ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge;

… it is those who know little, and not those who know much, who assert that this or that problem will never be solved by science

I have read this article, calmed down and started to write. Actually, I have not waited; though like the United States I am disappointed rather than outraged.

There is a dichotomy (I have been waiting for years to use that word again) between the fact that the argument against creationism can use both complexity and simplicity. Ockham’s Razor would suggest that the introduction of a sweeping outside entity as the designer of the entire cosmos is an increase in the complications – who designed the designer? We are into GOD Over Djinn territory – an acronym for itself, something which seems just too good at explaining the absurdity of the introduction of a creator. But hey – it works! The converse side of this is that the wholistic (sic) system, the result of the billions of years of interaction between entities is actually beautifully simple when looked at together. If you throw marbles into a square frame, randomly, hose them in, they will eventually form a pyramid, with no outside interaction other than that of geometry and gravity – the stable marbles become bases for the next layer – a sort of survival of the fittest. I am reminded of Volvox here. Expand that to cover the interaction of all particles and despite the seemingly infinite number of combinations, the survival of stable states becomes inevitable without the need for any design.

We come back to the infinite number of Monkeys and the script for Hamlet. This has to be clarified because an infinite number of Monkeys would come up with the script instantly because one of them (actually an infinite number as a proportion of infinity) would come up with the script on its first attempt. One Monkey shall we say? The creationist argument is that the beauty of the script is impossible to create even given geological time (not that extreme creationism believes in even that). However we have to look at smaller units of “beauty” or in the case of text, probably “meaning”. Maybe this argument is a little removed from the complexities of evolution, but the idea is that a small unit of meaning is able to “survive” better than a small unit of random text which has less meaning. As soon as some element of meaning raises itself above the common huddle of random junk, it can survive intact, it will remain. When two units of low-level meaning come together, they might form a unit with a higher level of meaning and therefore survive together. The upshot is that we are not starting over with each attempt at the script. Get the word “to” and it will survive long enough for it to come across the word “be”. And so on.

I sometimes rage against the heuristic approach while using it all the time in my testing. However, this is what nature does all the time, trying things (though “trying” suggests an intelligent selection of something to try when in actual fact it is just a random stream of things, which are tested by outside factors) to see what survives best. The end result is something of practical ability and also enough beauty to satisfy any criteria of great and good that might in the past have been used as an element of faith. Natural entities just seem “right”, even without having to examine them microscopically; they just fit with their environment. The universe achieves a balance – actually an infinite number of smaller balances, which in turn interact to create larger stable islands in the chaos of sub-atomic particles which make up everything. Overall, the universe is a mess of unorganised junk. The organised parts, with the human brain up near the top of the pyramid, do not violate any rules about the decay of matter into chaos because the amount of organised matter in the Universe is tiny compared to the soup of chaos. In a universe filled with water there will be random spots where a significant amount will boil spontaneously without the input of any outside energy.

I got half-way through an article amount Zero-point energy in water and I should finish it; but this seems to suggest that a good deal of biology is dependent on something which seems like a free lunch in terms of energy. Water is strange in that any other comparable compound would behave completely differently – freeze from the bottom up because it becomes denser when colder – and so not be able to support life. Some will see this as proof that the Universe was designed for us to live in though the anthropic principle dismisses this – the universe is the way it is not because it was designed for us to live in but because it allowed us to come into being. If it was vastly different, we would not be here to see it. This of course suggests the possibility that this Universe is just one on many where no life has developed enough to contemplate its own existence. It’s like thinking that coming from Great Britain is the best thing going and why should you be so lucky as to be here – safe from the famine and natural disasters than proliferate around the rest of the world? Apart from being pompous, this is just plain wrong. There are many arguments against this not least of which is that someone has to come from here. And then there are probably plenty of people in every country of the world who think they are truly blessed to live where they do. We of course like familiarity. Well most people do. The business arguments regarding change as being good are often just smoke-screens for the need to keep an economy going by selling us new things though being in the line I am, maybe I should not dwell on that too much.