Science, complexity, and the origin of an intelligible Universe: a Christian/secular perspective

Have you ever wondered why, as humans, have the capacity to understand the world around us? This question have puzzled us for years now and I enjoy reading scientists’ and philosophers’ perspectives on it. Here, we have the privilege to have two scientists exploring this question and its potential answer from a Christian and a secular perspective.

1. We’ll introduce both writers to you and will share their emails at the end of their bios so that you can get in touch with them.

2. Each of them will present arguments from their experience as scientists and respective world-views in this order: Dr. Ian Hawkings and Bryan Gitschlag.

3. You can share your thoughts in the comments with us.

Christian thinker Dr. Ian Hawkins is the Chairman of the Department of Arts and Sciences and the Science Program Coordinator at Welch College. He has Bachelor's degrees in both chemistry and biochemistry from East Carolina University, a Master's degree from Vanderbilt University in Molecular Biology, and a Doctorate degree from Middle Tennessee State University in Chemistry Education. Dr. Hawkins has been teaching for over 11 years at both Welch College and Cumberland University. He has been married to his wife, Katie, for 11 years, and they have two boys, Joseph and Luke. Contact Dr. Ian Hawkins here: ihawkins@welch.edu

Raised in a deeply Christian community, secular thinker Bryan Gitschlag appreciated from a young age the question of where we come from. Inspired by his religious beliefs to study science in a quest to find answers to life's deepest questions, he spent his college years studying the Bible, world religions, and science side-by-side. After completing a bachelor of science in chemistry and biochemistry, he enrolled in graduate school at Vanderbilt University, where he is currently completing a PhD in biological sciences, with an emphasis on how life evolves and on what the evolution of life can teach us about modern health issues like disease and aging. To address these issues, his research is focused on understanding the factors governing the transmission of genetic mutations in the mitochondrial DNA from one generation to the next. Outside of the biology lab, Bryan maintains a hobby of truth-seeking by studying physics, astronomy and philosophy, which has led him to become skeptical of supernatural claims and to depart from his former beliefs. Contact Bryan Gitschlag here: bryan.gitschlag@gmail.com

Christian Thinker Dr. Ian Hawkings: “Science, Complexity, and the origin of an intelligible Universe”

“One may say ‘the eternal mystery of the world is its comprehensibility.’ It is one of the great realizations of Immanuel Kant that the setting up of a real external world would be senseless without its comprehensibility.

 In speaking here concerning ‘comprehensibility, ‘the expression is used in its most modest sense. It implies: the production of some sort of order among sense impressions, this order being produced by the creation of general concepts, relations between these concepts, and by relations between the concepts and sense experience, these relations being determined in any possible manner. It is in this sense that the world of our sense experiences is comprehensible. The fact that it is comprehensible is a miracle.”

Einstein, Physicsand Reality(1)

 This quote by Albert Einstein was made in a journal article he wrote that was published in 1936. Einstein was speaking about the new discoveries in physics, both his own theory of relativity and newly minted quantum theory, considering changes in the philosophy of science and cultural changes. The world was growing weary of the positivism that seemed to pervade societies in the late 19thcentury. Science was progressively discovering new ideas that had led to technological advancements which had shaped the industrial revolution and made life a little better for most individuals compared to previous centuries. Political Revolutions had seemed to have taken their course and the world looked bright. However, Einstein and others had created new conundrums for scientific thinking and had rewritten the positivism of the late 19thcentury into a world of unknown possibilities.  Also, the cultural aspects of World War I and now the looming nature of World War II as well as the Great Depression had ceased to give people a sense of progression toward a utopian society. It is in this light that Einstein is speaking about the new physics and its implications for reality. Einstein here has a more honest and guarded approach to hypothesis than would have been used in a generation previous due to the revolution his ideas were having.  So why does he make this statement about the comprehensibility of the universe and why does it strike him as a mystery? Partly this has to do with the current theories both of quantum mechanics and relativity. Einstein and others had overthrown Newton’s ideas which led many to question how much we could know from science and why is it that we can know about things that are unobservable. Einstein’s idea here is that it is remarkable that we should have a universe that works by laws that can be explained in mathematical terms and one in which there are observers such as us that can discern these patterns and laws. What is more fascinating is that we can use abstract thought and math that goes beyond our senses to understand the nature of the world. This can be seen easily by the ideas of Copernicus and Galileo in the understanding of the solar system and our planet’s movement around the sun. It is interesting to hear many people today talk about why it is that people thought the earth was stationary and yet there is no discernable use of our five senses that suggest that this is the case. We do not see or feel or hear or touch anything in our normal everyday lives that suggest that the earth is spinning on its axis or that it is spinning around the sun. Why is it that we can even determine these things at all? It is because we can make observations using tools of our own creation and then take lots of data from these observations and coalesce them into overarching patterns. This is what Einstein is talking about. How is it that the universe is ordered in such a way as to be knowable? Why should we expect nature to follow patterns? Why should these patterns be mathematically expressible? Why should we of all creatures that we know about, be the only ones that can comprehend math and make sense of these patterns in a way that allows us to manipulate and formulate them? This is the question that we want to understand and give insights into a possible answer.

History of the comprehensibility of Nature

            Einstein was not the first to think about such things. These ideas go back even to the ancient Greek philosophers. Pythagoras may have been the first even though we do not have any of his writings but those that wrote about Pythagoras tell us that he viewed the language of math to be extremely important. Pythagoras thought that math or numbers was somehow divine and that using math can help explain the way we ought to live. His ideas lived on in Plato. Plato in his book the Timaeusdescribes the idea of nature being a representation of a true “form”. (2) What Plato meant was that the reason nature can be understood to follow patterns was that they were representations of something transcendent that held things together. This idea that the world embodied some transcendent characters was prevalent throughout the ancient world and for philosophers was mainly due to the observations that nature and the world followed strict patterns. This can be most easily seen in the movement of the sun, moon, and stars. They had made observations and had calculated the exact movements of the systems to understand these patterns. Therefore, unique astronomical events such as eclipses caused so much consternation. This idea also plays out in Aristotle’s understanding of the cosmos. While Aristotle did not share Plato’s idea about the “forms”, he did believe that the heavens followed regular patterns of perfection as he understood them. It wasn’t until Galileo and others who observed changes in the heavens that this idea of a changeless heaven was finally done away with.

            Not only were Greek philosophers aware of this observable pattern in nature, but Jewish and early Christian thinkers were expounding on this idea and connecting it to their own ideas about God. Philo a Jewish philosopher from Alexandria picks up on this idea of the transcendent and its application to an all-knowing God. Early Christian thinkers such as Augustine, and Basil of Caesarea continue this theme and describe the revelation of God as two books, the book of nature, and the book of revelation (Bible). This theme continues into Islamic thinking in the middle ages and is also used in medieval times by several thinkers including Anselm and Aquinas among others. It is expanded upon further in philosophy right up to Einstein and even since then. The question again is why we should expect the world to fit a pattern that is both knowable and understandable by living beings in the cosmos. This question has not only been explored in the last millennia but the theistic answer to the question is what drove many to study and produce the discipline of science. That is that the belief in a creator who established an orderly creation and one that created man in a special way with qualities that allowed him to discover these truths, is the basis for belief in a knowable world.

