As an ID proponent and creationist, the irony is that at the time in my life where I have the greatest level of faith in ID and creation, it is also the time in my life at some level I wish it were not true. I have concluded if the Christian God is the Intelligent Designer then he also makes the world a miserable place by design, that He has cursed this world because of Adam’s sin. See Malicious Intelligent Design.
Jesus prophesied of the intelligently designed outcome of humanity: “wars and rumors of wars..famines…pestilence…earthquakes.” If there is nuclear and biological weapons proliferation, overpopulation, destruction of natural resources in the next 500 years or less, things could get ugly. If such awful things are Intelligently Designed for the trajectory of planet Earth, on some level, I think it would almost be merciful if the atheists are right….
The reason I feel so much kinship with the atheists and agnostics at TSZ and elsewhere is that I share and value the skeptical mindset. Gullibility is not a virtue, skepticism is. A personal friend of Richard Dawkins was my professor and mentor who lifted me out of despair when I was about to flunk out of school. Another professor, James Trefil, who has spent some time fighting ID has been a mentor and friend. All to say, atheists and people of little religious affiliation (like Trefil) have been kind and highly positive influences on my life, and I thank God for them! Thus, though I disagree with atheists and agnostics, I find the wholesale demonization of their character highly repugnant — it’s like trash talking of my mentors, friends and family.
I have often found more wonder and solace in my science classes than I have on many Sunday mornings being screamed at by not-so-nice preachers. So despite my many disagreements with the regulars here, because I’ve enjoyed the academic climate in the sciences, I feel somewhat at home at TSZ….
Now, on to the main point of this essay! Like IDist Mike Gene, I find the atheist/agnostic viewpoint reasonable for the simple reason that most people don’t see miracles or God appearing in their every day lives if not their entire lives. It is as simple as that.
Naturalism would seem to me, given most everyone’s personal sample of events in the universe, to be a most reasonable position. The line of reasoning would be, “I don’t see miracles, I don’t see God, by way of extrapolation, I don’t think miracles and God exists. People who claim God exists must be mistaken or deluded or something else.”
The logic of such a viewpoint seems almost unassailable, and I nearly left the Christian faith 15 years ago when such simple logic was not really dealt with by my pastors and fellow parishioners. I had to re-examine such issues on my own, and the one way I found to frame the ID/Creation/Evolution issue is by arguing for the reasonableness of Black Swan events.
I will use the notion of Black Swans very loosely. The notion is stated here, and is identified with a financeer and academic by the name of Nasim Taleb. I have Taleb’s books on investing entitled Dynamic Hedging which is considered a classic monograph in mathematical finance. His math is almost impenetrable! He is something of a Super Quant. Any way:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_swan_theory
The black swan theory or theory of black swan events is a metaphor that describes an event that comes as a surprise, has a major effect, and is often inappropriately rationalized after the fact with the benefit of hindsight.
The theory was developed by Nassim Nicholas Taleb to explain:
1.The disproportionate role of high-profile, hard-to-predict, and rare events that are beyond the realm of normal expectations in history, science, finance, and technology.
2.The non-computability of the probability of the consequential rare events using scientific methods (owing to the very nature of small probabilities).
3.The psychological biases that blind people, both individually and collectively, to uncertainty and to a rare event’s massive role in historical affairs.Unlike the earlier and broader “black swan problem” in philosophy (i.e. the problem of induction), Taleb’s “black swan theory” refers only to unexpected events of large magnitude and consequence and their dominant role in history. Such events, considered extreme outliers, collectively play vastly larger roles than regular occurrences.[1] More technically, in the scientific monograph Silent Risk , Taleb mathematically defines the black swan problem as “stemming from the use of degenerate metaprobability”.[2]
….
The phrase “black swan” derives from a Latin expression; its oldest known occurrence is the poet Juvenal’s characterization of something being “rara avis in terris nigroque simillima cygno” (“a rare bird in the lands and very much like a black swan”; 6.165).[3] When the phrase was coined, the black swan was presumed not to exist. The importance of the metaphor lies in its analogy to the fragility of any system of thought. A set of conclusions is potentially undone once any of its fundamental postulates is disproved. In this case, the observation of a single black swan would be the undoing of the logic of any system of thought, as well as any reasoning that followed from that underlying logic.Juvenal’s phrase was a common expression in 16th century London as a statement of impossibility. The London expression derives from the Old World presumption that all swans must be white because all historical records of swans reported that they had white feathers.[4] In that context, a black swan was impossible or at least nonexistent. After Dutch explorer Willem de Vlamingh discovered black swans in Western Australia in 1697,[5] the term metamorphosed to connote that a perceived impossibility might later be disproven. Taleb notes that in the 19th century John Stuart Mill used the black swan logical fallacy as a new term to identify falsification.[6]
The very first question I looked at when I was having bouts of agnosticism was the question of origin of life. Now looking back, the real question being asked is “was OOL a long sequence of typical events or a black swan sequence of events.” Beyond OOL, one could go on to the question of biological evolution. If we assume Common Descent or Universal Common Ancestry (UCA), would evolution, as a matter of principle, proceed by typical or black swan events or a mix of such events (the stock market follows patterns of typical events punctuated by black swan events).
