Tag: cosmology

Chance and Necessity

If you free-associate the word “chance,” you may arrive at “I’ll take my chances” before potentially arriving at Thomas Bayes’ “Doctrine of Chances”. Jacques Monod was an early explorer of the collision of probability and chance in biology.

THE PRINCE OF CHANCE

Jacques Monod grew up just down the coast from Monte Carlo in Cannes, France, another town famous for its casinos and, later, its film festival. Graced with movie star looks—one prominent French journalist described him as a “prince” who resembled Hollywood icon Henry Fonda, as well as considerable musical talent, and an exceptional intellect, Monod struggled to decide on a career path through his twenties. After distinguishing himself in the French Resistance, Monod rose to fame not as an actor or musician, but as a brilliant biologist. He shared the 1965 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for seminal discoveries about how genes work.

A pioneer in the field of molecular biology, Monod was privy to the blizzard of discoveries in the 1950s and early 1960s about the molecules that determined the characteristics of living things—what Monod and others dubbed “the secrets of life.” He kept close company with a relatively small international community of leading researchers. For example, when James Watson and Francis Crick cracked the structure of DNA (deoxyribonucleic acid) in 1953, Monod was one of the first with whom Watson shared the breakthrough.

But as a Frenchman steeped in his culture’s deep philosophical traditions, Monod was interested in science for more than just science’s sake. After the war, Monod befriended France’s leading philosopher-writer Albert Camus, and the two men pondered questions of human existence in Left Bank cafés. Monod felt that the public misunderstood the principal purpose of science as being the creation of technology. Rather, Monod believed technology was merely a by-product. He said, “the most important results of science have been to change the relationship of man to the universe, or the way he sees himself in the universe”—a relationship of equally intense interest to his friend Camus.

Monod thought that there were profound philosophical implications of the new molecular biology, particularly in the realm of heredity, which had gone largely unnoted in the broader culture. Several years after his Nobel Prize and Camus’ untimely death, he decided to write a book to try to bring the meaning of modern biology to laypersons.

“[T]he ‘secret of life’…has been laid bare,” he wrote.

“This, a considerable event, ought certainly to make itself strongly felt in contemporary thinking.”

Monod used several chapters to describe the insights that had very recently emerged from the study of DNA and the deciphering of the genetic code. He understood this knowledge would be unfamiliar to most readers, so he included an appendix with chemical structures of proteins and nucleic acids, and a primer on how the genetic code worked.

In a matter-of-fact style, he explained genetic mutations as accidental alterations—substitutions, additions, deletions, or rearrangements—in the text of DNA, in the sequence of the long strings of chemical bases (ACTTGATAA, etc.) that make up genes.

Then, almost without warning, he turned to the broader implications of how mutations arise in DNA. It is worth quoting him at length for after 111 pages of background, he delivered one of the most powerful ideas in five centuries of science (all italics are original):

“We call these events accidental; we say they are random occurrences. And since they constitute the only possible source of modifications in the genetic text, itself the sole repository of the organism’s hereditary structure, it necessarily follows that chance alone is at the source of every innovation, of all creation in the biosphere.

“Pure chance, absolutely free but blind, at the very root of the stupendous edifice of evolution: this central concept of modern biology is no longer one among other possible or even conceivable hypotheses. It is today the sole conceivable hypothesis, the only one that squares with observed and tested fact. And nothing warrants the supposition—or the hope—that on this score our position is likely ever to be revised.

“There is no scientific concept, in any of the sciences, more destructive of anthropocentrism than this one.”

In essence, heretofore obscure discoveries in biochemistry and genetics (largely studied at that time in simple bacteria) had upended two millennia of philosophy and religion that put humans at the center or apex of creation. “Man was the product of an incalculable number of fortuitous events,” Monod wrote. “The result of a huge Monte Carlo game, where our number eventually did come out, when it might not well have appeared.”

Le Hasard et la nécessité (Chance and Necessity) appeared in France in October 1970. It was a fairly technical book with several chapters on philosophy and genetics, and those appendices full of chemical diagrams. A first-time author, Monod did not know what reactions to expect.

The merde hit the fan.

The book received dozens of reviews across France and quickly became a bestseller—second only to the French translation of Erich Segal’s Love Story (this was France after all. After it was translated into English, reviews and interviews with Monod were featured in several of the most prominent British and American newspapers and magazines.

