Update from Eric with New Review and Upcoming Talks

We are back. I apologize to our readers that this blog has been dormant for several months. We-I have been involved in lectures, book readings and research.
*In January Dorion and I spoke at a day-long session at the National Sigma Xi meeting. The organizers gave us two whole sessions to talk about thermodynamics and life and to explore some of the philosophical implications of our work. The room was packed and there was lots of lively discussion.

* I will be talking at the Harvard School of Design in Cambridge on the 21st of April [Thermodynamics, Ecosystems and Successions] and at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution on the 24th of April [Thermodynamics and Life]. I will post the places and times when I get that information. The talks are open to the public.


* Presently I am working on three research projects. Any one interested in these subjects please share your thoughts with me on this blog. I will make postings on these subjects from time to time.


A. Can ecological processes be mapped on evolutionary trends? Are ecological attributes carried forward into evolutionary processes (Hutchinson)?
B. Are there trends in evolution? Or is it the stochastic random process attributed to Gould and Mayr? I see trends i.e. species increases, and increases in metabolic intensity over time.
C. I plan to drive a stake in the heart of the premise that dissipative systems operate at a state of maximum entropy production. This idea has been suggested by climate modelers who say their models run better when one assumes maximum entropy production. They claim it is a universal principle. As one thermodynamist said to me "They have invented a new law in physics". Biological systems operate optimally at a minimum basal metabolism rate. Ecosystems do the same thing. I already have several collaborators working with me on this subject.

* In the coming weeks and months I plan to post an in depth rebuttal to Doyne Farmer's review of our book that appeared in the 4 August 2005 issue of Nature. I will post his review in the next week. The review is like drinking warm flat beer.
* In the meantime, here is a little review that came out of a web site I have never seen, Science a Go Go. With a web name like that, it is easy to see why I have not read their stuff before. Actually it is a good science review site. It is like an abbreviated web-based New Scientist. They read the book and liked it...


Into the Cool is a book that weaves its way through a forest of scientific literature, providing a multidisciplinary account of the Second Law of Thermodynamics and its prevalence and relevance in everyday life. Eric D. Schneider, a former atmospheric scientist who has worked in thermodynamics for over twenty years, and Dorion Sagan, coauthor of Acquiring Genomes and Up from Dragons, thoroughly explore chaos and equilibrium within diverse systems such as politics, economics, and even human health. The second law of thermodynamics is used in Into the Cool to explain the laws governing systems like evolution, ecology, economics, and the universe itself. Using entropy to explain the dynamics of such systems, Schneider and Sagan show us the relationship between hot and cold, meteorological pressure systems and fluctuating market prices. The book is an eye-opener, an extraordinary glimpse at what might otherwise seem mundane phenomena to the casual observer. Those in search of newfound insight should know, however, that they might need to lock themselves away in a quiet room in order to fully appreciate the complex subject matter. Despite its complexity, Into the Cool is deftly written, and an excellent initiation for anyone interested in the underlying laws of energy common to all complex systems.

--
Eric D. Schneider

Finding the Sun: Toward a Lower Higher Power

No idea causes greater philosophical consternation than that of the purpose of life: Why are we here?

Many stories have been proffered from the religious front to explain this all but inexplicable puzzle. We are here because God put us here. But why did He put us here? In order to glorify His own image. In order to test us. Those are rough Christian answers. But why did He put us in such a screwed up situation? Surely He could have done better, unless He has a bizarre and malevolent sense of humor.

Which perhaps He does. (Or She. Or, if we want to get science-fictiony about it, It.) Acclaimed author Vladimir Nabokov was not a Christian--he criticized Gogol for it--but he did have a notion of a whimsical author-like Creator making trouble for creatues that could not explain themselves by science alone. In his autobiography Speak, Memory (which was to be called Speak, Mnemosyne, but that title was nixed by editors who considered it too difficult for the normal reader), Nabokov writes of the mysteries of mimicry by butterflies whose wings exemplify artistic perfection. "Consider the imitation of oozing poison by bubblelike macules on a wing (complete with pseudo-refaraction) or by glossy yellow knobs on a chrysalis ("Don t eat me--I have already been squashed, sampled and rejected"). Consider the tricks of an acrobatic caterpillar (of the Lobster Moth) which in infancy looks like bird s dung, but after molting develops scrabbly hymenopteroid appendages and baroque characteristics, allowing the extraordinary fellow to play two parts at once (like the actor in Oriental shows who becomes a pair of intertwisted wrestlers): that of a writhing larva and that of a big ant seemingly harrowing it. When a certain moth resembles a certain wasp in shape and color, it also walks and moves its antennae in a waspish, unmothlike manner. When a butterfly has to look like a leaf, not only are all the details of a leaf beautifully rendered but markings mimicking grub-bored holes are generously thrown in. Natural selection, in the Darwinian sense, could not explain the miraculous coincidence of imitative aspect and imitative behavior, nor could one appeal to the theory of the struggle for life when a protective device was carried to a point of mimetic subtlety, exuberance, and luxury far in excess of a predator s power of appreciation. I discovered in nature the nonutilitarian delights that I sought in art. Both were a form of magic, both were a game of intricate enchantment and deception."