If natural selection is the mechanism of much of evolution, does the evolution of the major forms (like prokaryote vs. eukaryote, unicellular vs. multicellular, etc.) proceed by typical or black swan events?
[As a side note, when there is a Black Swan stock market crash, it isn’t a POOF, but a sequence of small steps adding up to an atypical set of events. Black Swan doesn’t necessarily imply POOF, but it can still be viewed as a highly exceptional phenomenon.]
Without getting into the naturalism vs. supernaturalism debate, one could at least make statements whether OOL, eukaryotic evolution (eukaryogenesis), multicellular evolution, evolution of Taxonomically Restricted Features (TRFs), Taxonomically Restricted Genes (TRGs), proceeded via many many typical events happening in sequence or a few (if not one) Black Swan event.
I personally believe, outside of the naturalism supernaturalism debate, that as a matter of principle, OOL, eukaryogenesis, emergence of multicellularity (especially animal multicellularity), must have transpired via Black Swan events. Why? The proverbial Chicken and Egg paradox which has been reframed in various incarnations and supplemented with notions such as Irreducible Complexity or Integrated Complexity or whatever. Behe is not alone in his notions of this sort of complexity, Andreas Wagner and Joe Thornton use similar language even though they thing such complexity is bridgeable by typical rather than Black Swan events.
When I do a sequence lookup at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) National Center of Biotechnology Information (NCBI), it is very easy to see the hierarchical patterns that would, at first glance, confirm UCA! For example look at this diagram of Bone Morphogenetic Proteins (BMP) to see the hierarchical patterns:
From such studies, one could even construct Molecular Clock Hypotheses and state hypothesized rates of molecular evolution.
The problem however is that even if some organisms share so many genes, and even if these genes can be hierarchically laid out, there are genes that are restricted only to certain groups. We might refer to them as Taxonomically Restricted Genes (TRG). I much prefer the term TRG over “orphan gene” especially since some orphan genes seem to emerge without the necessity of Black Swan events and orphan genes are not well defined and orphan genes are only a subset of TRGs. I also coin the notion of Taxonomically Restricted Feature (TRF) since I believe many heritable features of biology are not solely genetic but have heritable cytoplasmic bases (like Post Translation modifications of proteins).
TRGs and TRFs sort of just poof onto the biological scene. How would we calibrate the molecular clock for such features? It goes “from zero to sixty” in a poof.
Finally, on the question of directly observed evolution, it seems to me, that evolution in the present is mostly of the reductive and exterminating variety. Rather than Dawkins Blind Watchmaker, I see a Blind Watch Destroyer. Rather than natural selection acting in cumulative modes, I natural selection acting in reductive and exterminating modes in the present day, in the lab and field.
For those reasons, even outside the naturalism vs. supernaturalism debate, I would think a reasonable inference is that many of the most important features of biology did not emerge via large collections of small typical events but rather via some Black Swan process in the past, not by any mechanisms we see in the present. It is not an argument from incredulity so much as a proof by contradiction.
If one accepts the reasonableness of Black Swan events as the cause of the major features of biology, it becomes possible to accept that these were miracles, and if Miracles there must be a Miracle Maker (aka God). But questions of God are outside science. However, I think the inference to Black Swan events for biology may well be science.
In sum, I think atheism is a reasonable position. I also think the viewpoint that biological emergence via Black Swan events is also a highly reasonable hypothesis even though we don’t see such Black Swans in every day life. The absence of such Black Swans is not necessarily evidence against Black Swans, especially if the Black Swan will bring coherence to the trajectory of biological evolution in the present day. That is to say, it seems to me things are evolving toward simplicity and death in the present day, ergo some other mechanism than what we see with our very own eyes was the cause of OOL and bridging of major gaps in the taxonomic groupings.
Of course such a Black Swan interpretation of biology may have theological implications, but formally speaking, I think inferring Black Swan hypotheses for biology is fair game in the realm of science to the extent it brings coherence to real-time observations in the present day.
Did you ever think to try screaming back at them?
