
tremendous intellectual effort directed towards reducing living systems to
the confines of Darwinian though, nature refuses to be imprisoned. In the
final analysis we still know very little about how new forms of life arise.
The “mystery of mysteries” – the origin of new beings on earth – is still as
largely enigmatic as when Darwin set sail on the Beagle.
Ultimately the Darwinian theory of Evolution is no more nor less than the
great cosmological myth of the twentieth century. Like the Genesis based
cosmology which it replaced, and like the creation myths of ancient man, it
satisfies the same deep psychological need for an all embracing explanation
for the origin of the world which has motivated all cosmogenic myth makes of
the past, from the shamans of primitive people to the ideologues of the
medieval church.
PS: Since this is a blog I have decided to write a humorous new
cosmogenic myth based on the Dawkins Alien Design theory at the
footnote below.
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Footnote - My New Cosmogenic Myth inspired by the Dawkins
Alien Design Theory
Once upon a time Aliens planted an engineered seed cell on earth which gave
rise to all life there. Now every living cell on earth contains a
communication system which allows the Aliens to control them from their
spaceship which remains hidden but still
close by. This communication system also accounts for the occasional incidences of telepathy known
to occur from time to time between some humans. The creatures the aliens
guided into existence on earth reflected
psychological forces. For example, the slow moving turtle sporting a totally
impractical huge shell on it's back was not designed for maximum efficiency.
Instead the turtle embodies a stubborn, grumpy and short sighted love of home and
solitude.
In a stroke of pure genius the Aliens
found a way to embody a number of different vital psychological forces even
within each species. By creating the active, or male, and passive, or
female, duality they captured a variety of ideas including power-love,
intellect-emotion, idealism-materialism, master-slave. The Aliens were
rightly proud of this invention because they themselves were sexless.
Eventually they developed a single supreme intelligent species for this
world which is of course the human. Because the inside and outside are all
linked, the humans naturally became less hairy and more fragile as their
minds developed. The active male naturally came with a phallus, and the
passive female with the opposite. These humans were in fact the only real
reason the Aliens embarked on this long process in the first place. Because
the humans had self awareness they could gradually break free of their lowly
nature and collective. Gradually the humans are moving from primitive tribal
people barely much more advanced than the monkeys that once gave birth to
them, toward hugely sophisticated and rational self aware spiritual beings
who transcend earthly instincts, emotions and sexual physicality. Today most
humans are still a very long way from that ultimate goal, but the pace will
pick up dramatically in the mid 21 Century when the Chinese begin making
wide scale changes to their offspring using genetic engineering. Once the
humans have completely perfected themselves and achieved total power over
life on earth they will have become like the Aliens themselves. They will
have completed their long quest to turn a hellish little world into a
paradise fits for gods. At this point they will then be ready to join their
equals up in space.
Until that time comes the Aliens keep themselves mostly hidden so the humans
have to find the path to enlightenment themselves. The humans masses have,
on the whole, almost no idea of what they are and where they are going.
However, a few lucky ones with superior powers enjoy a degree of contact.
The world the Aliens created for the humans was no paradise but rather a
"dog eat dog" Darwinian place. Pain, competition, constant change and
pragmatism would, the Aliens reasoned, provide for a much more effective
education. The human wretches of today often wonder why anything would
condemn them to such a sorry life, but like children at school, they can't
see the final outcome nor understand the timescales their parents work in.
At this early stage their little human lives are worth almost nothing to the
enlightened Aliens, only the endpoint of their evolution matters to them. An
eternal paradise will come to the humans one day, and the thousands of years
of struggle will pale into insignificance.
After a few tens of thousands of years the Aliens think we have made reasonable
progress, at least in the Western World, but our theories on evolution are,
they tell me, laughable :-)
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Footnote - Problems with Evolution
(*) Homogeneous Fossil Records (A modern take on Darwin's Missing Link). If
creature A evolved into creature B by the process of small random change
then, if we had a time machine, we could go back and examine the skeletons
to watch the evolutionary process occurring. It would be hard to classify
the skeletons exactly, some would be mostly A, some mostly B, some in
between etc. Of course we don't have any time machines and must therefore
rely on the hugely imperfect fossil record. However, even after all these
years the fossil record still looks completely homogeneous not
heterogeneous. Although we can see some changes occurring within some
species (eg the gradual development of the modern horse from the fox-sized,
forest-dwelling Hyracotherium) it's really not enough. The 1972 theory of
punctuated equilibrium argued that the degree of gradualism championed by
Charles Darwin was virtually nonexistent in the fossil record, and that
stasis dominates the history of most fossil species. The theory hypothesised
that evolutionary changes could occur fairly rapidly after, for example,
climatic change and finding the records from this relatively short
transitional time period is therefore less likely. Although this theory
improved the mathematics, the problem has not gone away and just keeps
getting worse as more and more homogeneous records turn up.