Many commentators immediately recognized the threat chance posed to traditional ideas of humanity’s origins and purpose. To Arthur Peacocke, a British biochemist turned prominent theologian, Monod had put forth “one of the strongest and most influential attacks of the century on theism.” A flurry of articles and books appeared with titles such as Anti-Chance: A Reply to Monod’s Chance and Necessity, Beyond Chance and Necessity, and God, Chance, and Necessity. Monod was invited to debate philosophers and theologians both in France and abroad, on television, radio, and in print.

American Calvinist theologian and pastor R.C. Sproul summed up the high stakes posed by chance in the first page of his book Not A Chance:

“It is not necessary for chance to rule in order to supplant God. Indeed, chance requires little authority at all if it is to depose God; all it needs to do the job is to exist. The mere existence of chance is enough to rip God from his cosmic throne. Chance does not need to rule; it does not need to be sovereign. If it exists as a mere impotent, humble servant, it leaves God not only out of date, but out of a job.” More than two hundred pages later, Sproul concluded:

“Chance as a real force is a myth. It has no basis in reality and no place in scientific inquiry. For science and philosophy to continue to advance in knowledge, chance must be demythologized once and for all.”

Sproul and other critics argued that what scientists perceived as chance merely reflected a lack of knowledge of true causes. Perhaps that was the expression of hope to which Monod alluded—the hope that as scientists learned more, our position on the role of chance would somehow be revised.

A SECOND CHANCE

The ensuing fifty years have not played out as either Monod or his detractors hoped. The Frenchman thought that the new insights from molecular biology should be a turning point for modern society-away from traditional beliefs about causes in the natural world toward one that embraced randomness and our chance existence.

Ha! Fat chance. The excitement and fuss stirred by Chance and Necessity simmered down, and Monod passed away a few years later. Surveys reveal that the majority of Americans, for example, continue to believe that everything on earth happens for His reasons.

But Monod’s critics should take no comfort. The province of chance in the biosphere and human life has been revised, although not at all in the scope or direction that they hoped.

The domain of chance has expanded into realms neither Monod nor anyone else imagined.

As we have learned much more about the history and workings of the planet, we have been startled to discover how the course of life has been buffeted by a variety of cosmological and geological accidents—without which we would not be here. As we have explored human history, we have seen how pandemics, droughts, and other civilization-changing episodes have been triggered by random, singular events in nature that easily might not have happened. And as we have probed human biology and the factors that impact our individual lives, we have caught chance red-handed, reigning over the often-thin line between life and death.

This book tells the stories that Monod could not—of astonishing discoveries from the planetary to the molecular scale, from great upheavals across the globe to the machinery of chance that operates within every cell of every creature, including ourselves. And while these discoveries vaporize the comforts of anthropocentrism, the story of chance, I hope you will come to agree, is much more than highfalutin philosophy or the refutation of theologians’ wishful thinking.

I hope that you are awed—awed by the power and the drama of asteroids slamming into the planet, of continents colliding, and of the rapid rising and falling of ice and oceans; awed by the realization that we live on (and are at the mercy of a planet that is far more unstable than our short lives perceive; awed by the knowledge of how random chance is at the source of all of the beautiful and wondrous creatures with whom we share the planet; awed by the unique invisible accidents that made each one of us; and awed by the fact that we humans, recent descendants of bands of hunter-gatherers who persevered through a period of exceptional chaos, have in just the last fifty years or so, figured all of this out!

My goal here is to be comprehensible without being comprehensive. It is almost trivial to claim that the world is the way it is or that we are here because of a long chain of chance, albeit fortunate, events. The explanatory power I seek comes from specificity. It is essential to unpack some of those events to appreciate how they shape the direction of life. The layout of the book follows a simple three-part logic. I’ll begin with inanimate, external chance events that have shaped the conditions for life (Part One, “Stuff Happens”), and then turn to the internal random mechanism within every creature that generates the adaptations to those conditions (Part Two, “A World of Mistakes”). Then, I bring the story to the personal level (Part Three, “23 and You”) and how chance impacts our natural lives, as well as our deaths. Our chance-driven existence shatters long-held beliefs about humanity’s place and raises challenging questions about the meaning and purpose of our lives. In the Afterword, I’ll offer some possible replies with the help of some special guests.

This is a relatively small book for a really big idea. Science has given us a handful of really big ideas over the centuries, but they have been received in funny ways. Darwin had a huge idea that was very simple to understand, and even though the evidence is massive and everywhere, many refuse to believe it. Einstein had a brand new idea, and even though few understand it or the evidence for it, most everyone seems to believe it. Monod had a great idea, but these days most people (other than scholars) have not heard of it, or of him.

My greatest hope, then, is that this short book might be chance’s second chance.

