To the Editor:
Were he a veiled dancer, David Berlinski could not have beckoned more seductively in trying to deliver a resolution to the question he poses [“What Brings a World Into Being?,” April]. He dances feverishly with information theory, linguistics, particle physics, biology, literature, and—almost but not quite—theology.
His seemingly inescapable conclusion: that the world is too complex to have sprung full blown from itself. Thus: “The laws of physics . . . must provide an explanation for the behavior of matter in all of its modes, and so they must explain the emergence as well as the organization of material objects” (emphasis in the original). Or: “Plainly, the creation of something from nothing cannot be explained in terms of the behavior of material objects.”
But physics is the study of the principles underlying the relation between matter and energy. It is not the study of causes—and certainly not of first causes, which is a concern of theology.
When considering a closed system—that is, a system within which all entities are known and defined—the human mind cannot grasp the possibility of spontaneous creation. An apple cannot appear on a table unless someone puts it there. Spontaneous generation of an idea? A feeling? A bit of magic and a dove from a puff of smoke? A movie that creates whole epochs out of projected images? No. These are all understandable (to most of us).
But what about our universe? Is it so clear and well defined that we know that matter does not just come into existence? We must resist the tendency to label and define. There are limits that confine imagination to the already known.
David Berlinski blurs the distinctions that natural scientists have struggled for centuries to establish. This smacks of the tactics of the religious Right. Rhetoric is argument. Argument is propaganda. Propaganda may also be a form of information—but it is not science.
Robin Rapport
Rush, New York
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To the Editor:
David Berlinski informs us, albeit obliquely, that cosmologists are on the wrong track. Astonishingly, they think that the universe came from nothing.
Without ever stating as much, Mr. Berlinski seems to invoke the old theological idea of “intelligent design,” according to which the complexity we see in nature could only come from an intelligent source outside of nature. In doing so, he holds up to contempt cosmologists, physicists, and other scientists.
At the risk of stating the obvious, I would simply point out that many of yesterday’s scientific mysteries have been solved in today’s academies and laboratories. I think that we will just keep chipping away at the these marvelous cosmological problems—and that we will keep uncovering answers fact by painful fact.
Louis S. Lyons
Woodland Hills, California
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To the Editor:
David Berlinski asks many questions but accepts very few answers. He apparently refuses to believe in biological evolution, the Big Bang, contemporary neuroscience, or current theories about the behavior of cells and DNA. Does he even believe in the existence of cells and DNA? I would not venture a guess.
It is true that we do not understand everything. And even where we have some understanding, it is not absolute. But summarily to dismiss as rubbish whole scientific disciplines does not strike me as very helpful.
Matthew Johns on
New York City
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To the Editor:
David Berlinski ends his article with a question that paraphrases his title: “Just how did the information latent in the fundamental laws of physics unfold itself to become a world?” His answer: “Apparently it just did.”
Mr. Berlinski discussed a similar subject—the astonishing complexity of the biological world—in “The Deniable Darwin” (COMMENTARY, June 1996). The “assumption of religious belief,” he wrote, is that this complexity came about when “God said, ‘Let the waters swarm with swarms of living creatures, and let fowl fly above the earth in the open firmament of heaven’. . . . And who on the basis of experience would be inclined to disagree? . . . An act of intelligence is required to bring even a thimble into being; why should the artifacts of life be different?”
Has Mr. Berlinski changed his mind since then? Or is his refrain of “Apparently it just did” merely a provocative way to express his faith in the Bible?
George Jochnowitz
College of Staten Island
Staten Island, New York
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To the Editor:
David Berlinski’s conclusion in “What Brings a World into Being?” was strangely evocative of the opening words of the Gospel of John. Mr. Berlinski tells us that “It is only when information is assigned the power to bring something into existence from nothing whatsoever that its essentially magical nature is revealed” (emphasis in the original). John 1:1-3 reads, “In the beginning was the Word . . . and the Word was God. . . . All things were made by him.”
Alfred R. Matthews
Garner, North Carolina
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To the Editor:
David Berlinski grapples with ultimate subjects—the universe, evolution, creation—with wit and grace and, most importantly, total independence from the orthodoxies and received wisdom of the scientific establishment. With the humility and awe of the true scientist, he reminds us that we live in a universe of mysteries.
To those of us who are simple-minded, these mysteries seem to be miracles (dictionary definition: “an extraordinary event manifesting divine intervention in human affairs”). But since it is intellectually forbidden these days to believe in divine anything, modern scientists pretend to understand such phenomena by inventing new terminology. The alleged explosive creation of the universe from a point the size of a pinhead is thus called a “singularity.” David Berlinski avoids such pretense; he calls a mystery a mystery.