There is a show that airs on The Justice Network called “Most Shocking”. Watch a few episodes of that. You’ll come away believing in miracles.
Thank you for the kind words. I take it this is the first time we’ve communicated? If so, nice meeting you, and if not, nice meeting you again.
What I was trying to point out, that even outside the Naturalism vs. Supernaturalism debate, if we take OOL theories and Evolutionary theories, in each of them, if we just look at the literature as is, for the theories to be coherent, the theories implicitly invoke Black Swans anyway, but the proponents of theses theories just don’t want to admit it!
Take OOL for starters. Let’s ask most OOL proponents if the origin of life was a typical or exceptional event by the standards of science? Few would say typical. Even Crick (Nobel prize for DNA structure) thought OOL was bordering on a miracle he suggested pan spermia. Hoyle, a self identified atheist/agnostic was giving the chances of OOL 1 in 10^40,000 power. Koonin thinks we need multi-verses since the chances of OOL are so remote. So, much as what I”ve written here isn’t exactly well received, I’m not exactly on the fringe to say OOL is a Black Swan event.
Regarding macro evolution. Let’s take the evolution of bacteria to the Eukaryotic form. How frequently do we expect bacteria-like creatures to re-wire their information processing schemes like what happened with Eukaryogenesis? The literature suggest this happened only 1 time in the billions, trillions, buzzillions of trials that eventually resulted in the Eukaryotic form. It is a black swan outcome!
Same for the emergence of multicellularity. 6 Black Swan processes out of the buzzillions of supposed trials that led to the six supposed lines of multicellular evolution.
In contrast, we have frequently see anti-biotic resistance develop in lab and field contexts. That mode of evolution is not Black Swan, it’s typical. Whereas the OOL and TRF type modes of evolution, even by naturalistic standards are Black Swans.
My personal view, one I’m not insisting other necessarily follow is that God worked a miracle. But that’s a personal faith-based religious view.
I will however stand by the assertion that even according to OOL theories and evolutionary theories, even on those terms, some of the processes needed to make those theories coherent are Black Swans, even though it seems to be an embarrassment to the proponents to admit this implicit feature of such theories.
Mung,
Over at UD KF saw a miraculous partial levitation, where the levitation was stopped by a secondary powerful force !!
But this is really quite problematic, isn’t it?
Whether something is a Black Swan event depends on the value assigned to the prior probabilities, and that in turn depends on all sorts of other constraints and conditions.
Stuart Kauffman, for example, would deny that abiogenesis is a Black Swan event, because he would say that the emergence of life is predictable in a universe where thermodynamically open systems tend towards “order at the edge of chaos”.
Now, Kauffman might be wrong — either in the details or in general. I bring him out to make clear that whatever values one assigns to the prior probabilities depends on other conditions and constraints that are justified elsewhere in how one is conceptualizing the problem. That’s true whether the Black Swan event is abiogenesis, multicellularity, a political revolution, or a financial meltdown.
So long as you’re clear that this is a statement of faith, we’re fine. I’ve also seen speculations that life probably bootstraps itself fairly easily wherever the necessary ingredients are to be found. This is based on data suggesting that life got started on earth within a very short time after life was even possible here. Suggestions of life processes are dated within a few million years after the crust cooled enough for carbon-based molecules to be stable.
On the other hand, the eukaryotic cell took over 3 billion years to appear. This delay between life and eukaryotic life suggests that this invention was extremely unlikely, and if we were to rerun the whole experiment, we’d probably never see it again. I’d say it’s a black swan candidate on this grounds.
And even so, there’s no need to ring in any gods to poof extremely rare or unlikely events. One need only meditate on the number of absurdly unlikely but possible inventions that never did happen. If we did rerun the experiment, what are the odds that ONE such event would eventually occur, even if we have no clue what that event might be? Probably pretty high, without any gods involved.
Christ what piss-poor logic from you Sal. The entire history of life on Earth has been full of one-off contingencies. That doesn’t make them miracles. The 10km asteroid that smacked Chicxulub 66 MYA wiped out the dinosaurs and opened lots of new ecological niches for mammals to evolve into what eventually became humans. Was it a miracle God smote the dinos and 70% of all other living species back then with a big-assed space rock?
Thank you for responding.
Your comment made me realize a nuance.
1. Some theories are fairly explicit in stating the existence of a Black Swan — i.e. Koonin’s multiverse explanation of OOL, for example.
2. Some theories deny the need of Black Swans altogether, like Dawkins Blind Watchmaker, Kauffman’s self-organization, James Shapiro’s 3rd way of evolution.