Although hardly the official version, Nabokov s trickster creator elegantly accounts for many of the facts. The Gnostic and Hindu solutions are also more logical than the official local version but still not quite satisfactory. The Gnostic sect, considered heretical by the Church fathers even though its sharp divide between divine spirit and debased flesh left its mark on the development of Christianity, considered creation to be a botched job. This is much more in accord with the facts than the Panglossian notion that we live in the best of all possible worlds. Of course, in the Christian story badness can be laid at the doorstep of the Devil--but then how is God so all-powerful? The Gnostic position is more consistent. The perfect God did not create this world. Rather the Demiurge did it. The Demiurge is a subsidiary creator. The Gnostics add some nice touches like the purpose of life is for the divine spark within each of us to ascend upwards back through layers of terror overruled by the planetary archons, up to return to its original home in the seventh heaven of fixed stars. A nice story, but a little dated since we know now that the fixed stars are not fixed and that we are not at the center of the universe surrounded by seven spheres. (Gnostic cosmology arose before the outer planets had been discovered.) Seventh heaven will have to wait.

Hinduism suggests the purpose of life is to amuse the Godhead, who would otherwise be confined to eternal boredom. Like the cartoon says about Heaven, make sure to bring a magazine.

Given 20th century grappling with genocides, totalitarian regimes, nuclear explosions, prison camps and the rest, it is easy to see why many would give up on the idea of a divine purpose. The fashionable French existentialists followed German philosophers Heidegger (who never renounced his brief fling with Nazism) and Nietzsche, who said God is dead but that the news has not reached man. Into the vacuum created by the absence of divine design rushed Dadaism, nihilism, surrealism and allied artistic and philosophical movements, movements which substituted human-centered notions of play and dream and void for coherent cosmic purpose. The philosopher Aristotle had divided causes up into material, efficient, formal, and final but scientists, despairing of the idea of a deity running the show, dispensed with all but the mechanical explanations of the efficient cause. It was enough to study the mechanism of things (which ultimately attested to the craftiness of the creator, but he could no longer be considered a hands-on creator). Why ask the question why when you couldn t find out? Better to bask in the operational research program and potential discoveries of how. Thus Aristotle, who had been a favorite of the Church fathers, went out of favor. Questions of why things were could only be answered in terms of how they were unless scientists wished to risk being considered unscientific.

After Darwin, the great question of why does life exist was answered by the tautology, or question-containing answer, of "to reproduce" or "to produce offspring." Life existed as life. It did not make sense, scientifically, to ask why it existed outside the parameters of its origins, operations, and development.

Nonetheless, evolutionary theorists, as Stephen Jay Gould points out, were at least a little closer to Aristotle s multipartite division of cause than most scientists. That is because when they asked what is the purpose of a given part of an organism, what is its function, the answer was twofold: the efficient cause, to use Aristotle s language, was stated in terms of physiology, while the final cause was given in terms of evolution. For example, it is clear that the purpose of the heart, physiologically, is to pump the blood. That is why it exists. But before the anxious theologian could jump in and say "aha! So there is a Creator," the evolutionist would say no, the seemingly designed structure has resulted from the fact that nonfunctioning organisms perished. In other words biology gives a dual explanation of how an organ works, its functioning via cell structure, nutrients, bodily mechanisms etc., and its value to the organism that has it versus those that didn t, and perished. In the case of structures that have no obvious function, evolutionists often explain them with reference to ancestors living under different conditions in which the organs were of use. The wings of flightless penguins, for example, may point back to less blubbery birds that flew. Indeed, such reasoning is one of the primary evidences for evolution, organismic change over time.

All well and good, but what of the purpose not of the organ--the breathing lung, the calculating brain, the detoxifying liver--but the organism itself? We can understand animal organs in terms of evolution and adaptive value, but can we understand the organism similarly?

Many scientists would have a problem with this, and it is here where we glean the frightfulness for the working evolutionist of the question of why life exists. But they shouldn t be frightened. For, as we shall see, the question of life s existence can be approached scientifically. The same is true of an allied question, that of whether evolution shows any clear direction over time. The orthodox neoDarwinian position is that evolution is essentially random. Great modern evolutionists who differ on many fine points--Ernst Mayr, Stephen Jay Gould, and Richard Dawkins--all agree that the evolution is basically stochastic, that is, random.

And yet the evidence is to the contrary. Many trends are observable over the course of Earth s history: increase in number of individuals, species, and taxa; expansion of the area inhabited by life; increase in the respiration efficiency (measured by living representatives of animal taxa ordered by appearance in the fossil record); increase of cell types; increase in capacity for storage of energy, food, and information; and, last but not least, increase in the number of chemical elements involved in the process of life as it has expanded and evolved over Earth s surface through time. Moreover, with the appearance of technically capable human beings, rare radioactive isotopes never before seen in this part of the solar system, have made a brief appearance on the planetary stage. Although it is not true, for example, that there has been an increase in brain size or brain-to-body ratio in all lineages of animals over time, the many measurable trends towards increasing organization and complexity suggest that something a little less cavalier than mere evolutionary "randomness" is going on.

So, what is it?

