A is to B as B is to C

Turquoise Hexagon Monolith, Prij, October 2010

A while back I was accosted by some Jehovah's Witnesses whilst taking a break out on delivery. Once I started talking about causality they dove straight into their bibles for a relevant passage that can be summarised as the old Watchmaker argument. I conceded that the houses around us were indeed built by people, on the grounds that it's quite obvious they were designed and built. We've all seen houses under construction.

According to the anthropologist Daniel Everett, the Pirahã tribe in the Amazon have a strict concept of evidenitality. Essentially the veracity of a statement is graded by source - a first hand experience is more trusted than deduction which in turn is greater than hearsay, and so on and in between. Everett initially contacted the tribe as a Christian missionary, however the cultural rejection of indirect (and therefore unverified) information not only rebuffed his attempts to convert them, on the basis that neither himself nor any trusted second party had actually seen Jesus, but actually caused Everett to become an atheist for which he dubbed them the "ultimate empiricists". This obviously has benefits as well as hindrances, amongst them slowing the communication of ideas. Last year I said that amateur scientists and the general public would have to take particle physicists at their word because none of us have the ability or access to equipment to repeat their experiments and verify the work for ourselves. If we refute their findings for the foreseeable future then future technology arising from it will simply appear like magic and we'll be no better for it. As for the creation and design of life, we're no better off having faith. It's not quantum-procreation that will collapse if we don't believe in it and end up in a Children of Men scenario. The difference between a house and an organism is that the former needs humans to propagate (a bit like a virus, which I'll write about at some point) whereas the latter can self-propagate.

Having dismissed the design/causality argument, they asked me if I had a better explanation. I do, but I'm not going to pretend it's the absolute truth or even yet observed in nature (terrestrial or extra). It's light on specifics (because I'm not writing a super-PhD here), full of gaps (you know, where He resides), and in the case of the universe's bootstrapping technique potentially impossible to prove by modern means. But that's the difference - these claims will either be vindicated or rejected in the course of scientific history.

Well, if we want to follow the causal timeline we have to first tackle the Big Bang. Here it is briefly. As neither time nor the laws of physics existed before the appearance of the universe, there is absolutely nothing preventing it randomly occurring. Really. Under multiverse theory it was only a (figurative) matter of time before a universe popped into existence that was suitable for life in whatever form. There is no why because 'conditions that are observed in the universe must allow the observer to exist'. You can't have a puddle where there is no indentation in the ground to be filled. In this finite universe (effectively not infinite, because causality is bound by the speed of light forming a horizon) there are only so many interactions and patterns possible as determined by the physical properties of matter. Again, given enough time order will arise spontaneously from the limited array of primordial chemical elements present on Earth. A gloop of chemicals becomes a pool of amino acids, etc., and eventually something that sustains itself emerges.

It isn't a figure of speech to talk about 'genetic code' because RNA and DNA are sets of instructions for interaction as defined by chemistry. These instructions are no more scripted than the behaviour of its constituent atoms as defined by physics. What can happen, will happen. If they didn't go together, they wouldn't. It's like getting monkeys to write Shakespeare - it'll take a while and 99.9% of the output will be junk. In steps natural selection to remove failed code from the system - reinforcing the system's appearance as an improbably ordered one. I don't understand why this is refuted by people that don't dispute the artificial selection of animal and plant breeding. If anything, artificial selection proves natural selection given the number of dog breeds that suffer from diseases and conditions brought on by their engineered status. In natural selection, a dog with crippling arthritis will probably not make it to breeding age in the wild and the defect will not be replicated in offspring. Or perhaps it does reach breeding age, but the disease prevents it maximising its breeding opportunities (seeking out several receptive partners). In the latter a hampered individual will be outbred by fitter competitors that can maximise their opportunities. Evolution is genetic mutation regulated by this nonrandom filter. If not, I'd love to hear your explanation for antibiotic resistance and the extreme genetic diversity of HIV. God did it?

All these intricate processes that arise from the underlying mathematics create an illusion of design and architecture. The rings of Saturn are the product of orbital resonances, not some cosmic sculptor. Various groups and movements have come to worship the mathematical basis of the universe either as divine in itself or a sign of divine creation. Prime amongst these were the followers of the mathematician Pythagoras who found numerical relationships and ratios in enough of the world around them to generate a belief system from it. The Masonic movement is a descendant with it's symbology lifted from applied geometry, though details beyond the belief in universal architecture are unknown.

The domain of the god of the gaps is always shrinking. See how the divinity or mysticism of sciences have been ejected as time progresses: numerology from mathematics, astrology from astronomy, alchemy from chemistry. Long after the bronze age has been superseded in every other field, it's still the case that books of ancient desert scribblings are given the same kind of credence as a neuroscience journal. Would you trust someone from the middle ages, nevermind the bronze age, to operate on you? They'd have to be brought up to speed on modern medicine. They'd have no realistic sense of hygiene. Germ Theory alone only dates back to the end of the 19th century.

Burial practices and complex belief systems are archaeologically evident long before the invention of writing, so it's a given there was a lot of stuff thrown out and others added in oral tradition before the first codification of a religion. What we've inherited are the self-serving delusions of self-identified chosen tribes. Things have moved on.

Apologies if this piece feels disjointed or full of hanging threads. I may edit it in the future.

[1145;29]
Incorporating drafts October 2010