Sean B. Carroll, A Series of Fortunate Events: Chance and the Making of the Planet, Life, and You, Princeton University Press, 2020, pp. 6-12.

Modern biology as described by Monod pushes the linkage of probability, randomness and chance to the center. At the time, this was a very radical and profound way of looking at biology. If we combine Monod’s biology with theoretical physics like Lawrence Krauss’ A Universe from Nothing: Why There Is Something Rather than Nothing, we realize that accidentality is the bedrock on which our knowledge of the universe is built.

Heidegger vs. Marx as World Watchers

Marx (1818-1883) implies that the foundation of human reality is econo-technical, and on that basis society creates thoughts and philosophies, art and poems. This explanation seems appealing when we think of the economic development of China in our time, for example, or the rise of computers and software.

In a way, Heidegger (1889-1976) turns this upside down. At the basis of world history is society producing culture. You can make a simple “cartoon” and say that for Marx, economics shapes everything, and for Heidegger culture replaces economics.

For example, in his book, What Is Called Thinking? (English translation, 1968, Harper & Row), Heidegger argues the foundation of all Western thinking and culture comes from axioms such as logos [Ancient Greek: λόγος] (from which we have logic, cosmology, psychology, epistemology, etc.), as well as legein (the Greek verb λέγειν, “to speak”).

Heidegger states (on page 204), “Without the λέγειν of that logic, modern man would have to make do without his automobile. There would be no airplanes, no turbines, no Atomic Energy Commission.”

Our MI comment on this is that any monocausal explanation of how mankind went from Neanderthal to the Manhattan skyline is completely inadequate. You must create a “double-helix” of Marx and Heidegger, adding the dimensions of surprise and unintended consequences. Without the physics concepts of emergence and complexity, we have no possibility of understanding how we got to now. In the site tagline, we use the word “composite” as a reference to this kind of deeper understanding.

Education and Intuition

The 2014 PBS TV series, How We Got to Now is a good miniseries on improvements in glass-making, sewage, water management, etc. that serve as the material/organizational basis for this modern world.

At one point in the series, the host Steven Johnson, a kind of historian of innovation, reveals his idea of how innovation occurs and he focuses on mavericks whose breakthrough is not a sudden “Eureka!” moment, but rather what Johnson calls “a slow hunch.” In other words, the innovators struggle along with a partially understood sense of possibility, very inchoate in the beginning, that comes into better focus with the passage of years and decades, via missteps and boondoggles.

The science writer Arthur Koestler shines a different “flashlight” on this problem of intuitive creativity and its bearing fruit:

Arthur Koestler, CBE (UK: 5 September 1905 – 1 March 1983) was a Hungarian British author and journalist. Koestler was born in Budapest. His masterful book, The Sleepwalkers, is a kind of defense of the way people in the past benefited from a productive sleepwalking on their journeys to scientific advance.

The Sleepwalkers: A History of Man’s Changing Vision of the Universe is a 1959 book by Arthur Koestler. It traces the history of Western cosmology from ancient Mesopotamia to Isaac Newton. He suggests that discoveries in science arise through a process akin to sleepwalking. Not that they arise by chance, but rather that scientists are neither fully aware of what guides their research, nor are they fully aware of the implications of what they discover.

A central theme of the book is the changing relationship between faith and reason. Koestler explores how these seemingly contradictory threads existed harmoniously in many of the greatest intellectuals of the West. He illustrates that while the two are estranged today, in the past the most ground-breaking thinkers were often very spiritual.

Another recurrent theme of this book is the breaking of paradigms in order to create new ones. People—scientists included—hold on to cherished old beliefs with such love and attachment that they refuse to see the wrong in their ideas and the truth in the ideas that are to replace them.

The conclusion he puts forward at the end of the book is that modern science is trying too hard to be rational. Scientists have been at their best when they allowed themselves to behave as “sleepwalkers,” instead of trying too earnestly to ratiocinate.

Add to this overview the “creativity” discussion on The Charlie Rose Show in The Brain Series (2010), where Professor Eric Kandel, the Nobel-prize physiologist, states forthrightly that brain research has no idea about creativity and the prospect of explaining creativity in terms of the brain is very distant indeed.

The arrival of a “slow hunch” (Steven Johnson) and “productive sleepwalking,” as opposed to unproductive kinds of woolgathering (Arthur Koestler), are mind, personality and spirit issues, although they do have brain-chemical “correlations” that cannot be explained mechanistically.

Mysteries all have physical/chemical “correlations” but cannot be simplistically reduced to biochem or genomics.