It turns out that the question of the purpose, or function, of an organism s whole body is related to that of the observed evolutionary trends.* The functioning of the whole organism connects to the observation of evolutionary trends via the science of energy flow. The key observation of this science, thermodynamics, is the second law. The second law of thermodynamics, which has wrongly been argued to conflict with life, says quite simply that energy disperses. You may have thought that the second law of thermodynamics says something about entropy rising, or disorder. Well, it does, but not exactly. The use of the terms entropy and disorder have been bandied about in many confusing ways. But the spreading of energy also leads to what we would call ordered or organized systems. Examples include hexagonal structures called Bénard cells, whirlpools and hurricanes, and complex chemical reactions of which life, of course, is a most fascinating example. In each case the complex structure arises in an area of energy flow, and represents nature s "attempt" to follow its second-law mandate of energy dispersal. I put "attempt" in quotes because obviously it is considered an example of the pathetic fallacy, silly personification à la Disney or nature-worshipping heathens, the imputing of an active will or animate spirit to nature and its inanimate operations.
And yet the universal tendency for energy to disperse--a kind of proto-animate directionality--is as omnipotent and important in terms of nature s laws as is Newton s law of gravity. In the words of Sir Arthur Eddington,

If someone points out to you that your pet theory of the universe is in disagreement with Maxwell s equations--then so much the worse for Maxwell s equations. If it is found to be contradicted by observation--well, these experimentalists do bungle things sometimes. But if your theory is found to be against the second law of thermodynamics I can give you no hope; there is nothing for it but to collapse in deepest humiliation.

The beginning of the universe itself obeys the dictates of energy dispersal, with the spreading of that inconceivable pinpoint of energy we locate at the origin as the big bang. Another way of getting a handle on the second law is to say that nature abhors a gradient. A gradient is a difference across a distance. The difference can be of pressure, temperature, or chemical concentration. As such differences are rectified--not really because nature "wants" to rectify them but just because that s what nature does--energy tends to flow. For example, the difference between a hot boiler and a cool radiator runs a traditional steam engine. But that is manmade, a machine. Nature behaves this way without any consciousness (that we can detect). A hurricane reduces temperature and pressure gradients in the atmosphere, spinning into existence and disappearing once its second law task is done. We give them names like Wilma and Katrina but don t really think hurricanes have agency.
Which brings us back to the question of purpose seen in light of the second law. One of the main obvious traits of organisms is that they seem to be doing something: they have an agenda, a motive, some sort of task or goal. The question we can ask is, Is this goal, this trending behavior in organisms looking for food or mates or shelter or company--is it related to the second law? I believe it is, although living matter s ability to store energy, and then redeploy it to seek new energy sources makes it a higher-order thermodynamic phenomenon than, say, a hurricane. But consider how simple second law behavior can mirror that of the deliberating mind. Imagine Abe Lincoln s heated log cabin as he reads by fluttering candlelight without his stovepipe hat: anywhere there is a space between the logs, or the windows, or the doors, heat will act as if it is "trying" to escape. And why--if we can use that word--is it acting like it has a will to get outside and keep our future president cold? Well, the answer is not mystical. The heat behaves this way because it is concentrated energy following its natural second law mandate to disperse; or, ag"in, because there is a temperature gradient between the inside and the outside of the heated cabin--which nature "wants” to rectify. Are our human wants, desires, and needs related to this higher scientific "purpose"? If a house insulator were to come along and, as they sometimes do, sprinkle powder in the air to make visible the gaps in Lincoln s cabin, he might find behavior similar to that reported by a modern insulator: a streamer of hot air, rising through the face-like hole of an electric outlet, rising up a wall, half-way across the ceiling then, as if changing its mind, reversing course and heading out the same hole whence it came.
Such behavior of simple thermodynamic systems is intriguing and begs the question as to the nature of that sacrosanct mindfulness with which we regard ourselves divinely, or at least superiorly endowed. If an unconscious streamer of air, in fulfilling its natural end to spread out, to reach equilibrium with the cooler air outside, can somehow calculate its position to do a u-turn on the ceiling, then perhaps the purposeful behavior we see in living things is not so grandiose. As Aristotle (in Physics II. 8), often called "the first biologist," wrote, "Nature belongs to the class of causes which act for the sake of something...In natural products the sequence is invariable, if there is no impediment. It is absurd to suppose that purpose is not present because we do not observe the agent deliberating. Art does not deliberate. If the ship-building art were in the wood, it would produce the same results by nature. If, therefore, purpose is present in art, it is present also in nature...It is plain then that nature…operates for a purpose."
In fact, to follow up on our earlier question, we can regard the whole organism as having a natural function, or purpose: to reduce gradients on a more or less continuous basis. Indeed, satellite measurements show that complex ecosystems are more effective at reducing the long-wave sun-Earth radiation gradient than less complex ecosystems or nonliving areas. There is evidence that over geological time life has kept itself cool despite the sun s increasing luminosity. This global regulation, which disperses more of the sun s energy as it grows more luminous, is physiological and thermodynamic, and need not be explained with recourse to natural selection or conscious will. Indeed, life s gradient-reducing activities have recently been marred, not aided, by the conscious agent humanity because of our fossil fuel use and deforestation. More and more human life, infused with energy and cycling matter, seems an amazing but natural process.
Thermodynamics teaches us that complex systems, far from violating the second law, arise naturally during the course of energy dispersal and gradient reduction, and that our precious consciousness, with which we like to consider ourselves far above the animals, may in the end belong not just to life but to the principles of organization of a second law-endowed cosmos. Rabbi Harold S. Kushner said that our lives here seem to us as if we are part of a great story. We feel the plot is very complex, but is somehow more than singer Lou Reed s encapsulation of the existential viewpoint, that "life is just to die." It is as if the universe is up to something, something making a mockery of our limited attempts to understand it, something involving the implacable resolution of the simple, indomitable, second law.

References:

Nabokov, Vladimir, 1966. Speak, Memory: An Autobiography Revisited, G. Putnam s Sons: New York.