Comprehensibility as the philosophical foundation of science

            While scientists seek to discover new information about the patterns of the world and how everything works, there has been a resurgence over the last 100 years into the understanding of the history and philosophy of science. These subjects about science tend to be ignored by scientists themselves and unfortunately many have not realized the importance of these fields. Recently, Stephen Hawking in his last book, The Grand Design, wrote that “philosophy is dead” and that the world no longer needs philosophy or religion to answer questions because these disciplines have not kept up with new discoveries in science. (4) Yet, John Cornwell in the Telegraph gives a critique saying that it may be Hawking that has not kept up since even at his own institution at Cambridge, there are many philosophers of science that have been working over 50 years on these new discoveries and the Faraday Institute which works to understand science, philosophy and religion and their interactions. However, what is so interesting about Hawking’s book is that while dismissing philosophy, he uses it in his book to talk about what he believes is true. He talks about M theory; which Roger Penrose has said is solely philosophy in that empirical scientific evidence could never be used to prove or disprove M theory. This seems to be what Hawking states later in the book. So why is this even an issue. Hawking is stating a very popular idea that science has taken over the authority from religion and philosophy due to its progressive discovery of more information. As the story goes, science has proven that over the last 500 years or so, what was once thought of as evidence for God has now been proven to consist of a straightforward natural explanation. This story fits what most scientists probably believe and that is scientism. The idea that science will eventually be able to answer all questions which is what Hawking is basically stating. The problem with this idea is that it is philosophically false. Why? Because to state that Science can or will answer all questions is not a statement of science because it cannot be verified empirically but is a philosophical statement. This means that while science may not want philosophy to impede on their progress it does. Philosophy has also shown over the last 50 years that science depends on faith in some philosophical principles to do their work.

The reason that rejecting philosophy and only using science is important, is that the very reason that science exists is because of a philosophical belief that the universe is comprehensible to us. Let’s look at this another way. If scientists did not believe that the universe was knowable then science would have never become a discipline of study. Hawking later in The Grand Designmakes this statement: “We are just an advanced breed of monkeys on a minor planet of a very average star. But we can understand the Universe. That makes us something very special.”(3) This belief in the ability of humans to understand the world is a philosophical belief and again not something that you can prove with science but without this belief the Hawking states here is imperative for anyone to think that science is worth our time an effort. In fact, historians of science have pointed out that science would have never developed if the culture did not believe in a knowable patterned world. Some historians have even suggested that science would only have developed and did develop in a theistic world view because this is the only worldview that believes in an ordered world. C.S. Lewis put it best when he said “‘Men became scientific because they expected Law in Nature, and they expected Law in Nature because they believed in a Legislator. In most modern scientists this belief has died: it will be interesting to see how long their confidence in uniformity survives it. Two significant developments have already appeared—the hypothesis of a lawless sub-nature, and the surrender of the claim that science is true. We may be living nearer than we suppose to the end of the Scientific Age.” (7) It is interesting in Hawking’s book that this is where he ends up at the end claiming that one cannot really know the truth of any theorem. Maybe Lewis was right that when science rejects or believes that it can supersede its prior beliefs in a knowable universe then the enterprise of science becomes mute. This idea that science comes from a “faith” if you will in these beliefs is not just a theistic understanding of science but also a clear reasonable one that many agnostics and atheists have understood. Recently I was listening to a podcast on Unbelievablewith Justin Brierly and he had Dr Alister McGrath and Dr. Bret Weinstein who were discussing the use of religion in a scientific age. (7)  Dr. Weinstein agreed that science operates on an underlying faith as well. This makes the importance of the belief in the comprehensibility of the universe as paramount to the future of science and its understanding of the world. While we know that every scientific theory comes with a caveat that we might learn something new and have to rework our theory, we continue to work at science because we have the belief that we are getting closer to the truth of reality by each new discovery that we make and without that underlying philosophical belief we simply would give up on science.

The magnitude of human ability to comprehend the universe

            As we have talked about the idea of comprehensibility it may come as a surprise to many that one would even spend time debating why the universe is knowable because this seems self-evident. However, what has struck scientists such as Hawking and Einstein as amazing is that the ability of humans to understand the world goes beyond just a simple faculty of helping us in our daily lives. In other words, our ability and place in the universe seems to give us an uncanny ability to understand things that are beyond our everyday concerns to grander ideas and concepts. I want to explore some of these to give you an idea of just how vast these abilities are and how we seem to be tailor made to make these types of observations.

Evidence from cosmology for complexity and intelligibility

            In quoting Einstein and Hawking one understands that the area with which they studied was the universe and its beginnings. If one wants to understand the unfathomable ability of humans to think about things that do not really affect our every day lives, one only must look at the theories of relativity and quantum mechanics. Maybe a history lesson here will help. Ever since the Greek philosophers many have concluded that the universe was eternal or at least this was the secular understanding of the world. Islamic thinkers in the middle ages countered this argument with the idea that if the universe was eternal then we would never have come to this point in time because if the universe extends infinitely in the past then this moment in time could never have been reached. While these arguments had some weight to them, Aristotelian thought came to pervade Western culture in the medieval period, and he believed in an eternal universe. In fact, Thomas Aquinas, a theologian, argued for the existence of God even if the universe were found to be eternal. These ideas held until Einstein’s work on relativity showed that the universe was expanding. In the mathematical equations that Einstein developed to expand the ideas of gravity across space he concluded that his formula would result in an expanding universe. This did not sit well with him and so he added a factor into his equations to keep the universe in a static or constant state. This, he would say later, was his worst mistake. A Belgian priest named Lemaitre designed a model after Einstein’s equations that led to an exploding universe from what he called a “primeval atom”. (3) This idea of a universe that is expanding was bolstered when Hubble discovered that stars and galaxies are moving away from us. Einstein conceded that his equation was right in the beginning and that the universe was expanding. This led to an uncomfortable idea for many in that this pointed to the beginning of the universe. For several years this theory was debated and was coined the “Big Bang” theory by Sir Fred Hoyle in an attempt to make fun of the theory. Hoyle continued to believe in a steady universe even though the evidence continued to pile up. In the 1960s several scientists discovered by using radio telescopes that they could detect a radiation level in the universe that existed everywhere and corresponded closely to the calculations of the radiation that would have been given off by the original Big Bang. This eliminated the steady state models and further gave evidence for a beginning. Work done by Hawking and Penrose, proved that even time itself had a beginning at this point and recently models by Borde, Guth, and Vilenkin indicate that no matter what happened in this early “primeval atom” state that the universe must have had a beginning. Robert Jastrow a leading cosmologist who worked at NASA has made several comments in his books and writing that give clear understanding of the magnitude of these findings. In an interview with Christianity Today he said: “Astronomers now find they have painted themselves into a corner because they have proven, by their own methods, that the world began abruptly in an act of creation… And they have found that all this happened as a product of forces they cannot hope to discover. That there are what I or anyone would call supernatural forces at work is now, I think, a scientifically proven fact.” (8) Now Jastrow goes much further in his ideas than most scientists would today, and Hawking’s book is meant to write against Jastrow’s take but the importance of the ideas behind these discoveries is important. So, the question is not what do these ideas suggest but how is it that we can learn about these things. This is not even something that we can observe but is based on mathematical modeling and then looking at the evidence left behind. One more recent observation is that if the Big Bang was true, we should see an exact amount of hydrogen and helium in the universe and this was proven only a few years ago. The evidence for this mathematical theory is accumulating but how is it that we can know these things in the first place. Mathematics, in particular, is important in these discussions because it is the mathematical formulas that drive our understanding of these past events. Mathematics has had several historical cases where mathematical abstract ideas have later proved helpful in real scientific problems. In other words, as we have explored math in unreal and abstract situations, we have come up with mathematical formulas that can explain these abstract ideas and it is not until later that we discover that the math involved can be an exact representation of a new scientific problem. Due to this, many scientists believe that mathematics is the language of the universe. 