Education and Ambiguity Awareness: A Polyvalent World

Sleepwalkers and sleepwalking are both destructive and constructive and show us the ambiguity in all phenomena.

The World War I chronicle of Professor Christopher Clark, The Sleepwalkers, from 2012, is described this way:

On the morning of June 28, 1914, when Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife, Sophie Chotek, arrived at Sarajevo railway station, Europe was at peace. Thirty-seven days later, it was at war. The conflict that resulted would kill more than fifteen million people, destroy three empires, and permanently alter world history.

The Sleepwalkers reveals in gripping detail how the crisis leading to World War I unfolded. Drawing on fresh sources, it traces the paths to war in a minute-by-minute, action-packed narrative that cuts among the key decision centers in Vienna, Berlin, St. Petersburg, Paris, London, and Belgrade.

Distinguished historian Christopher Clark examines the decades of history that informed the events of 1914 and details the mutual misunderstandings and unintended signals that drove the crisis forward in a few short weeks.

How did the Balkans—a peripheral region far from Europe’s centers of power and wealth—come to be the center of a drama of such magnitude? How had European nations organized themselves into opposing alliances, and how did these nations manage to carry out foreign policy as a result? Clark reveals a Europe racked by chronic problems—a fractured world of instability and militancy that was, fatefully, saddled with a conspicuously ineffectual set of political leaders. These rulers, who prided themselves on their modernity and rationalism, stumbled through crisis after crisis and finally convinced themselves that war was the only answer.

On the other hand, the great science writer and intellectual Arthur Koestler (died in 1983) in his own book, The Sleepwalkers, (originally, 1959) argues that the revolution in cosmology associated with the names of Copernicus, Kepler, Galileo, et al depended on visionary thinking, a kind of “sleepwalking.”

Lastly, the classic novel, The Sleepwalkers by Hermann Broch (died in 1851) condemns sleepwalking as the basis of Europe and Germany’s descent into nightmare.

Important works by Broch are The Sleepwalkers (German: “Die Schlafwandler,” 1932) and The Guiltless (German: “Die Schuldlosen,” 1950). The Sleepwalkers is a trilogy, where Broch takes “the degeneration of values” as his theme. Various generations are depicted as sleepwalking through their times and eras without any ability to “see past” their time, place, era. They were “sleepwalking.” This made them liable to demagogic deceptions and recruitment.

On the other hand, the experience and story of Kekulé (died 1896) and his scientific discoveries prodded by dreams and reveries and sleepwalking give us a story that argues against seeing sleepwalking as always negative:
Kekulé’s dream and “good kinds of sleepwalking.”

Friedrich August Kekulé, later Friedrich August Kekule von Stradonitz (7 September 1829 – 13 July 1896), was a German organic chemist. From the 1850s until his death, Kekulé was one of the most prominent chemists in Europe, especially in theoretical chemistry. He was the principal founder of the theory of chemical structure.

The new understanding of benzene (C6H6), and hence of all aromatic compounds, proved to be so important for both pure and applied chemistry after 1865 that in 1890 the German Chemical Society organized an elaborate appreciation in Kekulé’s honor, celebrating the twenty-fifth anniversary of his first benzene paper.

Here Kekulé spoke of the creation of the theory.

He said that he had discovered the ring shape of the benzene molecule after having a reverie or day-dream of a snake seizing its own tail (this is an ancient symbol known as the ouroboros).

Kekulé’s story of “dreaming up” the structure of benzene (C6H6) gives us another historical example of Arthur Koestler-type “good sleepwalking” ie visionary dreams and reveries that really enhance “objective” concrete scientific analysis and not only art works.

It is educational to see the inner ambiguity of words and phenomena (such as sleepwalking) because this duality and “polyvalence” applies to many cases.

Education and Wittgenstein “Language Games”

It is instructive for a student to get a grip on the whole question of “language games” à la Wittgenstein, who says that these “games” (i.e., ambiguities) are central to thinking in general and thinking about philosophy in particular.

Let’s make up our own example and step back from the meaning of the preposition “in.”

The comb is in my back pocket has nothing to do with the “in” of “he’s in a good mood” or “he’s in a hurry” or “he’s in a jam or pickle” or “he’s in trouble.” Furthermore, in modern deterministic neuroscience language, a good mood is a footnote to brain and blood chemicals so that means that a good mood is in you via chemicals and not you in it.

Does the word “jam” here mean difficulty or somehow the condiment called jam? You don’t know and can never without more information (i.e., meaningful context).

Imagine we take a time machine and are standing in front of the home of Charles Dickens in London in his time say in the 1840s. They say he’s working on a new novel called Oliver Twist.