Dawkins and Kauffman’s theories don’t seem to come to terms that their models don’t actually agree with observations in the lab and field, but their theories are free of Black Swans!
PS
In one of the financial melt-down events in the 90s, there was Long Term Capital Management (LTCM) that used it’s 5 Billion in assets to make a highly leveraged TRILLION dollar bet. LTCM had two Nobel Laureate economists, Scholes and Merton, who used a theory that did not model Black Swans. The likely suspected the math was flawed, in fact I’m almost sure of it because I can even see the errors myself! Like Dawkins Blind Watchmaker, the Black-Scholes-Merton theory doesn’t model Black Swans.
Scholes and Merton, protested that other members of LTCM were blindly following the idealized mathematical model, but they were over-ruled even though they were the authors of the theories (based on the flawed assumption of Normal/Log Normal Distributions no less!). When the Black Swan hit, LTCM went down, and nearly backrupted the entire planet!
See:
Black Swans are not necessarily rare. You just have to be in the right spot to see many of them.
fG
Rich,
Two miracles! Take that, materialists.
stcordova,
Yeah, we’ve been around this a couple of times. Crick’s expertise on DNA doesn’t make him an authority on OoL, and panspermia is no answer at all. There must have been an origin somewhere, why not here? Hoyle’s expertise on astrophysics even less so – his random pick protein-o-matic calculations are an embarrassment. Fantasy calculations based on long modern enzymes and 20-acid character sets (39 with chirality!!!) are just silly, and I’m pretty lukewarm on proteins first anyway.
On Koonin, I don’t think there’s any need to invoke the multiverse when you don’t even know what the probabilities are. Too small for this universe? Prove it!
The thing regularly missed is that life is ‘self-suppressive’. If free oxygen is inhibitory to OoL, and all free oxygen on a planet is biogenic, this is one plausible reason you don’t see it every day. Another is that a novel replicator on a sterile planet has the field to itself. Things are very different for such a replicator on a planet teeming with bacteria, or even multiple competitive independent OoLs on a level playing field. One modern survivor does not mean one event.
And finally, replication occurs at the molecular level. Single molecules are very hard to detect. A single replicator can become visible in favourable circumstances, by actually replicating, but could be occurring at low frequency in an inaccessible environment without being noticed before extinction.
For reasons such as this, the present absence of detected OoLs on this planet at this time, and the absence of present descendants of any other OoLs that may have occurred, are not sufficient reason to declare it miraculous, or even particularly exceptional in the right conditions. This planet does not offer the right conditions – it’s occupied.
In his The Vital Question: Energy, Evolution, and the Origins of Complex Life Nick Lane makes a case that based on chemistry and thermodynamics we should expect life to be wide spread in the universe.
However, he does make a separate case that eukaryotic life could indeed be a black swan and very rare one in the universe.
KN said:
I appreciate you backing me up on that.
You could ask the same of the other theological assumptions used in the dilemma; how do we know what is good is good because god commands it? How do we know god is bound by a good greater than god? Answer: we don’t.
Er, for my personal use, yes, I’m entitled to make any assumption I wish. Also, in order to find an answer to a logical dilemma between theological assumptions (none of which are proven), yes, I’m entitled to offer a different theological premise that solves the dilemma. This is a trivial procedure in such logical arguments.
Sure one has; one has argued that there could exist a theological state where there is no Euthypro dilemma. For those that insist that the Euthypro dilemma constitutes an unsolvable moral problem for theism, they are shown to be wrong.
The other premises involved in the Euthypro dilemma are also premises that can be dismissed out of hand. So? The point of the Euhthypro dilemma is to show that “where morality comes from” poses a unsolvable problem for theists. The theistic premise I’ve offered solves the dilemma. So, the Euthypro dilemma is not a problem for theism per se.
Newton said:
Not all theisms have a god that “commands” things.
However, you’re being vague in your terminology. The dilemma is based on a god that can make anything good simply by commanding it (or is bound to an external good); with a necessarily good god, a god that “commands’ things cannot command something that isn’t good. The goodness isn’t made by the command; rather, the command is limited to what is good. Thus, no dilemma.
Unless god is necessarily evil. Which might seem silly, but is a better fit for the data.
WHOA! Hey thanks for the data point. I didn’t know that.
Both of those claims align with my own rough intuitions in the matter.
And intelligence and consciousness could be extremely rare in the universe. Perhaps even unique to this planet, for all we know.
I’m glad to see some sympathy for the issue of Eukaryogenesis being a possible Black Swan candidate.
This has led me to think of an empirical question regarding phylogeny.