            Further evidence from cosmology speaks to the nature of having intelligent observers that can make sense of the ordered universe. One amazing aspect to the laws of physics is that it has been determined over the last few decades that these laws seems to be fine-tuned for life. Freeman Dyson stated in his book, Disturbing the Universe, “The more I examine the universe and the details of its architecture, the more evidence I find that the universe in some sense must have known we were coming.”(9) This is due to the factors that govern the universe such as the force of gravity, the strong nuclear force, the masses of the fundamental particles, and many other factors. If the force of gravity, for instance, was changed by just 1 part in 10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 then planets would not exist or all the mass in the universe would be all stuck together. (10) If the mass density throughout the universe was different by 1 part in 100,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 then again, no planets or solar systems or anything that could have life. (10) This continues for other forces. If the strong nuclear force was slightly more then no hydrogen present, if slightly weaker then only hydrogen present. If the electromagnetic force were slightly stronger or weaker then no bonding of atoms, which means no larger chemicals, which means nothing living. This is true for a host of forces. This just illustrates the magnitude of these forces. Hugh Ross gives an analogy for just the force of gravity. (11) If you take the entire continent of North America and cover it with dimes and then add dimes on top of that until the depth of the dimes reached the moon, and then did this for a billion North American continents and then at random picked out the one dime colored red in that entire stack, that would be like landing on the exact measurement of gravity. This is bewildering when you think that we just looked at gravity only but did not consider any of the other forces. This has led many to postulate other universes to account for how incredibly lucky we are to live in a universe that can have life. Again, the astonishing thing is that if these forces must be this exact in why we should ever expect to see a universe with any intelligent beings at all.

Evidence from our position in the universe

            Not only do we have the ability to understand abstract math and then apply mathematical equations to problems like the universe, and we also have observed a finely-tuned world for life to be able to exist, but we also have found that our particular location in the universe is unique for our use of discovery. Several years ago, Guillermo Gonzalez and Jay Richards wrote a book entitled the Privileged Planet.(12) In the book they outline several lines of evidence from our local planet and position in the solar system that makes conditions right for living systems. This is just extending the fine-tuning argument to include things other than the laws of physics. These included, the earth’s position in comparison to its sun, the size of the moon, the gases necessary in our atmosphere, the type of sun that earth orbits, and the luxury of having larger planets outside of our orbit. These factors help maintain earth’s climate, allow for water to exist as a liquid, make gases available for energy capture, protect us from asteroids and other space debris, and they also help regulate the ocean tides. What was most fascinating about their discoveries was there seemed to be a link between the things necessary for life and what allowed observers to see the stars. For instance, we happen to be in a clear area of our galaxy out of the way from dust clouds. This is not only necessary for living things to survive but is also allows us to make observations about our universe that would not be possible if we were in a dusty arm of the galaxy. We also happen to have an atmosphere that is transparent, and this is exactly the type of atmosphere that would be needed to have gases that living systems could use to capture energy. For instance, Jupiter has a toxic atmosphere to most living systems and would be a terrible place to see the stars because the atmosphere is made of thick gases like a thick fog. It seems odd that the very atmosphere that allows life also allows for observation. One of my favorite examples from the book was the use of solar eclipses. Earth has a unique moon in that we only have one moon and that it is quite large in comparison to the size of earth. Many of the other planets in our solar system have moons but they are much smaller in comparison to the size of the planet they orbit. Our moon, however, is quite large in comparison. Now during a full solar eclipse, our moon covers up the sun exactly only leaving the sun’s chromosphere visible. This is astounding that the moon happens to be smaller than the sun as well as just the right distance between the sun and us to cover it up exactly. Now this does not seem that important except that by observing full solar eclipses we have been able to deduce what the sun is made of and understand the other stars that we can see as well as many other things about the universe. This seems to indicate that the very place where life can exist and, where there could be intelligent beings is the very place where you would have the ability to observe the universe and the surroundings in the solar system. 

Evidence from Biology

            The evidence from Biology takes on a whole other system of ideas, however, I want to focus on just a few evidences. The first is the information found in DNA. Over the last century there have been as many discoveries in biology as there has been in physics. These discoveries have led to the understanding that all living systems contain a code of information much like that of a computer. In fact, just after we discovered the code for life, computers were first put together to help with everyday tasks. The importance of this unique code gives us insight into how organisms use information. It has been said that one human cell contains enough information to house the entire collection of books at the library of congress. The information has not only been discovered but now using technological advances in equipment we can now manipulate the information to help in disease and other processes. Humans are unique in their capacity to be able to manipulate their own bodies. What other creature that we know of can perform these tasks or even be able to understand the properties of this information? We have used this knowledge to further developments in medicine and in technology. This does not mean that we have always used this information for good purposes, but it is unique in that we are able to understand, learn, and eventually in small ways control the use of this information. Now, efforts are being made to ensure that this knowledge is regulated in a proper moral sense to avoid any disastrous uses of these techniques. 

            Another aspect of human knowledge in biology is the use of language. It is interesting that if evolution is true, humans somehow managed to develop the ability to write and speak long before this would give any survival advantage and long before humans used, writing to communicate information through the ages. This makes us one of a kind and completely separates us dramatically from the animal kingdom. Knowledge can now be communicated across cities, borders, continents, and even more importantly through time. We still can even write an article such as this one and talk about the use of ideas from so many different authors from so many different times in history. This is not just a coincidence but is due to our unique ability to master the dissemination of information through written language. Where would we be without textbooks for learning, or news articles, or even the information written on the internet. Now with the help of technology, information can be sent in milliseconds across the globe. This has helped in science discoveries as scientists from across the globe can observe stars from different locations simultaneously. This aspect about human biology makes it clear that the use of language and the ability to write is the basis for our scientific understanding and for our ability to pass knowledge down. Just the other day I was having a conversation with a colleague and was talking about the fact that science has changed so much that now I was taught a technique using a kit where all the materials necessary to perform the technique were proprietary and owned by a science company. This means that science that was discovered only a few decades ago is now been forgotten by most students because they are only taught how to use the materials given to them by a company. We may yet see the day when science rediscovers things that we have lost the ability to do simply because it become commonplace to perform. 

How to answer the question of comprehensibility

            There are only two answers to the why question about the comprehensibility of nature. Either it is just a brute fact or lucky happenstance that humans live in a world where there is a constancy in nature, or there is a transcendent purpose or person behind the universe that made it in such a way as to allow for humans the privilege of discovering its inner workings. Which hypothesis gives a better answer to the question? Let’s look at their answers.

Materialism as an answer

            If the theory of evolution and the accidental beginning of the universe is the ultimate answer to all that is in the physical world, then the ability of humans to be able to comprehend a ordered universe is just a fact of the random act of the universes beginning or it is just a happy accident. While many in our culture are content with such an answer and claim that evolution with it myriad of proposed evidences as well as the materialistic evidence given for the universe’s beginning, it seems rather odd that we would be able to comprehend the universe at all. Either the universe due to its random beginning would be chaotic in nature or the difficulty in forming a creature with the mental and language capacities to understand these ideas would be impossible to achieve. How is it then that we live in a universe where these things seem to come together? In a rather straightforward way, why would we evolve a creature that could eventually control its own evolution? This answer seems to beg the question instead of giving an actual answer. Recently I was listening to a debate between John Lennox and Peter Atkins about what science can answer. Atkins, in his opening statement, said that where there are questions that science cannot answer such as the purpose of the universe or if there is an afterlife are worthless or he called them stupid questions.(13) Well maybe this is another one of those stupid questions that we should not be asking ourselves because scientific materialism does not seem to answer why we have the capacity to comprehend the universe and its orderly nature.