McKeon, Richard, ed., 2001. The Basic Works of Aristotle. Princeton University Press: Princeton.

Minkel, J.R., 2002. "The Meaning of Life—Are we nothing more than energy-shredding machines—Byzantine contraptions for reducing the Universe to a state of bland uniformity?" New Scientist, 30-33.

Sagan, D. and Whiteside, J., 2005. Gradient-Reduction Theory: Thermodynamics and the Purpose of Life. In Scientists Debate Gaia: The Next Century, MIT Press, Stephen H. Schneider, James R. Miller, Eileen Crist, and Penelope J. Boston, eds, pp. 173-186.

2005. Schneider, Eric D., and Sagan, D. Into the Cool: Energy Flow, Thermodynamics, and Life. University of Chicago Press, Chicago.

The Hydra of Doubt: Big Time Bush-Sanctioned Intellectual Dishonesty

It is great to see that Don Mikulecky has joined our page. Don is one of the most talented minds in science. A Noam Chomsky of science might be an appropriate title. Don has been a Marine, a preacher, a premier researcher in several fields of science and philosophy, including complexity science, relational biology, network thermodynamics, and other fields that I forget. He is a great teacher and lecturer. Check out his web site site. Don is correct. I tend to come in charging on a horse. However many of us have dedicated a lifetime to science and to see others debasing the basic premise of our lives with nonsense is bothersome to say the least. This is a dogfight that I did not expect. They have come out of their blogs attacking my book before they have even seen it. These are people like we have not seen before. We scientists all like a good scientific fight. Often some small advances are made by such turmoil. But here is what a colleague said on National Public Radio this week about the ID community:

"Most people--even many who are writing in this group--do not
appreciate how unbelievably dishonest the ID crowd is, Behe and
William Dembski in particular. Dembski is really the principal 'go to'
science guy for the ID crowd. The one thing Dembski and Behe share with the creationist crowd in general is a deep aversion to the term 'natural science.

"The logic goes like this: after Darwin (Dembski, I think he says
Voltaire was the first enemy of God, leading to Darwin) science was
forced to adopt the moniker of natural science to show its ideological move to naturalism. "Natural" science necessarily excludes the "super"-natural. Excluding the supernatural excludes God; and anything that excludes God is anti-God. This is a mantra for the WHOLE
movement, creationist and ID-ist all.

"Dembski publically maintains that his books are not an endorsement of religion (Behe does the same). They say this to give the impression that their goal is a new scientific orthodoxy. Behe was one of the persons who was on the losing side of the Louisiana test case on
Creationism in LA schools. The Supreme Court decision, as you will
remember, concluded that Creationism is not science and therefore
could replace or compete with evolutionary biology in school curriculum. More than that, though, the decision seemed to suggest to creationists that they reformulate their position to reflect that necessity. Behe and Dembski have that, and only that, as their goal. In fact, not only is Dembski's writing an endorsement of the most vulgar evangelicalism, it advocates the teaching of daily miracles, for example God's hand in one's choosing lines from the Bible for
making daily decisions, etc., as well as Bible numerology, etc. And
while hiding behind his pseudo-mathematics (algorithms, information
theory, etc.), all of the most serious objections to 'Darwinism' are
really just the same old 'a room of monkeys with typewriters will
never compose Hamlet by chance' yarn. I recommend, if you will excuse
the phrase, Dembski's book "Intelligent Design" as proof of all of this (published by InterVarsity Press!!! How distinguished!). Moreover, the ID movement is, and Behe and Dembski are, entirely and exclusively 'Christian' in intent, to the exclusion of all other faiths. While it is true that the latter do not advocate the 6000-year Earth or six-day creation, and while they do give a nod to some notion of evolutionary processes, they cannot be understood,
by ANY reading of their books and articles, as being anything short of Christian advocates of the most basic kind.

"These guys are just shameless liars when addressing criticism in
public. They will endorse things one day and say the opposite the
next. They really do not seem to care about the verity of their
positions, and they, in fact, do not: they are only interested in
knocking down the 'epoch of naturalism' by proffering a 'scientific'
counter to evolution. It is guerilla ideology, pure and simple. AS
LONG AS THEY CAN BRING THE DEBATE TO ANY SCIENTIFIC JOURNALS, they
will have shown, legally, that ID is a science. That is the only goal."


I have spent several months on their non-science. There is nothing there. It is like one hand clapping; the one reason they have received so much press is that the media says that it is only "fair if we cover both sides." But there is no "other side" as far as the science goes. They should cover it as a religious story.

I have spent too much time deeply immersed in this ID-science issue and I must tell you there is a WAR going on out the on the net and in the courts. They HATE each other with comments like "get the AK 47 and spray and pray" on the net.  The day Bush came out in favor of ID there were over 300 messages on one discussion group. There are secret discussion groups. The ID groups are well funded, their web pages look great and are up to date almost hourly. Their leaders are very smart and many have multiple PhD's from good schools. They have had a plan, and recent polls suggest that only 10 and 35 percent of Americans believe in evolution without God's help. They have won!!!!!!!! (The disrespect for science is cut from the same cloth as Bush's EPA appointee Christine Todd Whitman's pronouncement that the World Trade Center site was safe despite toxic levels of mercury from pulverized computers that, along with asbestos dust and radioactive elements further endangered fire and other workers as the crime evidence was being whisked away. If you scroll down Mikulecky, who happens to be deeply spiritual, suggests that Bush should be impeached on the basis of his de facto "war on science" alone...it is hardly surprising that the super-smarmy political dirty tricksters who have taken over our government feel threatened by intellectual honesty and the scientific method--even if it could have saved Reagan's life.)