Someone says: a novel by Dickens is a kind of “fictional universe.” Shall we say that because Dickens is in his home (at home) in London (though in London is itself confusing since London as a city is not like a pocket to a comb or wallet) his fictional universe is “in” the universe which might be a multiverse according to current cosmological speculations? That’s not what we mean. The fictional universe of Dickens is a shared cultural abstraction involving his stories, characters, people absorbing his tales, his mind and our mind, books and discussions. A fictional universe is as “weird” as the other universe. The preposition “in” does not begin to capture what’s going on which is socio-cultural and not “physicalistic.”

We begin to intuit that everyday language which we use and handle as the most obvious thing in the world in constant use, is completely confusing once you look at it more clearly.

Einstein’s friend at Princeton, Kurt Gödel, looked into language as a logical phenomenon and concluded that it’s entirely puzzling that two people could actually speak and understand one another given the ambiguities and open-endedness of language.

A language-game (German: Sprachspiel) is a philosophical concept developed by Ludwig Wittgenstein, referring to simple examples of language use and the actions into which the language is woven. Wittgenstein argued that a word or even a sentence has meaning only as a result of the “rule” of the “game” being played. Depending on the context, for example, the utterance “Water!” could be an order, the answer to a question, or some other form of communication.

In his work, Philosophical Investigations (1953), Ludwig Wittgenstein regularly referred to the concept of language-games. Wittgenstein rejected the idea that language is somehow separate and corresponding to reality, and he argued that concepts do not need clarity for meaning. Wittgenstein used the term “language-game” to designate forms of language simpler than the entirety of a language itself, “consisting of language and the actions into which it is woven” and connected by family resemblance (German: Familienähnlichkeit).

The concept was intended “to bring into prominence the fact that the speaking of language is part of an activity, or a form of life,” which gives language its meaning.

Wittgenstein develops this discussion of games into the key notion of a “language-game.”

Gödel saw that language has deep built-in ambiguities which were as puzzling as math and logic ones:

Gödel’s (died in 1978) incompleteness theorems are two theorems of mathematical logic that demonstrate the inherent limitations of every formal axiomatic system capable of modeling basic arithmetic. These results, published by Kurt Gödel in 1931, are important both in mathematical logic and in the philosophy of mathematics.

Take any simple sentence: say, “men now count.”

Without a human context of meaning, how would you ever decide if this means count in the sense of numeracy (one apple, two apples, etc.) or something entirely from another domain (i.e. males got the vote in a certain country and now “count” in that sense).

When you say, “count me in” or count me out,” how does that make any sense without idiomatic language exposure?

If you look at all the meanings of “count” in the dictionary and how many set phrases or idioms involve the word “count,” you will immediately get the sense that without a human “life-world” (to use a Husserl phrase), you could never be sure of any message or sentence at all involving such a fecund word.

One task of real education is to put these difficulties on the student’s plate and not avoid them.

Linguistics as such is not what’s at issue but rather a “meta-intelligent” sense of language, written or spoken as highly mysterious with or without the research into vocal cords, language genes (FOXP2, say) or auditory science and the study of palates or glottal stops and fricatives, grammars and syntax.

Seeing this promotes deep education (i.e., where understanding touches holism in an enchanting way).

Scientism and Its Discontents: Movie About Hawking

Scientism is the view that science is truth and the rest is false, idiotic, or childish.

There’s a wonderful scene in the 2014 movie, The Theory of Everything (Eddie Redmayne plays Hawking) where the young Hawking is courting his wife to be at an evening party and he represents the quest for the theory of everything, hence the name of the movie.

His girlfriend expresses doubts about this and speaks a few words from the William Butler Yeats (died in 1939) poem “The Song of the Happy Shepherd” [full text]:

“Seek, then,
No learning from the starry men,
Who follow with the optic glass
The whirling ways of stars that pass —”

The poet (and Hawking’s fiancee in the film) are suspicious of the science-and-nothing-else cosmologists and astronomers “who follow with the optic glass the whirling ways of stars that pass.”

William Butler Yeats (13 June, 1865–28 January, 1939) was an Irish poet and one of the foremost figures of 20th-century literature. A pillar of the Irish literary establishment, he helped to found the Abbey Theatre, and in his later years served two terms as a Senator of the Irish Free State.

Yeats says in his works, “Education is not the filling of a pail, but rather the lighting of a fire.”

Our desire to “re-enchant” education might cause us to modify this Yeats aphorism slightly, “Education is not merely the filling of a pail, but rather the lighting of a fire.”