            On the other hand, theism has a long standing answer to this question and historically it is the answer to this question that led many to form the discipline of science. From the medieval period many theologians called the study of nature, natural philosophy. It was a worthwhile endeavor for theologians to pursue natural philosophy in order to discover the ideas of God. Paul the apostle speaks of this in Romans, and this idea is taken up by early scientists such as Newton, Boyle, Kepler, Galileo, Pascal, Pasteur, and many others. Not only did theism give them an answer for why the universe was orderly and deserved to be studied but also why humans were qualified to be able to understand the nature of the universe as they were created in the “imago Dei” or the image of God. I personally believe that human’s nature of language, morality, and knowledge are all better explained by the image of God. In specifically Christian theism, God creates man to be unique and He endows us with special abilities that are moral, intellectual, and communicative in nature. This has been a long standing theme in western Christian thought and again has given perspective to education, politics, justice, science, and many other disciplines. It is this idea that we are created by an orderly God to be endowed with His image that makes the most sense of why we can do science in a way that expands our knowledge of the orderly universe and its laws.

1.    Einstein, A (1936) Physics and Reality, Journal of the Franklin Institute, 221(3) pg. 349-382

2.    Plato, Timaeus(Indianapolis: Focus,2016), 14

3.    Cain, MT (2018) Science and the Mind of the Maker, Harvest House Publishers, Eugene, OR

4.    Hawking, S., & Mlodinow, L. (2010). The grand design. New York: Bantam Books

5.    Cornwell, J.,(2010, Sep 20)The Grand Design: Answers to the Ultimate Questions of Life by Stephen Hawking: review, The Telegraphaccessed: https://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/books/bookreviews/8006738/The-Grand-Design-New-Answers-to-the-Ultimate-Questions-of-Life-by-Stephen-Hawking-review.html

6.    Lewis, C.S., Miracles: a preliminary study, Collins, London, p. 110, 1947.

7.    Brierly, J. (Producer). (2019, September 13). Alister McGrath and Bret Weinstein – Religion: Useful fiction or ultimate truth? [Audio podcast] Retrieved on iTunes Unbelievable? Podcast

8.    “A Scientist Caught Between Two Faiths: Interview with Robert Jastrow,” Christianity Today, August 6, 1982

9.    Dyson, F. (1979) Disturbing the Universe. New York: Harper & Row pg. 250

10.  ID’s Top Six-The Fine-Tuning of the Universe(2017, November 8) Evolution News Accessed:https://evolutionnews.org/2017/11/ids-top-six-the-fine-tuning-of-the-universe/

11.  Ross, H (1994, April 16) New Scientific Evidence for the Existence of God. Presentation in South Barrington, IL, Accessed:https://evo2.org/hugh-ross-origin-of-the-universe/

12.  Gonzalez, G., Richard, J. (2004) The Privileged Planet. Regnery Publishing

13.  Brierly, J. (Producer). (2019, February 2) John Lennox vs Peter Atkins – Can Science Explain Everything? Live Debate [Audio Podcast] Retrieved on iTunes Unbelievable? Podcast

Secular thinker: PhD candidate in Biological sciences Bryan Gitschlag: “Science, Complexity, and the origin of an intelligible Universe”

CONTENTS:

Introduction

Part 1: The Big Bang (how do we know?)

Part 2: Quantum physics and the history of the universe

Part 3: So what does all this have to do with the origin of the universe?

Part 4: Entropy and complexity

Part 5: But do they evolve? Complexity and Evolution

Part 6: Turning to biological evolution

Part 7: The best evidence for evolution

Part 8: Intelligible universe (evolution and consciousness)

Concluding remarks

Introduction

The Voyager 1 and 2 spacecrafts drift through the inky blackness of space, each carrying a record beyond the reaches of the solar system. If any life form were to ever discover the record and were capable of listening to it, they would hear various greetings and well-wishes in multiple human languages. It represents humanity’s first real attempt to spread the customary message, “I come in peace,” to other worlds. In the spirit of the Voyager messages, I want to be up front about my intent: open, productive communication and the spirit of discovery. If I’m being honest, I don’t think the supernatural is real. I find that the study of the natural world helps us figure out why we exist, and how the universe works, and I see no reason to think we need the supernatural to make sense of things like complexity, life, or the origin of an intelligible universe. Here I will explain why that is. You may not agree with me, but my hope is that you will at least understand why someone might have that view. My real goal—my “hidden agenda” if you will (except that it’s not hidden because this is me telling you about it)—is to use this as an opportunity to just share what I think is some truly fascinating science, and I’ll keep it topically relevant by trying to express why I think the natural explanations are probably the right ones.

I also encourage you to explore these topics freely, to check out the sources below for further reading, and above all, to think for yourself.

Part 1: The Big Bang (how do we know?)

 Stars give off light at certain, specific wavelengths. This has to do with their chemical composition. Basically, atoms emit photons, or “light particles,” at predictable energy levels depending on the structure of the atom, which corresponds to its place on the periodic table. The energy level of the photon corresponds to its wavelength. Shorter wavelength means higher frequency and higher energy; longer wavelength means the photon is stretched out, and at lower frequency and lower energy. So the spectrum of light coming from the atoms in other stars can function like a sort of "barcode," allowing scientists to get an idea of the chemical composition of wherever the light is coming from.

In the early 20th century, astronomer Edwin Hubble took notice of the observation that the light from distant galaxies is stretched out. This phenomenon is called the redshift, since the spectral lines—the "barcode" corresponding to a specific chemical signature—are stretched out toward the red end of the light spectrum. The opposite effect is the blueshift, when light waves become condensed rather than stretched. Although Hubble was not the first to discover the phenomenon of the redshift, he also noticed that the farther away a galaxy is, the more redshifted the light from that galaxy is. He and others explained this phenomenon as a result of galaxies moving away from us. If a galaxy is moving away from us, then each wave of light leaving that galaxy has a tiny bit more distance to travel than the wave right before it. The extra distance between each light wave is why the light is redshifted.

By combining some of the equations from Einstein's Theory of General Relativity with observations of redshifted galaxies, the Belgian astronomer and priest Georges Lemaître developed the idea that would later become known as the Big Bang Theory, which describes the universe as something that expands outward from a singular point. So how do we actually know that the redshift is being caused by the galaxies moving away from us? Let's think about this the way a scientist would.

 Following the scientific method, we would treat the claim (“the redshift is due to the expansion of the universe”) as a hypothesis to be tested, and then perform an experiment to test some prediction that the hypothesis makes. Here is one testable prediction that this hypothesis makes: other events taking place in another galaxy will appear to take a longer amount of time if the galaxy is moving away. Consider the example of a star explosion. When a star explodes and becomes a supernova, the light from the explosion takes some measurable amount of time for the brightness to rise and fall. There are specific types of supernova that have a consistent behavior in the way the light intensity rises and falls, and how long it takes. If you were to plot a graph of the brightness of a supernova over time, the resulting curved line would be called the "light curve." So basically, for a given type of supernova, there is a consistent shape in its light curve.

So let's say that a supernova happens in a distant galaxy. And let’s say the galaxy is moving away from us (since that is the hypothesis we are testing). If that’s correct, then by the time the light from that supernova achieves peak brightness, the supernova will be farther away than it was when the explosion first began, and the light will have traveled farther before reaching us. And by the time we notice the brightness start to diminish, the supernova will be even farther still, and the light will have even farther to travel. Thus, it will take more time for the light to reach us than it did when the supernova first began. In other words, the explosion itself will appear to happen more slowly, if the galaxy is getting farther away while it’s happening.