The 16S Ribosomal RNA and aaRS genes are some of the few that prokaryotes and eukaryotes share. Phylogenies have been built with these genes.
I would be curious to see if eukaryotic aaRS genes have very large introns relative to prokaryotic aaRS genes. I’ve seen the E. Coli aaRS gene. I’ve not yet looked at eukaryotic aaRS genes.
If the eukaryotic aaRS genes have big introns which are absent in prokaryotes like E. Coli, this would look to me like a Black Swan, a poof.
I’m not exactly surprised the Eukaryogenesis raises phylogeny issues. Woese himself said, at least for this macro evolutionary step:
Where Woese was referring to horizontal gene transfer (not special creation).
The point being, if not a black swan, it at least suggests a mode of evolution not really seen today.
If Eukaryogenesis was achieved only once, it is fair to consider it a Black Swan process.
Again, I contrast Black Swan evolutionary processes against typical evolutionary events like the evolution of anti-biotic resistance, or the evolution of adaptation by color, weight, etc. These seem typical evolutionary events.
Yep. There are lots of big brained critters, on land and in the sea.
I would expect civilization building beings to be quite rare. Possibly involving something apelike in morphology.
So we need to add plate tectonics and well timed asteroids to the list of things the Designers diddle with.
That seems right to me, too.
For that matter, the prokaryotes that we see today are likely adapted to an environment that has eukaryote life. So they might not be all that representative of the kind of life that might spontaneously form. There’s a lot that we don’t know, and perhaps that we will never know, about OOL.
stcordova,
Probably. Prokaryotes don’t have introns! Curious that there is sequence conservation on exons though, no?
stcordova,
Well, some things can only happen once in a lineage! But the non-existence of other mitochondria-bearing species alive today does not mean that there were none. I’d agree that the event was relatively special, but hardly unique. Chloroplasts, apicoplasts, secondary and tertiary endosymbioses, nucleosomes … potentially incipient endosymbioses can also be observed today.
Why is endosymbiosis more ‘special’ than – say – lichen formation? It’s all this putting things-that-led-to-us centre stage that I find a bit cherry-picked.
Any lineage of 4 billion years’ duration can have, naively, one 1-in-4-billion-year, two 1-in-2-billion, four 1-in-a-billion …. etc events. In fact, statistically, it would be dubious if a lineage had no comparatively improbable events in its history – that everything was composed of things that happen routinely, and only that.
Or, if they happen a second time, the newbies are not competitive.
stcordova,
Hi Sal
Thank you for the explanation. I think the concept you have put forth is break through thinking. I am wondering if we can use the scientific method and ask some why questions to get to the ultimate cause of multiple black swan events being observed to explain change and diversity. What is it about biology that is creating what appears to be multiple low probability events based on current understood causes of biological changes. In the case of the housing crisis I believe an identified root cause was variable interest rates on mortgages that when changed dramatically from 1 to 5% made the persons house no longer affordable forcing default. This created a black swan event by forcing excess supply and ultimately housing prices below statistical models resulting in a black swan event.
I already told you your first premise “good is good by definition” doesn’t solve the dilemma, and your following amendment, equivalent to “good is good an good is god” obliterates your original argument from morality. You’re welcome.
What are you talking about? There are no theological assumptions or any other assumptions in the Euthyphro dilemma, it simply asks, if morals emanate form god, are those morals objectively good or just a divine whim. It’s a follow up to the moral argument. Don’t you understand that simple concept? It’s an effin question with a yes/no answer! and the answer is either that morality is just a whim and no true morality, or that it can’t support the existence of god. You really are slow.
You can assume whatever you want, but if you’re trying to ARGUE for something, presenting that argument as evidence, then you can’t pretend that you’ve provided any evidence by assuming stuff that nullifies your original argument.
Have you forgotten already that this crap was part of that laughable article of yours where the moral argument was supposed to be positive evidence for god’s existence, and how atheism was unreasonable? So now you just shrug and say, hey, I can assume whatever I want, fine, but that’s not an argument at all an you’re failing miserably at making a case for the reasonability of the belief in god.
Don’t you undrestand that when you’re arguing for something, ALL THE PREMISES MUST BE IN PLACE? If one must accept that god is good and the only source of good, then you are left with no argument from morality! All you have is some disgraceful question begging! Let me illustrate it for you:
MORAL ARGUMENT: Good therefore God.
then the dilemma is presented, and you “solve it” by adding the premise that God is good and good is God. What happens when you put it all together?
God therefore god.
Useless, fallacious, ridiculous, pathetic, UNREASONABLE
What premises are introduced in the dilemma? What’s wrong with you religious wackos that can’t think logically to safe your lifes?