As for bringing religion and science together that is another matter. This is where is Don and I agree. How do we meld them? Boltzmann once said that philosophy gave him headaches but that he was returning to thermodynamics to look the hydra of doubt in the eye whatever the consequences and however perilous it is if one value's one's life. I suffer from daily migraines but am no Boltzmann. I have been asked to write an article for a major magazine on ID and Science. Any suggestions from any of you are welcome.

Eric

Science and God: Can We Handle the Truth?

On the 28, April 2005 readers of the British science
journal, Nature, were greeted with a jarring cover
headline banner, replete with faux University of
Regents red seal:

"This journal contains material on evolution.
Evolution by natural selection is a theory, not a
fact. This material should be approached with an open
mind, studied carefully and critically considered.

Approved by the University Board of Regents, 2006"

Such front-page satire from the world's premier
science journal was staggering in itself. But polling
data inside showed that a moneyed fundamentalist
mission, having taken up intellectual arms against
science, especially cosmology and evolutionary
biology, was winning big time. A Gallup poll published
in Nature showed that today only 35 percent of
Americans "believe evolution is a scientific theory
well supported by the evidence." Among Americans with
a high school education or less, only 20 percent
accept evolution as fact.

This summer the Kansas State School Board is considering changing their State's curriculum to include "other theories than evolution" (creationism) in their science courses. The conservative Kansas School board is expected to approve this measure. Similar issues are in front of schools boards in 20 states.

After the defeats of the concept "Creationism" in state courts
and the United States Supreme Court these religious
campaigners have turned to a morphed creationism that
they call Intelligent Design. The movement makes
three main claims against evolution. The first is
that our biological world is too complex to have been
produced by biological variation and selection and
that an unidentified designer must have designed the
object or process. A related argument is a hazy "God
algorithm" that supposedly separates natural objects
from those changes done by a designer.

The ID- creationists' third area of complaint takes
refuge in thermodynamics. An example is given by a group
known as the Institute for Creation Research:
"Evolutionists are embarrassed by the Second Law of
Thermodynamics. The obvious tendency of nature from
disorder to order and organization is, of course, only
an assumption of evolutionists. The real tendency in
the natural world, as expressed by the Second Law of
Thermodynamics, is from order and organization to
disorder. This very obvious problem is commonly
bypassed by evolutionists."

Such statements are made in ignorance of the last 60
years of research in thermodynamics. There is
absolutely no contradiction between the Second Law and
the evolution of order and life. Order and disorder
are intimately connected. Life and its ecosystems,
driven by energy from the sun, not only do not violate
the second law but it is thermodynamic phenomena that
provide the "go" for life. The cosmos is indeed highly
and surprisingly organized; but the presence of life
inside this organization is in perfect keeping with
other spontaneously appearing systems that naturally
organize to produce atomic and molecular chaos. As
evolution links all organisms through heredity,
thermodynamics links all complex systems through
common patterns of energy flow.

It is a poignant irony that the biblical Jesus
reserves his harshest language for the rich and for lawyers.
Perhaps predictably, an unholy alliance of these two
forces appears to be behind the well funded,
rhetorically unctuous attack on what is arguably
civilization's greatest triumph: the honest search for truth, the rewards of which include knowledge, education, technology, and science.

Much of the ID power and coordination comes from the
the Seattle-based Discovery Institute, with a full
time staff of less that 10 people with some forty
Fellows including all the high-profile ID advocates.
It is partially funded by reclusive, deeply Christian
multi-billionaire, Howard H. Ahmanson Jr. Ahmanson
sits on the boards of the Discovery Institute and the
Claremont Institute, an ultra-right-wing think-tank
that stresses "Christian values." The last data
available showed that he and his family own Home
Savings of America, worth $47 billion in 1997.

The leaders of this movement may not be interested in
scientific research but they have political acumen. By
far the most vocal and politically astute member of
the Discovery Institute is lawyer Phillip Johnson.
Johnson had a mid-life crisis and Christian religious
conversion turned him from being a law professor at
the University of California Law School into an
anti-evolution provocateur. In 1999 the
Johnson-Discovery Institute's twenty-year strategic plan
was leaked via the Internet. This proposal was to
drive a theistic "wedge" between science-evolution and
religion. This formal plan was complete with dreams of
PBS documentaries, plans and strategies for "cultural
confrontation, publicity and opinion shaping and
timed public relation campaigns. In 2004 Pennsylvania
Senator Rick Santorum praised Johnson for his efforts
to inject a new and unbiased understanding of science
into our public schools. To the dismay of many, this
summer the Smithsonian Institution in Washington D.C.
is showing a film sponsored my the Discovery Institute.


If faith is substituted for evidence, and ignorance
spackled with a miracle putty that can do anything, then
science is no longer needed. There seems little doubt
that the emotional source of this debate is pure
religious belief, which we honor and, indeed, do not think
should be desecrated by pretending its science. It is
difficult for our human ego to imagine a cosmos
without a special place for human beings. Scientific
investigation has revealed that we are not at the
center of the universe, and that we are not made of
special stuff but of atoms such as are found
abundantly throughout the cosmos. The DNA studied by
molecular biology proves Darwin's contention that we
are all related through common ancestry.
Thermodynamics takes the story one step further,
showing that complex systems and progressive
tendencies, such as we see in evolution,
are the natural result of energy flows.