With this in mind, we could predict that the faster a galaxy moves away from us, the longer its supernova light curves will be. But we are saying something similar about wavelength: the faster a galaxy is moving away from us, the longer its light waves. These two ideas can be merged for simplicity: if a galaxy is moving away from us, then the length of light curve for a supernova taking place in that galaxy will be correlated with the amount of redshift in the light coming from the same galaxy.

In 2001, a collaboration of scientists called the Supernova Cosmology Project produced a paper for The Astrophysical Journal, in which they showed a positive correlation between supernova light curves and the redshift [1]. So, galaxies are moving away from us. How long has this been going on? How old is the universe?

The distance to other objects in the universe can be estimated in a variety of ways, for example by measuring the peak brightness of a supernova instead of the shape of its light curve, or the timing of a pulsar. When these estimates are compared with the velocity, the overall conclusion is that galaxies are not only moving away from us, but the farther away they are, the faster they move away. The trick to figuring out velocity is the magnitude of the redshift: the more the light waves are stretched out, the faster the galaxy is moving away from us, and vice versa.

So what does this have to do with the age of the universe?

You may have seen this equation before:

V=D/T

Where:

V = velocity

D = distance

T = time

This just means that velocity is distance over time. If you have objects moving away from each other, and you know how fast they are moving (V) and you know how far apart they are (D), then you can plug those values into the equation and solve for T. There is a version of this called Hubble’s Law, which relates the expansion rate of the universe with its age and size.

So if you can measure the distance between the most distant galaxies in the observable universe, and how fast they are moving away from each other, then you can plug them into the equation and calculate the amount of time that they've been moving away from each other. Unfortunately it's a little more complicated than that, because the expansion of the universe is accelerating (velocity is thus a changing number), but once these sorts of factors are taken into account, the amount of time that the universe has been expanding is routinely calculated to be in the neighborhood of 13.7 billion years, based on measurements of distances and velocities at the cosmic scale [2].

None of this information tells us how the universe actually began to exist (or even if it began to exist). All this tells us is that the observable universe—the universe we can see through a telescope—is expanding. If you rewind the clock and watch the history of the universe in reverse, galaxies are moving closer together, the universe is becoming more densely packed, until eventually everything is collapsed into one spot.

Equations derived from Einstein’s Theory of General Relativity predict that as the timeline of the universe approaches “zero” (as we go further back), the size of the universe approaches zero as well, which means the density of matter and energy approaches infinity. The only problem is, this prediction is not right. General Relativity is part of classical physics, which does not take quantum physics into account. Thus, the idea that the universe “began to exist” at time zero is based on a classical description of the universe, which becomes more unreliable as we go backward in time and the universe gets smaller. As we reach the scale of subatomic particles, the equations of classical physics become unreliable and the equations of quantum physics become necessary to understand what’s going on.

This does not mean the universe began to exist; it means we won’t know more about what was happening back then without some insight from quantum physics.

Part 2: Quantum physics and the history of the universe

Quantum physics, or quantum mechanics if you prefer, is the area of physics that describes nature on the smallest, most fundamental scale of the physical universe. For example, the equations of quantum mechanics describe the properties and behaviors of the stuff that atoms are made of, such as the quarks that help make up the protons and neutrons in the atomic nucleus, as well as the electrons that surround the nucleus, along with photons, neutrinos, and so on.

Arguably the most important equation in quantum mechanics is the Schrödinger Equation, for which Erwin Schrödinger won the 1933 Nobel Prize in Physics. The Schrödinger Equation describes the behavior of a quantum mechanical system (which can mean any quantum particle or anything made of quantum particles, which applies to everything in the universe that we know of). If you want to know what an electron is doing as it moves around the nucleus of an atom, you need the Schrödinger Equation. In fact, if you solve the Schrödinger Equation for all the possible energy levels of an electron (without factoring time into the equation), and you plot the solutions on a graph, what you end up with are the atomic structures of all the elements on the periodic table! Or to be more accurate, you at least end up with the electronic structures (the structure of each electron cloud that engulfs the nucleus of each atom), meanwhile the nucleus is made up of its own particles with their own properties, hence they obey the Schrödinger Equation in their own way.

Why does a particle obey the Schrödinger Equation in the first place? To answer this, it helps to keep in mind what a particle is, and what the Schrödinger Equation says about it.

If you spend a little time in a quantum physics textbook, pretty soon you’ll come across the concept of the wave function. The wave function is just a description of the particles and their properties. If you imagine an elementary particle as a ball rolling down a hill, you can get an idea of what’s going on: the ball has a mass, it has a velocity, and it has a direction of travel. If you look backward or forward in time, you can identify where the ball started and where it will end up. Together, these changes in the position and momentum combine to form the overall behavior of the ball, including its past, present, and future. This is the “wave function.” In simple terms, solving the Schrödinger Equation is how you calculate how the wave function of a particle changes through time and space, which just means that it tells you what is happening with the particle.

So then, what is a particle? The elementary particles are the smallest ones we know of. If you use a particle accelerator to smash protons together, and the collisions produce smaller particles, and the smaller particles do not break apart into even smaller ones (that is, they have no identifiable sub-structure), that’s when we know we're dealing with elementary particles. Elementary particles can be organized into categories like quarks, bosons, and leptons. Electrons are an example of leptons. Photons are an example of bosons. Quarks are an example of, well, quarks. Quarks are what help make up the protons and neutrons in an atomic nucleus.

What do they all have in common? The simplest answer is that they aren’t actually particles at all. They are waves: ripples passing through fields. So then, what is a field? In some ways, you probably already have some idea of what a field is. You have heard expressions like “magnetic field” or “gravitational field” before. A field is a physical thing that exists everywhere you look, which can bend and curve. Kind of like how ripples and waves can give “life” to the surface of an otherwise motionless pond, waves or ripples can occur in a quantum field, and these are what we recognize as particles. Every particle belongs to a given field. If you take a quiet, motionless electron field, and you deliver a little bit of energy to it, the field will vibrate and the vibration is what we call an electron. There are also quark fields, boson fields, and so on, that give rise to their own respective particles in a similar way. This is what we know of as quantum field theory, in a nutshell. So quantum field theory takes the concepts of particles and quantum physics, and combines them with the classical concept of fields. This combination gives you a description of the universe in terms of fields that vibrate with energy, and those vibrations are what people usually talk about using the language of “particles.” This is easily the most successful theory in all of physics. Yes, you read that right. When it comes to understanding how the universe works, the success of a theory is measured by its ability to deliver the goods. For example, does the theory make precise mathematical predictions that can be tested by doing an experiment? In the case of quantum field theory, the calculations have been confirmed with breathtaking precision. One good example is the value of one of the physical constants in nature: the fine structure constant. Theoretical calculation and experimental measurement agree with each other on the value of the fine structure constant all the way out past the ninth decimal [3]. Quantum field theory can thus describe the nature of the universe in ways that are numerically accurate to greater than one part in a billion!

So what does all this have to do with the origin of the universe?

Part 3: So what does all this have to do with the origin of the universe?

The spontaneous movement—all the little vibrating ripples—in the quantum fields are what scientists often refer to as the “vacuum energy,” the energy of empty space. Empty space itself is not “nothing,” as you may have heard. Energy is there, because the quantum fields are vibrating. In the late 1970s, physicists Alan Guth, Andrei Linde and their colleagues realized that if the vacuum of space has a high enough amount of energy, then it would function as a source of pressure that drives the universe to expand. These individuals will be remembered as the scientists who successfully helped unite quantum mechanics with the Big Bang Theory, by using the concept of vacuum energy to come up with a plausible explanation for the mechanism that drove the universe to expand in the first place. Then in 1998, it was further discovered that the vacuum energy is not only driving the expansion of the universe, it is also accelerating the rate of expansion [4]. As the universe expands more, it expands faster.