(*) Computer Scientists have found Genetic Algorithms Failing. Remember the
problem of finding the roots of n degree polynomials using numerical
algorithms? The algorithms get suck in local maxima/minima. Genetic
Algorithms have the same problem - all small changes have a negative impact.
If that makes no sense: Try to imagine a bridge developing under Darwin's
Theory. Until you can walk across the bridge the wasted structure detracts
rather than add to its success, yet the bridge is far too complex to be
built in a single generation. Now if Genetic Algorithms can't even build a
simple bridge how could they possible build the human eye? Biologists
sometimes struggle with this argument, but for many hard core scientists it
completely undermines the entire theory.
(*) Related to the question above but more popular with the life scientists:
All life on planet earth is proven to have evolved from a single cellular
ancestor (all cells have common physical and chemical systems and identical
molecular handedness which is a random property). Yet there is no
explanation of how such a hugely complex 'device' could have come into
existence. No simpler forms of life have ever been found but they would have
had to exist. This argument is currently getting a lot of attention because
in the past biologists just waved the original cell into existence with
stories about some lightning and some soup, but now they are really
marvelling at how absolutely mind bogglingly complex cells really are.
Forget all the rest, many say, how on earth could a random gradual change
have ever produced a device like this even in a zillion years? It's so
highly mechanised with concepts such as hardware and software that many find
it impossible to believe that it has not been 'designed'. You have to do a
bit of studying to appreciate the scale of this problem, but it's huge.
(*) Also related to the above some instinctive animal behaviour appears too
complex to have arisen according to random genetic mutation. Remember that
animal behaviour is determined mostly by instinct rather than by education.
From 'The Blind Watchmaker' by Dawkins we have this description of how
Beavers evolved to build big dams instinctively: "when mutation affects this
particular part of the brain's wiring it has a specific effect on behaviour.
It causes [perhaps] the beaver to hold its head higher out of the water
while swimming with a log in its jaws. This makes it less likely that mud
attached to the log will wash off during the journey. This increases the
stickiness of the log, which in turn means that, when the beaver thrusts it
into the dam, the log is more likely to stay there. This will tend to apply
to all logs placed by this beaver... makes the lodge more secure against
predators... increases number of offspring successfully raised... eventually
becomes the norm." With a wave of the hand he thus explains the evolution of
complex instinctive animal behaviour, but many find this improbable. Rupert
Sheldrake has suggested a novel theory by which behaviour could be passed
between generations without recourse to random genetic change. Although his
controversial theory solves this and the following point, it does not solve
all the problems here. I quite like this problem, but it's not that popular.
(*) Many biological structures must have evolved independently in different
species and yet show improbable similarities for a random process. The
famous example of the Octopus and Man having similar eyes but no common
sighted ancestor. This problem has been kicking around forever, but its a
hard one to analyse since biologists actually have so little idea about what
came from what or how.
(*) The failure to observe species change in the world today. Scientists
have tried to exploit the short life cycle of Drosophila to reproduce
evolution in laboratory but without success. There are more humans alive
today that every before in history, if a tiny number of Cro-Magnons could
evolve into modern humans in a few tens of thousands of years surely we
should see more mutation in our enormous population today. The changes we do
see today, eg people getting taller, are small and do not even appear to
have a link with natural selection. Likewise enormous populations of
domestic animals and breeding programs that encourage change have produced
lots of new types of dog but no proper species change. Real world examples
of evolution, such as London's Peppered Moths and Darwin's Finches, although
much celebrated, are unimpressive. These points have also faded into the
background as the battle over the original cell rages.
(*) Molecular Equidistance and the failure of biologists to build
Phylogenetic Trees etc (don't worry I won't even try and explain these
pretty recent and involved arguments)
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Footnote - "Evolution, A Theory in Crisis", 1985
Michael Denton
The classic book which really started the debate raging. It's still pretty
good but I think he misunderstand
the implications of pleiotropy - to me that's a powerful point in favour of
evolution. It's precisely our failure to build pleiotropic features that
hinders our progress in genetic algorithms and AI. I think the layman should read
one of two accessible pro-evolution books (eg by Dawkins) before Denton. Eg I already mentioned the "Blind
Watchmaker". Wiki is hopeless on evolution- you just get the old
fashioned consensus which is vehemently opposed to ID.
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