You don’t understand what’s an argument, you don’t understand the dilemma. And you think you’re qualified to tell anyone that atheism is unreasonable. Wow, just wow
petrushka,
Yes, that can happen at 2 levels – a second mitochondrial lineage may make the host less fit, or the second mitochondrion may be less fit than the resident within the environment provided by the host. Or vice versa for that matter.
But even without any competitive element, multiples would be expected to winnow down to one long-term survivor.
black swan = we don’t know if the event was unique = god of gaps.
Alternative take:
When the fossils have gaps, pound fossil gaps.
When molecular evolution has gaps, pound molecular gaps.
When gaps are filled, pound the table.
Yes, somehow Sal’s new found love of skepticism has never reached the stage that he is skeptical about making up a cause like a “Designer,” nor has it led to requiring actual evidence for a claim rather than assuming the false dilemma of evolution or design. He’ll admit the lack of positive evidence for ID, then turn around and argue for miracles based on what we don’t know, all the same.
What are the odds of a miracle? Aren’t miracles the ultimate black swan events? And most importantly, how does the fact that miracles are apparently exceedingly unlikely mean that they account for unlikely events? Apparently, unlikely event = unlikely cause for Sal.
And we’re back to the strangeness of ID thinking–that while science tries to explain the unknown via the known, the IDist tries to explain the known via the unknown*. This has never been a sensible way to proceed.
Glen Davidson
*To be sure, they also try to “explain” the unknown by the unknown, but at the least it is more annoying that they try to explain what is known (confirmed unintelligent evolutionary predictions, for instance) by the unknown.
That’s all that really needs to be said: if we assume that God is necessarily good, then there is no moral argument from the existence of goodness to the existence of God.
I wonder if this counts? Ignicoccus hospitalis has only been found at 2 very widely spaced locations, hydrothermal vents off Iceland and Mexico. It is the only archaeon known with an outer membrane. It has the only symbiosis known in Archaea (but likely asymmetric, not mutual). The relationship is almost a ‘reverse mitochondrion’, with export of ATP from the larger to the externally-located smaller, which has lost most of its genome (some of it to the larger), like many a parasite.
Therefore miraculous?
But even if there were other mitochondria-bearing species alive once, that may be due to there having been proto-Eukaryotes around. It’s not all about mitochondria, after all, it’s perhaps more about the nucleus and the changes in DNA packaging. I think the point of Eukaryogenesis being special is that apparently a very long time elapsed between OoL and eukaryotes’ appearance, while OoL (probably) happened relatively soon after earth could support life.
Now I have my doubts. Maybe it just took quite a while for cells to reach the complexity to become eukaryotes, yet it may be likely that it would happen after two or three billion years. After all, it took a fair while to go from eukaryotes to the complexity of the Cambrian period, and people don’t seem to think that multicellular eukaryotes are especially unlikely, that it just took time and maybe some special conditions.
It’s not just that it’s potential, it happens. Brown algae and golden algae are purportedly secondary endosymbionts. In the secondary symbiont your chloroplast will often have not a double-membrane, but four layers around the organelle. But I don’t think bacteria or archea could successfully endosymbiose other cells (well, not in the same way, anyhow–I added this when I saw AM’s archeon example), which could still leave eukaryotes as unlikely–although I have my doubts, as previously noted.
It’s not very special at all, having happened many times since eukaryotes arose. The issue would be if eukaryotes are somehow special in other ways.
That’s another part of the issue of large numbers–the unlikely has to happen ever so often.
Glen Davidson
The problem with large numbers is not that everything has to happen, but that we don’t know how things happened.
The most parsimonious solution is that chemistry supports events that look unlikely when you don’t know the circumstances.
GlenDavidson,
Well, I didn’t want to conflate eukaryogenesis and endosymbiosis. Nucleation, generation of a cytoskeleton, linear chromosomes, multiple origins of replication, sex (the eukaryote version) – all of these are also part of the bigger picture. It’s a drawn out process, and hence one with dependent probabilities involved. Endosymbiosis I see as pretty easy, given organisms without rigid cell walls; the rest perhaps less so.
I am inclined to agree that something set the ball rolling that was comparatively unlikely, among the organisms existing till that point (about the first 2 billion years of Life). Prokaryotes are typically enclosed by a cell wall; get rid of it and they burst due to turgor pressure, and can’t replicate anyway because the origins of replication are separated by cell wall growth.
So I would see an early important step as possibly the eukaryote-like cytoskeleton. This seems a necessary precursor to so many things – support without cell wall, vacuolar pressure regulation, endosymbiosis, sex, mitosis, phagocytosis, transport – that characterise the eukaryote. And certainly we might not find cytoskeletons arising very often. (That said, the archaea I mentioned manage without a cell wall).