Centuries ago Benedict Spinoza's Theologico-Philosophical Treatise helped lay the political foundation for separation of Church and
State, as well as the freedom of speech and worship.
This philosopher also pointed out that a God who
intervenes to create miracles is not as amazing as One
who orders the universe according to unchangeable
scientific laws. Only an impersonal God such as this
(believed in by Einstein) is consonant with science. Insofar as the laws of nature are eternal, if they imply a God it is
a God who neither intervenes nor makes special
allowances, least of all for specific human groups.
The explicit dependence of religious belief on faith
makes it inimical to science. Science is about finding
the truth whether we like it or not. No amount of
money or clinging to past mythology is enough to
create the truth.

Such twisting of science by the Church has occurred
before. Galileo was forced to sit on the sidelines
while religion reigned over astronomy and physics. It
took hundreds of years for science to recoup. The
current setback in science is even more pernicious as
it is the result of an orchestrated disinformation
campaign to ensure the general public cannot decipher
myth from fact. Now Darwin sits on the sidelines.

Eric D. Schneider and Dorion Sagan

Bedazzled by Design

If you can't dazzle them with brilliance, baffle them with bullshit. This junior high school motto seems to be the secret motto and modus operandi of the "intelligent design" (ID) movement, which used to be the "creation science" movement, and was before that simply "creationism." Author and ID advocate William Dembski has kindly given us permission to post on his website, which we have been pleased to do, in the hopes of promoting a more considered view of the second law's role in life and evolution. Obviously this was naive. Ironically we have been criticized--apparently by those who have not read our book--for promoting "pseudoscientific bunkum." Apart from ad hominem attacks to the effect that we are just a "geologist and Carl's son" and that our book would better have been named "Into the Baloney," the criticism has been leveled that the second law's role in life's complexity cannot be crucial because natural phenomena such as tidal waves and fires produce much more entropy. The point, however, is not that life outstrips other natural processes in entropy production but that it measurably (as shown by outgoing long-wave radiation satellites, to take just one example) produces more entropy than would be the case without it. Indeed, if a person were to spontaneously combust, more entropy would be produced--in the short-term anyway--than if she were to continue metabolizing normally. Yet a living thing produces more entropy than a mere random collection of matter--and, over the long run, more than someone spontaneously combusting. As Eddington writes. "If someone points out to you that your pet theory of the universe is in disagreement with Maxwell's equations--then so much the worse for Maxwell's equations. If it is found to be contradicted by observation--well, these experimentalists do bungle things sometimes. But if your theory is found to be against the second law of thermodynamics I can give you no hope; there is nothing for it but to collapse in deepest humiliation." Some of the more scientifically savvy creationists have gleaned this fact and, speculating quite wildly, attempted to make an end run around the second law. Perhaps the most surprising of them is Frank Tipler, author of The Physics of Immortality, who has devised an elaborate means in which the future of evolution, encompassing human technology, will preserve each human soul in a futuristic heaven. This is interesting science fiction, and cannot be ruled out; but it is not science. We enjoy the work of Philip K. Dick, which includes stories of God as an alien ("The Divine Invasion"), aliens sending a vampiric (to them a devouring God is more natural than one that you eat) Jesus simulation onboard a faltering spacecraft, and a lowly future worker, beta testing a time travel device, who turns out to write the Bible by accident ("A Prominent Author"). By contrast the intelligent design ur-plot that Jesus is somehow--but of course they are reluctant to say how on the record as it sounds, well, a tad unscientific--behind it all seems rather trite and boring. The Christian proto-existentialist Soren Kierkegaard remarked that the more preposterous a belief is the greater the faith necessary to believe it. Precisely. We were surprised to see Tipler--co-author with Templeton winner John Barrow of a massive tome on the Anthropic Principle--included in a Dembski anthology on intelligent design. What was worse was Tipler's claim that Lynn Margulis supported intelligent design in Aquiring Genomes because she mentioned Behe while criticizing Darwinism--and was joined in such criticism by doyenne of evolutionary biology Ernst Mayr. Unfortunately, this showed a solid lack of scholarship if not disingenuousness on Tipler's part. Margulis was criticizing neoDarwinism's claims that mutations were the sole source of variation, not Darwinism of which her endosymbiotic theory of the origin of eukaryotic cells is a shining--and genetically proven--example. (The Behe "mention" was perjorative.) The amount of money coming in to support creationism is astounding. One of us (Dorion) even thought fit to apply for a John Templeton Grant as they were advertising in Nature that they were seriously looking for scientific treatments of what they called the "great debate" concerning purpose in life. To their credit, the Templeton committee now summarily reject the creationist conceit that evolution is a theory.

But the anthropic principle notion that the universe is somehow created with man in mind or as its end point, is too often a smokescreen for wholly speculative creationism. Book after book is written highlighting the supposedly inconceivable concatenation of finely tuned constants that supposedly (if unstatedly) reveal the miracle of creation. And yet if the chances, based on information theory (or whatever other scientific disciplines can be pounded into shape to suit creationist purposes), of us being here are so remote as to suggest an all-powerful Creator, then simple calculation suggests that the chances that You exist are even more remote. More remote still is the startling unlikelihood that You will be reading this Precise Peevish Note on the cryptic political machinations of scientific underlings. The Intelligent Designer is apparently a many-faceted monster with an exceedingly devious plan that includes the meta-miracle of anonymous posters spewing incomprehensible theories on our website and creationists who have not read our book criticizing it on theirs. In engaging the creationists we were hoping to generate more light than heat but apparently the Intelligent Designer's mysterious ways include cavalier dismissals of evidence in favor of worldviews that place mammalian bipeds at the center of the universe. Will wonders never cease.