If the expansion of the observable universe began from spontaneous high-energy fluctuations in a quantum vacuum, as mounting evidence seems to suggest [5], then one could ask what “causes” the fluctuations. Keep in mind that the equations of quantum mechanics are probabilistic. They do not predict exactly what will happen; rather, they predict probabilities. The Schrödinger Equation does not tell you what the particle is absolutely doing; it describes the probabilities for what you might see if you observed what the particle is doing. A particle could therefore do something incredibly improbable if given enough opportunity, and the time parameter in the Schrödinger Equation extends from negative-infinity to positive-infinity [6]; hence, so long as the universe has some non-zero amount of energy, and the laws of physics don’t change with time, then there is enough opportunity for even extremely rare events to eventually happen. Given the fields obeying the equations of quantum mechanics, eventually a spontaneous fluctuation could reach a high enough energy to inflate a whole new region of spacetime. We seem to be existing within one such region of spacetime, which we call the observable universe, with the Big Bang just being a point of unusually high energy located somewhere in the wave function of the universe.

One could then pose the question: if the observable universe owes its existence to spontaneous fluctuations in quantum fields, then what explains the existence of the quantum fields themselves? Or in simpler language, why is there something rather than nothing? I don’t know the answer to that. This represents uncharted territory in the quest for knowledge, and it reminds me of the virtually incomprehensible number of discoveries that await future generations. In the mean time, my best answer to the question, “why is there something rather than nothing,” is, why not? That question assumes that there always needs to be a reason for “something” (otherwise “nothing” would be the default). All I can say is, I don’t share that assumption. Even if our observable universe has a “first cause,” I see no reason to assume the cause was a conscious being. Why not a physical mechanism? That seems simpler and less contrived to me, as far as explanations go. Furthermore, it should be noted that the existence of a physical mechanism that produces universes (such as the theory of cosmic inflation developed by Alan Guth and his collaborators) predicts the existence of other universes besides our own. Contrary to common belief, the existence of other universes is not an ad hoc assumption to “explain away” the fine-tuning of our observable universe; rather, the existence of other universes is a prediction—a logical consequence—of having a physical universe-generating mechanism such as the one described above.

Part 4: Entropy and complexity

Even if you’re willing to entertain the notion that the observable universe began by a physical mechanism such as quantum fluctuations, that raises the question: why so much apparent orderliness, stability, and complexity in the world around us? The simplest way to make sense of this can be summarized in four words: entropy increases over time. That is one way of stating the second law of thermodynamics.

Entropy can be defined as the disorder of a system. In more precise terms, entropy refers to the number of free states—or degrees of freedom—that characterize the system. Consider a simple gas chamber that is almost entirely empty except for a single gas molecule bouncing around inside. We would say that it has three degrees of freedom: it can move in the up-down, left-right, or forward-backward directions, and most likely its movement will be some combination of movement along these three dimensions. Molecules also have rotational and vibrational degrees of freedom, in addition to the three dimensional degrees of motion, but for the sake of simplicity let’s only consider the three dimensions of travel and ignore the other ways the molecule can move. If there are more gas molecules bouncing around the chamber, then there are more degrees of freedom (each individual gas molecule has its own three degrees of freedom). Since the idea of “degrees of freedom” refers to the ways in which molecules can arrange themselves, the number of degrees of freedom can be thought of as the number of ways in which the parts of a system can be rearranged. If you start with a few molecules traveling through the chamber in unison, soon they’ll hit the walls of the chamber, bounce into each other, and start scattering off in their own directions, increasing their own degrees of freedom and thus their own entropy.

This helps shine a bit of light on why we have the second law of thermodynamics in the first place. There are more ways for particles to scatter than for them to un-scatter. If you set up a rack of billiard balls and strike them with the cue ball, you notice that they tend to scatter but they never seem to un-scatter back into an organized rack (if you see that happening, then you realize something fishy is going on, like maybe the footage is being played in reverse). The same thing happens with molecules. If you drop a little bit of blue, water-soluble ink into a glass of water, you'll notice that the molecules of ink redistribute themselves randomly around the volume of water, turning the entire glass of water slightly blue. This happens spontaneously because, just like with the billiard balls, there are more ways for the molecules to scatter than for them to un-scatter, so scatter is what they do. And when you consider the mind-bogglingly large number of particles in the universe, there are practically limitless ways that the particles can redistribute themselves as the universe gets older. Thus, we have the reason that the second law of thermodynamics is true: the universe spontaneously finds its way toward higher entropy because there are more ways to be at higher entropy than lower entropy.

Does this mean that biological evolution violates the second law of thermodynamics?

Remember the example of the thermodynamic system that I mentioned earlier: the gas molecules bouncing around the chamber. When we talk about a thermodynamic system like that, what we have done is take the entropy of the universe and split it up into two values: the entropy of the system, and the entropy of the surroundings (“surroundings” being defined as the rest of the universe, minus the system). This is a handy distinction to make because it allows us to identify examples where the entropy is not changing in the same way for every part of the universe. In fact, using this distinction between a system and its surroundings, we can describe entropy in the following way:

∆S(u) = ∆S(y) + ∆S(s)

Where the term ∆S(u) refers to a change in the entropy of the universe, ∆S(y) refers to a change in the entropy of a system, and ∆S(s) refers to a change in the entropy of the surroundings. So if you divide the universe into “system” and “surroundings,” then any changes in the entropy of the system and the surroundings add up to the overall change in the entropy of the universe. So then, what if the entropy of a system decreases? Would that violate the second law of thermodynamics? Let’s see what happens. If the entropy of the system decreases, that is the same thing as saying that ∆S(y) is a negative number. The only way for ∆S(y) to be a negative number, without violating the above equation or the laws of thermodynamics, is for ∆S(s) to be an even greater positive number. In other words, as long as a system increases the entropy of its surroundings more than it decreases its own entropy, then the entropy of a system can go down without violating the second law of thermodynamics.

So then, the process of biological evolution does not violate the second law of thermodynamics as long as it raises the entropy of the rest of the universe to a greater degree than it reduces the entropy of the biological systems that are evolving. This is not surprising when you look at how biological systems work: they constantly reduce their own entropy at the expense of raising the entropy of the surroundings by a greater amount. Virtually every spontaneous biological process that you might think of—the formation of a cell membrane, the two strands of DNA sticking together to form a double-helix, the production of heat from aerobic metabolism—these processes all involve adding more entropy to the environment than the amount by which they lower the entropy of the system. In other words, biological organisms raise the entropy of the universe (even while decreasing their own entropy), and thus they obey the second law of thermodynamics.

Part 5: But do they evolve? Complexity and Evolution

Here is an efficient way to find your way toward higher entropy, assuming you’re an unconscious universe obeying the laws of physics: generate life.

Life as we know it may be complex, but complex things can emerge if the process obeys the laws of physics. The chemical reactions taking place within our cells obey the laws of thermodynamics. They help to drive up the entropy of the universe. In fact, since biological systems help drive up the entropy of the universe, then if they make more copies of themselves, that will drive up the entropy of the universe even further!

But let’s take it a step back. How did it all start?

One of the neat things about carbon is that it contains exactly six protons. If all we had to work with were the equations of quantum mechanics, the wave function of the electron, and the knowledge that carbon has six protons, that’s enough to understand why carbon is the best candidate to be the “element of life.” The electronic structure of the carbon atom allows for not one, two, or three, but up to four stable chemical bonds at the same time.