Generally there is, I think, a confusion of contingency and principle. Sal seems to want things explicable by principle, and lack of multiple instances suggest to him that there is no principle involved. But it may simply be a general lack of the necessary circumstances in history.
My understanding is prokayotes don’t have spliceosomal introns. They have other kinds of introns like Group I and Group II and for achaeal prokaryotes, archaeal introns.
Am I not understanding this issue correctly?
FWIW, when I looked a E. Coli aaRS I didn’t see any introns in the annotations.
The human or other eukaryotic genome? I have to spool up my gene browsing skills. It’s been a while since I tried to do a gene navigation.
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC177115/pdf/1773897.pdf
This exposes the problem with you as the rezident philosopher here at TSZ. Imagine that someone won’t be convinced by your argument and see if you can figure out why. You’re the philosopher. Figure it out.
Meanwhile you, even with your undying devotion to skepticism, present no evidence or argument for anything that might be capable of challenging your faith.
Sal +1
Not everything mentioned in the Torah concerning the Account of the Beginning is as the vulgar imagine…
– Maimonides
So how much information was smuggled in Mung?
stcordova,
You’re right; I was rather slack in my wording. They only have self-splicing introns, and those very rarely.
I don’t see spliceosomal introns (or anything else in Eukaryotes) as sound evidence of a ‘poof’, though. Evolution, by its very nature, tends to erasure of history. The serial acquisition of changes such as sex, mitochondria/plastids, cytoskeletons, nuclei, mitosis, linear chromosomes, multiple origins of replication and so on, and staged acquisition of each, is perfectly plausible. All that is required to explain the present pattern, of a universal set of Eukaryote features with no extant intermediates, is extinction of the transitional forms. Which, as each step may be an improvement on the last, is not all that unlikely.
If one thinks such serial extinction is special pleading, don’t look me in the eye and say ‘poof’ is better!
How typical of the poor cornered christian. When you know you’ve got no arguments, strawman the skeptics using your own tenets in an insulting tone: “you are being religious!, takes more faith to be skeptic, LOLOLOLOL!!11!1”
You know full well there’s no devotion, faith or religion involved in skepticism, and you should know using those in a demeaning way, when those are what you base your entire worldview on, only outlines your pathetic inferiority complex
Keep it up Mungy
KN said;
Yeah, I’d like to see you support that assertion, KN. Just because the one assumes good is an innate, unchangeable quality of god doesn’t mean you cannot argue from the existence of good to the existence of god. That’s a big, fat non-sequitur.
You can argue for whatever you want, William. Personally I find the argument that the Universe was created by an omnipotent, omniscient creator as plausible as any other explanation for the existence of the universe.
Whether it’s Craig, Plantinga or Thomas Aquinas making the argument, I’m perfectly happy to say that, as far as it goes, they may be true explanations for the existence of the universe. But, like the underpants gnome reasoning, there is a gap between needing a creator to explain the creation of the universe and deriving the attributes of this creator*.
The middle bit is where humans do the creating.
*Other than “creates universes”, obviously!
THE MORAL ARGUMENT MURRAY! You have no moral argument anymore if it’s all in the premises! Will it ever sink? Obviously not
Allan: I understand Nick Lane is a well-regarded OOL researcher. But I don’t know whether arguments he advances in his latest book have been subject to peer review in the professional literature.
Have you had a chance to read his book or have you seen any such analysis of his arguments for the commonness of simple life but the possible rareness of complex life?
Speaking of a philosopher’s intuition, did you see the NDPR review of Rescher’s book on epistemology? The last paragraph describes an unorthodox application of intuition while making a point which may apply to both our scientific arguments and intuitions about OOL and consciousness:
On the whole, Rescher’s discussions are sober yet sanguine regarding his epistemic pessimism; however, he ends the book with a jarring exercise. Instead of surveying human cognitive limitations from the inside, he does so from without. For this purpose, he does not call upon the divine or any holy host, but rather invents an alien species, “intelligent little green creatures from the planet ZONK.” These alien scientists-cum-anthropologists survey the human sciences, describe our research technologies, and assess our current theoretical advancements. Rescher’s chapter is written in the voice of these aliens as their report to their central scientific institution. The exercise is usefully illustrative, as the ZONK aliens, given their environment of mostly water (they, it seems, are something like psychic jellyfish), find our solid-state physics developed well past theirs. Yet they find our progress in areas in which they have done significant research lacking (areas Rescher terms psychointegration and processual hydrodynamics, precisely the kind of areas in which psychic jellyfish would excel). The objective of the alien report is to be a case in point about the management of cognitive limitation, given interest and resources: “knowledge is inevitability developed by a civilization with its own resources and from its own point of view” (195). The chapter, however illustrative, is quite jarring in its change of pace; the rest of the book had given no hint of impending science fiction.