Behe and the Proton Rotary Motor

Ironically, in rejecting religious accounts of creation, science has acquired a taste for an almost equally anthropomorphic view based on human experiences of mechanical construction. This taste for a reductionism that pictures complexity formation as a kind of bit-by-bit construction, rather than natural flow process, plays into the hands of those who argue that specific biological structures are too complex to be scientifically explained. In Darwin's Black Box (1996) Michael Behe draws attention to what he considers an example of ID: the "irreducible complexity" of the "proton rotary motor" of a corkscrewing bacterial appendage used in locomotion, the flagellum. The flagellum helps the prokaryote move through its viscous medium. The phrase proton rotary motor conjures up images of a more-than-human craftsman, the divine equivalent to those artists in Manhattan who write poetry on grains of rice. Scientists describe the proton rotary motor as a real rotating motor, with a membrane-embedded rotor running on ion flow (charged particles). It has a helical filament like a propeller, a hook like a universal joint, a drive shaft-like rod, and a ring complex with stator, which represents the heart of the mechanism. Some bacteria can even reverse their motors, allowing them to switch directions. Behe revels in the clear design function--to propel bacteria through the water to where they are going--and disparages the notion that such microscopic complexity could have possibly evolved by an incremental evolutionary process. But a closer look, one that links non-equilibrium thermodynamics (NET) and natural selection, gives us a clearer take on nature's creative potential. The bacteria with such motors travel along food gradients. When E. coli dart about, then stop and tumble (by reversing their motors), they sample the environment for data and move toward the concentrated sources of the carbon, energy, and electrons needed for survival. Although at first it may all seem impossibly well crafted from the outside, in fact evolutionary antecedents of the bacterial movement "apparatus" are there. The ability to switch directions, for example, is not present in all bacteria. This suggests evolution from simpler forms. More to the point, there are close similarities between the proteins making up the flagella with their "motors" and other proteins routinely secreted by bacteria naturally as part of their thermodynamically mandated entropic waste production. Indeed, in some cases the exact same proteins used in the flagellar motor are excreted through a tube much like that seen in the growth of proton rotary motors (e.g., Komoriya et al. 1999; Young et al. 1999). Thus, the proteins involved in export probably got caught up in ion flows moving across the membranes of bacterial cells, leading to mobility systems that became honed by natural selection. Details aside, the take-home lesson is that flow patterns are omnipresent in the area of gradients and the complex cyclical structures that navigate them: life is not starting with a blank slate, but with a chalkboard intricately sketched with thermodynamic "designs." Behe, a leading semi-scientific spokesman for the ID (intelligent design) movement is right that not all "motors" are made by man. Nor are human beings. But there is nothing scientific about cryptically intimating that where science reaches a gap in its understanding, religion or its ID surrogate should rush in. (We will pass by here the obvious and appropriate if cliched motif regarding sneakerless angels and fear.) In fact, it is, at best, a superficial understanding of science that makes divine magic or its engineering equivalent of the intricate and functional arrangements described propelling bacteria. Natural selection cannot explain everything, but what it does not explain does not move automatically over from the Darwinian realm into the arena of Unexplained Mysteries. Thermodynamics, consonant with Darwinism, allows structures to grow and complexify when their kinetic arrangements aid and abet the second law. Such a perspective should be more commodious to the scientific mind than the hypothesis that God, like our Manhattan rice grain artist, is consumed with microscopic engineering feats concentrated on the rear end of germs. Thermodynamics provides the needed flashlight to peer in to Behe's cathected "Black Box."

Loyal Rue and Religious Naturalism

Two-time Templeton Award winner Loyal Rue (Luther College, Decoarah, IA) is a breath of fresh air cutting through the obscurantist, politically motivated fog of creationism-ID theory. In his new book, Religion is Not About God, Rue writes (pp. 365-66) "The more we learn about the details of natural processes, the more evident it becomes that these processes are themselves creative. Nothing transcends Nature like Nature itself...Holmes Rolston speaks of the cosmic evolutionary process in terms of struggle, endurance and achievement. Nature appears to be informed by internal, systemic values as it struggles through to something ever higher. Some strains of process theology assert that all natural phenomena arise from elementary movements of experience and valuation. Thus, without natural values there can be no Nature. God is viewed as an essential part of the natrual process, and to this extent God is a natrual entity, not a supernatural one...The gap between Nature and God is being narrowed from the other direction as well--that is, Nature is becoming divinized...Margaret Atwood reinforces the point beautifully 'God is not the voice in the whirlwind. God is the whirlwind.'...As the gap between the natural and the sacred narrows--as God is naturalized and Nature is divinized--the problem of the missing metaphor begins to fade away and the central core of religious naturalism becomes clear: Nature is the sacred object of humanity's ultimate concern. Nature is the ultimate ground of natural facts, and eco-centric values are justified by the claim that Nature is sacred. The values inherent in Nature are obscure (as are the laws of Nature), and our apprehension of them will always be heavily conditioned by our biology and culture. It will always be too much to claim that we know Nature's agenda, just as it has always been too much to claim knowledge of God's will. But if we attend carefully to the feedback, we will see clearly enough that Nature does not tolerate everything...the fact of human survival presupposes a narrow range of values, and it is these values, these natural commandments, this Dharma, that will be the ultimate concern of religious naturalists." In a final section, "In the End, Irony" (p. 368) Rue sums up, "Theists will insist that religion is about a transcendent God, yet the God worshipped and served is always incarnate in natural forms. And religious naturalists may affirm the sacredness of Nature and practice eco-centric piety sincerely, yet deep down they must know that religion is no more about Nature than it is about God." These comments, although somewhat cryptic and critically impregnable insofar as they partake of a negative theology, are consonant with the religious possibilities we leave open at the end of Into the Cool. We particularly like the Atwood quote since the example she uses, the whirlwind, is in fact a paradigmatic nonequilibrium thermodynamic structure: although inanimate, it is complex, purposeful, and materially cycling, like life itself. And, like life, the whirlwind--be it a destructive tornado, the Great Red Spot of Jupiter, or an innocuous whirpool in your bathwater--requires absolutely no divine intervention. Its form follows its function. It does what it does beautifully. And its "design," consisting of trillions of atoms acting with off-the-charts statistical coherence, works with a robust natural precision that compares favorably to the clunkier productions of technologists and engineers. In Into the Cool we argue life is precisely such a thermodynamically organized system. With reference to the comments below on Spinoza, natural activities such as these are far more likely to elicit reverence in the scientific mind than superstitious, evidentially unsupported attributions of interference by an outside, emotionally fragile, and human-like God.