Carbon also has a relatively light mass among the elements on the periodic table, so it’s easy for stars to make carbon through nuclear fusion, and thus carbon is an abundant element in our universe. Of all the abundant, lightweight chemical elements, carbon can form an unusually large number of stable (covalent) chemical bonds. It can also bond with other carbon atoms and with many other elements, including hydrogen, nitrogen, oxygen, phosphorus and sulfur. These are by far the six most abundant chemical elements in biological molecules (proteins, DNA, RNA, carbohydrates and lipids). Thus, carbon atoms and a few other elements can be rearranged to give rise to a virtually limitless diversity of molecular structures and chemical properties.

In fact, you might even say that the universe would “naturally select” for carbon-based chemistry, since the chemical reactions involving carbon would represent a massive supply of paths by which the universe could spontaneously tumble toward higher entropy. This doesn’t necessarily mean that complex carbon-based chemistry dominates the whole universe, of course. Stable chemical bonds between carbon and the other elements mentioned above fall within a specific range of conditions; the reactions involving carbon-based molecules can be impacted by extreme temperatures and radiation, for example. That is why solar systems tend to have a “habitable zone,” where the environmental conditions are more likely to be favorable to the chemistry of life as we know. This is why earth was the best candidate in our solar system for the emergence of complex life; to put it another way, this is why we are earthlings instead of martians.

But are the chemistry of carbon-based molecules and the laws of physics actually sufficient to explain the emergence of life? The short answer is, maybe.

In order to properly address that question, it’s important to take a step back and ask what life is. If you were on another planet, and you encountered life, how would you recognize it? What criteria should it meet? As you navigate the alien planet, you realize that living things reproduce. This is such a well known fact of life that it seems to be an area of agreement between creationism and the theory of evolution. In Genesis, God says to the newly created life: “be fruitful and multiply.” And the Darwinian sense of the word “fitness” is measured by reproductive success. In the simplest terms, life forms make more copies of themselves. You also know that back on earth, living things have metabolic activity. After all, in order to make more copies of itself, a life form must convert resources from its environment. Finally, living things obey the second law of thermodynamics.

So we have at least three general criteria for classifying life:

1) It makes more copies of itself (reproduction)

2) It converts resources from its environment to do so (metabolism)

3) It maximizes entropy (the explanation for criteria 1 and 2)

Others may wish to define life in more specific terms, but I find that trying to decide where to draw the line between life and non-life becomes arbitrary at that point. So I would say that if you encounter something on another planet that conforms to those three criteria, then you have found some form of life.

From those three criteria, it becomes clear why natural selection would occur: if one mutating replicator increases the entropy of its surroundings, two mutating replicators will increase the entropy of the surroundings even more, and so on. As long as there is a sufficient supply of resources to sustain the process, pretty soon there will be a population of mutating replicators, varying slightly from one another in their structural and chemical properties due to the occasional spontaneous “copying error,” or mutation, and the more efficient replicators become more prevalent over time. And the process continues. That’s it.

Am I speculating without any evidence to back it up? You will have to decide, but first, I would just like to bring a few observations to your attention, as I think they make a case for the plausibility of this general scenario. First, the universe is indeed an abundant source of carbon-based chemistry; in 2016, a team of researchers led by Italian chemist Raffaele Saladino found that material recovered from a meteorite could catalyze chemical reactions in the presence of water and formamide (formamide is a simple molecule containing only three atoms of hydrogen and one atom each of carbon, nitrogen, and oxygen). The result was the production of a wide diversity of organic building blocks: RNA bases, amino acids, lipids, and carboxylic acids [7]. Also in 2016, a research team led by chemist Nicholas Hud of the National Science Foundation’s Center for Chemical Evolution reported on the spontaneous formation and self-assembly of organic chemical building blocks in water [8]. The self-replication of small organic molecules has also been an active topic of study for decades at this point, with a number of examples [9, 10, 11]. Finally, a group from the Max Planck Institute in Germany showed that even random sequences can be an abundant source of biologically active RNA and protein molecules, providing a way for natural selection to take place [12]. While I am quick to confess that there is still much we don’t know, here are at least some tangible reasons we can point to for thinking that there is a plausible natural explanation for the existence of life.

Part 6: Turning to biological evolution

Natural selection essentially means the following: the traits that are more reproductively successful tend to become more prevalent over time. Not only is this a true statement, it is true by definition. This is because being reproductively successful is what it means to become more prevalent, at least when we are talking about biological organisms. After all, biological organisms are mortal and thus can only continue existing indirectly, by making more copies of themselves. Reproductive success is what defines the very concept of “fitness” itself, at least in the Darwinian sense. Whether we are talking about a gene that helps control the growth rate of a plant or fungus, or a gene that contributes to antler length in an antelope, or neck length in a giraffe, or whichever other example you can think of, as long as the trait contributes to Darwinian fitness—reproductive success—then by definition it will tend to become more prevalent over time, as long as the environmental conditions continue to be hospitable.

Come on a short hypothetical journey with me, to help illustrate how this process looks in nature. Let’s say we climb into a time machine and travel back to visit the earth at various points throughout its history. In fact, let’s say we visit the earth in thousand-year intervals, with each visit occurring for a few months at a time. We carefully observe the various ecosystems present around the globe. During one of these visits, we make some observations of different life forms as they compete with each other for survival and reproduction. Different life forms would not need to compete for survival in a hypothetical world where their population sizes could continue growing indefinitely. In any real-world scenario, though, we are talking about ecological niches with limited space and finite resources. Some gene pools are thus going to put others out of business, so to speak, depending on which gene pools are utilizing the resources of that niche to replicate more efficiently than others. With this in mind, we spend some of our visit taking some direct measurements of reproductive success—growth rates for various organisms, average number of offspring, that kind of stuff—and we pay particular attention to traits that correlate with reproductive success. For example, does the length of an antelope’s antler help predict how successful it will be during mating season? Are flowers with red petals visited by pollinators on a more frequent basis than flowers that belong to the same species but with orange petals? If a songbird sings a more sophisticated song than other members of the same species, does that correlate with the average number of hatchlings that it will father during its lifetime? After collecting data to address these kinds of questions, we climb back into our time machine and travel to the same location but a thousand years later. Of course, some things could have occurred in the intervening millennium that we could not have anticipated. A volcanic eruption, perhaps, or an asteroid impact. So let’s play it safe by making similar visits and collecting similar types of data for several ecosystems around the globe, so that we can increase the chances that we will find at least some ecosystems that remained relatively unaffected by any major outside events. What you will generally find to be the case is that the traits that were observed to correlate with greater average reproductive success on the previous visit are more prevalent upon the next visit. Remember that flowering plant? Its species is likely to have a higher percentage of red flowers. The songbirds now have longer, more sophisticated songs on average. The antelope species has longer antlers on average. This hypothetical journey in time is only meant to illustrate what the words “evolution by natural selection” mean: the traits that contribute more toward reproductive success tend to become more prevalent over time.

One source of doubt that I’ve heard about evolution could be expressed in the following way: natural selection reduces genetic information (so why isn’t that a hindrance to evolution?). Unfortunately, this is one of those times when the facts can be presented in a misleading way. Does natural selection reduce genetic information? Yes, but in the following way: when one trait is becoming more prevalent, another is generally becoming less so. A balance of two traits is thus shifting toward only one trait. However, keep in mind that this process does not occur in isolation. During the process of reproduction, living things will replicate their DNA. This provides new opportunities for genetic mutations to occur, which contribute to the diversity of traits within a population of life forms.