I’ve read The Vital Question and Nick Lane is an enthusiastic and optimistic advocate for there being a natural explanation for OoL. It’s an open question as to whether OoL research can become less speculative when evidence supporting theory is only circumstantial. A hint that there’s life elsewhere in the universe would be a huge positive input.
“If natural selection is the mechanism of much of evolution, does the evolution of the major forms (like prokaryote vs. eukaryote, unicellular vs. multicellular, etc.) proceed by typical or black swan events?
[As a side note, when there is a Black Swan stock market crash, it isn’t a POOF, but a sequence of small steps adding up to an atypical set of events. Black Swan doesn’t necessarily imply POOF, but it can still be viewed as a highly exceptional phenomenon.]”
As a side note, there’s nothing Black Swan about stock market crashes. Are waterfalls on a river untypical? Uncommon? Unnatural? They have nothing at odds with the nature of river as such.
Similarly, instead of contrasting “typical events” with “Black Swan events” as if there were a fundamental distinction there (really, there isn’t), I’d contrast “natural” with “unnatural” (meaning against nature, adverse to nature, either impossible by natural means or not serving a natural purpose – but don’t conflate this with “supernatural”). Black swans may be uncommon, but there’s nothing unnatural about them. The appropriate question is: If (white) swans exist, would black swans upset the balance of nature in some way, be an impossibility for some reason, fail to serve natural ends the way swans in general do?
The Black Swan thing has a bias of irrelevance to it.
BruceS,
In the statement you quoted I was simply offering a caution that the present rarity or absence of something is not a sure guide to its rarity in history. But I actually tend to agree with Lane’s argument, and have casually offered similar speculations in fora such as these before – that prokaryotic life is probably common, but complex life probably rare. As far as we can tell, complexification depends upon something specific to eukaryotes – cytoskeletons, mitochondria and sex are the prime candidates.
The complexities, upon which further complexity has been built, are obviously not ten-a-penny, and there appears no fundamental driver towards complexity in a population of simple replicators. The circumstances that led to complexity in a numerically rather minor set of organisms on this planet were contingent rather than driven by any ‘principle’ of complexification – in the first instance, the presence of a clade of cell-wall-free prokaryotes. Without that, I doubt that the major drivers – mitochondria and sex – could have been encountered, and life would just churn on in its indefinitely prokaryotic way.
‘Complexification’ in eukaryotes is IMO a consequence of a change in energy budget and a change in genetic dynamics, which resulted from 3 genomes in the one cell – mitochondria and 2 haploid genomes – and the additional levels of selection and change they bring to bear through the wider population.
No, Dazz. You can make the moral argument to the existence of god ( “oughts” requiring purpose, purpose requiring mind, universal oughts requiring a universal creator, aka “god”, universal moral oughts requiring absolute authority which give us the moral right to defy institutions, society, and law). It is at that point that the Euthyphro dilemma is an issue, which boils down to a choice between what it assumes are the only two kinds of “god to good” relationships that can exist.
These are implied theological premises which the dilemma makes – that god is either (1) the kind of god that submits to a good which is external to that god, or (2) the kind of god which makes what is good by issuing forth commands. The dilemma’s questions directly imply those two theological premises as the total of what kinds of god might exist.
IOW, it is after you make the moral argument to god that you must choose what kind of god (inasmuch as how god relates to what is good) solves the dilemma. The dilemma doesn’t ask you to prove which premised god is real; it just asks for a premised god that solves the dilemma, deceptively asking you to choose between the two it offers, as if those are the only two kinds of theological premises available.
But, as with Pascal’s Wager, there are other options available.
That is the reason it is false dichotomy. After you reason from good to god (the moral argument), there are more than the two kinds of god the dilemma asks you to choose from; there is a third, where god is not (1) the kind of god that is subject to an externally binding good, nor where (2) god is the kind of god that makes what is good by issuing commands, but rather where (3) god is the kind of god that is the unchangeable, fundamental basis of what is good, and cannot change that aspect of its nature, nor change what is good throughout creation.
Alan Fox said:
Yes, but I’m not trying to “derive the attributes of the creator” here. Someone challenged me with the Euthyphro dilemma, and I’m explaining how the Euthyphro dilemma is a false dichotomy that can be rather easily solved.