Respectfully submitted,

Dorion Sagan

Creationists and Intelligent Design

Our book, Into the Cool, should be on the stands this week.
But before the book is even out, the Creationists-Intelligent Design movement is shadowing our book. The site on Amazon that advertises and sells our book has paid advertisements to lead people to Creationist sites. Although this is automatic as part of Google's Adsense program, postings have also been put up on our blog and then been mysteriously removed. Our work will bring a new light on this debate. First, we reject the Creationist-ID program. It is not science. As we have said, unfortunately for those who want to pin life's origin on Him, life is but one of many systems that measurably exhibit directional tendencies and more effectively produce entropy than random aggregates of matter.
Overlooked in this conflict is the role of modern thermodynamics, which shows how matter, including living matter, cycles and becomes more complex in regions of energy flow. In a sense here the
creationists are correct because life is not random. Dawkins and Gould have been wrong! Life evolves towards more species, cell types, and taxa; increased area inhabited, respiration efficiency, stored energy, food, and information; and increase, despite several
mass extinctions (each hundreds of thousands of times more powerful than all-out nuclear wars). But it does so due to thermodynamic factors not a finger-pointing creator. The beauty and functionality of plant and animal "designs" have to be contrasted with the horror of an African child starving and his eyes being eaten out by a worm: does not the great Creationist God also deserve credit for designing the worm? And all the other diseases and species not specified in the Bible? In fact, Dembski's supposed algorithm to distinguish created things that are too complex to have evolved from evolved things does not distinguish between creation by a beneficient God and evil aliens or the Devil. If Dembski believes otherwise, we invite him to post a response here. We agree with Dembski that (Stuart) Kaufmann's search for a fourth law of thermodynamics is weak but Dembski's law of "Conservation of Information" is just as bad as Kaufmann's futile search for a new law of thermodynamics. We will take up these issues in later discussions on this BLOG.
Also in later postings we will look at the work of two of he most prominent leaders of the ID movement. Michael Behe, and William Dembski. Behe is formerly unheard-of associate professor at the small
College of Lehigh in Pennsylvania. Behe published a bestseller book Darwin's Black Box. This book with a catchy title by an unknown biochemist has caused an inordinate amount of smoke and chaff from the scientific community. Scientists, being scientists, methodically deconstructed Behe with logic, data, and
theory. These critiques have rolled off the back of the ID community like water off of ducks. Behe's
favorite hobby horse is his belief that nature shows "Irreducible complexity" that can only be explained by
a "designer." He finds the flagellum of bacteria so complex that a designer is required for its existence. True scientists do not walk away from difficult problems with a copout of, "It's too complicated for me to understand, therefore it was a product of a designer God." The intellectual guru for the intelligent design move is 45-year-old William A. Dembski. Dembski has a PhD in philosophy and a PhD in mathematics both from the University of Chicago. He also holds a master's  degree in divinity from Princeton Theological Seminary.
Dembski's dense mathematics seems to be the design of a series of probability-based filters that allow one
to distinguish between natural events and those developed by a designer. He claims to have designed a
calculus for "detecting design-God" in natural systems. Again Dembski, formerly unknown in the field
of biology, has released a torrent of six books over the past seven years with titles including No Free
Lunch: Why Specified Complexity Cannot be Purchased Without Intelligence (2002) and The Design Revolution
(2004). If Dembski is the intellectual spine of this movement his writing favoring a "designed universe"
offer no scientific hypothesis, data, or evidence for his scientific "revolution." It is like arguing with a person who comes to the public and says the earth is flat: God told me so. Why the media gives so much credence to these views which are on the order of a "Flat Earth" hypothesis is a disturbing question. Could it be peer pressure and political intimidation? As Dave Reney reminds us below, when Benjamin Franklin suggested starting each constitutional congress with a prayer, Alexander Hamilton replied, "We don't need any foreign aid." Where are such witty and ballsy patriots today? Such true Americans? Let us hope the newly lamblike media, lying down with the would-be leonine executive branch, isn't hoping for divine intervention to bail out their possibly catastrophic political and fiscal blunders.