Thus, I left out a crucial detail of the thought experiment, which I’m ready to bring up now: when you make your next visit a thousand years later, not only will you see a greater prevalence of the traits that were previously associated with greater reproductive success, but you will also see some additional traits that did not exist back then. More accurately, you will see traits that you no longer recognize, since they will be modified forms of earlier traits.

One of my favorite examples to illustrate this point is the whale’s blowhole. Although it took much longer than a thousand years for any noticeable change (it would be better to visit earth in million-year intervals for this), the blowhole is nevertheless a modified nostril. This modification is captured in the fossil record, with the nostrils of aquatic mammals migrating from the front of the snout to the top of the head as you examine the specimens represented in progressively more recent fossil layers [13]. Another example, the bird’s wing, is a modified front leg. Some birds, such as the hoatzin, still hatch with claws on their wings.

And if we take DNA samples during each of our visits, we will be able to see similar processes at work—variation in transmitted traits that correspond to variation in reproductive success—but at the molecular level we can see this phenomenon in much finer detail. One great example to illustrate this point can be found in primates, specifically in an antiviral protein called MAVS, short for Mitochondrial AntiViral Signaling. The DNA sequence of the gene that encodes this protein (and hence the amino acid composition of the protein itself) varies from one primate species to another, and this variation corresponds to greater or lesser resistance to infection by hepatitis-related viruses [14]. As long as the ability to mount a proper immune response to viral infection is important for survival and reproduction, then we are witnessing a snapshot in the evolution of genes like the one that encodes the protein MAVS.

Additional processes are involved in evolution as well, besides natural selection. Genetic drift comes to mind. This refers to more random changes in the gene pool, when we’re dealing with genetic traits that have no discernible impact on reproduction. For the sake of time and simplicity, I have chosen to focus on evolution by natural selection.

Part 7: The best evidence for evolution

I realize that since the previous section focuses on how evolution works, I did not devote much attention to the actual evidence for it. I would like to make up for that by just briefly summarizing what I find to be the strongest evidence for evolution: phylogenetics. Phylogenetics is the discipline that concerns itself with retracing ancestral lineages. The reason this provides such strong evidence for evolution is because a phylogenetic tree can be independently recreated multiple times, using different bodies of evidence. Accordingly, the phylogenetic tree derived from one source of evidence can be understood as a hypothesis, which can then be tested by how accurately it matches the phylogenetic tree derived from another (independent) source of evidence. When a tree depicting ancestral lineages is derived from molecular sequencing in the late twentieth century [15], and it bears a striking resemblance to phylogenetic trees that can be found in paleontology textbooks from the 1930s [16], the evidence starts to look unmistakable, especially considering the sequences in question come from molecules that do not encode any morphological traits, thus they represent evidence that is truly independent from fossils. With the advent of modern molecular biology techniques—including rapid genome-wide DNA sequencing—the field of biology has seen an explosion over the last couple decades in the amount of hereditary data that can be used to retrace ancestral lineages, with greater accuracy than was possible in the days when we were limited to non-molecular techniques. One of my favorite examples was the 2015 reconstruction of the bird phylogeny using whole-genome sequence data, which resolved the issue of where the hoatzin belongs on the, well, “tree of birds” if you’ll pardon the expression [17].

Part 8: Intelligible universe (evolution and consciousness)

To say that consciousness is an adaptive trait would be an understatement. Life forms that are capable of remembering, communicating, and planning, have a distinct advantage over other organisms that lack these capabilities. Knowing this and how natural selection works help shed light on how conscious life forms could come to exist naturally, provided they are at least physically possible and the environmental pressures favor the behavioral traits that are characteristic of conscious life forms.

I freely admit that much is yet to be understood about consciousness. However, I would like to offer just a few points of consideration that, in my estimation, point toward the conclusion that consciousness has a natural explanation rooted in the biology of the brain...

First, the living world forms a continuum of varying levels of apparent “awareness.” Even a tiny, barely visible roundworm is capable of associative learning. Despite its entire nervous system being microscopic in size, it is capable of adapting its behaviors based on experience. Pigeons seem to be able to recognize themselves in a mirror [18]. Across the diversity of animal life, we see varying degrees of what look like conscious behaviors, and these seem to correlate with varying degrees of brain complexity.

Second, people can lose consciousness if they get hit in the head hard enough, and loss of consciousness is an indication of the level of head trauma that puts the person at higher risk of permanent brain damage.

Third, consciousness is something that can be turned on and off like a light switch, using drugs that inhibit specific aspects of brain activity in predictable ways. Some proteins, called GABA receptors, can be found on the surfaces of certain brain cells. Some drugs can bind to these proteins in a way that opens up a channel in the cell membrane, allowing negatively charged chloride ions to flow across the cell membrane. This doesn’t kill the brain cell, but it suppresses the transmission of electrical signals and can cause a person to lose consciousness. Then consciousness is restored as the drug washes out of the person’s system. This is how general anesthesia works [19, 20], and it provides an elegant demonstration that consciousness comes from brain function.

Finally, altered states of consciousness (characterized by altered perception of time, reduced activity in the default mode network, also known as the brain’s “autopilot,” and vivid hallucinations) can be achieved using a variety of psychotropic drugs that target the brain’s serotonin system. Such drugs include mescaline, the psychoactive ingredient in the peyote cactus, and psilocybin, the active ingredient in psychedelic mushrooms. LSD, the drug responsible for what is sometimes called the “acid trip,” is another example of a drug that falls into the same category. Despite their unfortunate misuse and their historical reputation as party drugs, LSD and psilocybin have gained greater interest among the biomedical community because they have shown promising results in the possible treatment of some forms of anxiety and depression [21, 22].

A person’s conscious experience of the world can be dramatically altered, or can cease altogether, depending on what happens to brain activity. Remember also that consciousness is an adaptively beneficial trait that appears to occur to varying degrees between different animal species. These facts make me think that consciousness is likely a function of the brain, and the two evolved together. I cannot stress enough that there is much that we don’t know, and far more that I don’t know personally; I am just trying to communicate what I am convinced is the case, and the evidence that convinces me. Given the widespread diversity of life that is made possible by the diversity of carbon-based chemistry, I would expect the natural evolution of conscious life forms to be a plausible scenario as long as a few conditions are met. One such condition would be that conscious life forms are physically possible, meaning nothing about them violates the laws of physics. A second condition is adaptability; consciousness ought to promote survival and replication. The final criterion is evolution by natural selection itself. Given these three conditions (and hopefully I convinced you that these conditions are met in the real world) then conscious life forms can evolve naturally.

And, as sentient life forms evolve, they continue to diversify and increase the entropy of the universe, opening up a pathway to the evolution of social groups and the rise of civilization.

Concluding remarks

One topic I promised to get around to was the origin of the intelligible universe. Even if I made a compelling case that the observable universe draws its existence from a quantum fluctuation, that doesn’t explain why we find the universe intelligible. Science fiction author Douglas Adams expressed the analogy of a sentient water puddle who notices how well it fits into its environment. The point of the analogy was to illustrate that life is adapted to the universe, not the other way around. Making sense of the world brings better odds of survival. Thus, we find the universe intelligible because we are adapted to living in it. In other words, the universe isn’t rationally intelligible by design; rather, it gradually became rationally intelligible due to the evolution of rationally intelligent creatures. Reflecting on this reminds me of how inextricably dependent we are on the world around us, just as our overall evolutionary heritage never fails to remind me of our shared kinship with all the other life that we share this world with, and how much we depend on each other. In the words of Charles Darwin, “from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved.”

Thank you for reading.

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