Eric Julber
Carmel, California
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To the Editor:
David Berlinski is right. The notion of information has become ubiquitous in contemporary science, and it carries the same sense of imperial destiny as have other universal ideas. The idea of information may be the hardest of all to resist, for it promises nothing less than the power, as Mr. Berlinski suggests, to bring our very world into being.
Can it really be the information contained in a novel that brings an imaginative world into existence, or the information in a molecule that creates an organism? Mr. Berlinski seems to think not. Yet for him, “It is only when information is assigned the power to bring something into existence from nothing whatsoever that its essentially magical nature is revealed” (emphasis in the original).
Maybe so, but it is possible to detect quite a bit of magic in the power attributed to information even in what he calls the “low tavern of thought” of biology. We need only to look a little more closely at the sleight of hand involved in the idea of pulling an organism out of a molecule of DNA.
Mr. Berlinski identifies two parts of the difficulty: the first is to be found in the “computational wilderness” of protein-folding, and the second in the regulation of global properties that maintain the cell or organism as a living system. Both of these point to gaps in our understanding of the relation between genotype and phenotype that have become ever more conspicuous since we have learned to read the genome’s sequences.
But there are other difficulties as well. For example, what exactly are “the causal pathways initiated by DNA” (to use Mr. Berlinski’s phrase)? The common assumption is that DNA “causes” protein synthesis and replication, but the notion of cause is almost as elusive as that of information, and it is worth scrutinizing this claim as well.
No one would argue that the digital structure of DNA allows for an extraordinarily high degree of specificity—that is, of information, in the colloquial sense of the term. But actual responsibility for initiating the chemical reactions leading to replication and protein synthesis lies in the enzymatic machinery that performs these tasks. Furthermore, while nucleotide sequences certainly carry vital information, they do not carry enough to determine when, where, or even how faithfully replication occurs, or when and where protein synthesis occurs. Nor do they determine exactly which proteins are to be synthesized.
There is no problem in saying that DNA carries indispensable information for bringing an organism into being, or that it has a kind of causal power—as long as we are clear about what we mean. The sleight of hand is in the implication that it is the only source of information, the only causal agency at work. And for that implication, the conjurer relies on the imprecision of our terms, and on the ease with which we slide from one meaning to another.
Evelyn Fox Keller
Massachusetts Institute of
Technology
Cambridge, Massachusetts
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David Berlinski writes:
The idea that, to quote Robin Rapport, the world (or anything else) sprang “full blown from itself” (my emphasis) collapses into contradiction as soon as it is expressed. An object can no more be its own cause than a man may be his own father.
The seemingly spontaneous emergence of material objects is another story. Virtual particles pop up in the universe described by quantum electrodynamics and then quickly pop back down; but even such particles do their popping within a pre-existing structure: the quantum vacuum, which contains a seething electron-positron field. These strange quantum effects indicate that nature on the smallest level blurs the distinction between fields and particles, but no one suggests that virtual particles are their own cause, or that they come into existence from nothing whatsoever.
Current orthodoxy in the sciences—and in intellectual life generally—holds that the universe is nothing more (or less) than a collection of material objects. However “material objects” may ultimately be defined—are quantum states material; are Hilbert spaces objects?—it is surely reasonable to ask for an account of their origin. And this demand has nothing directly to do with their complexity. A universe filled with objects no more complicated than Britney Spears or Stanley Fish would also require an explanation. Nor is there anything out of the ordinary in the idea that mathematical physics should provide an account of the emergence as well as the organization of matter. “The origin of the matter in the universe,” remarks the contemporary cosmologist Alan Guth, “is no longer thought to be beyond the range of science.”
Indeed, I cannot imagine why Mr. Rapport is persuaded that physics is not the study of causes, or even first causes. Causal connections are the physicist’s stock in trade. A baseball strikes a bat. Thereafter it accelerates toward the bleachers. Newton’s laws of motion provide the requisite explanation: force has been applied and the result is acceleration. Cause—the applied force; effect—the zooming baseball. The inference is so commonly made within a world of material objects that it is very hard to see why it should not be applied to a world of material objects.
True, there is one big difference. Cause and effect are connections achieved between material objects; if the point at issue is the emergence of material objects, then there are no material objects to act as causes. Two solutions, broadly conceived, commend themselves. The first is to accept the existence of material objects as an axiom—something given and so something unexplained. The second is to enlarge the concept of causality so that things that are not material can give rise to things that are.
The first solution, although logically impeccable, is emotionally unsatisfying; the second is the other way around. This is because it replaces a mystery by a miracle, as when the laws of physics are assigned a causative role in the grand scheme of things. I discussed just such a notion in my essay.
On the largest scale, Mr. Rapport suggests, perhaps things do just pop into existence. We must resist the “tendency to label and define.” I demur: a little more labeling and defining would do the world much good. Labeling and defining are coextensive with thinking and thinking clearly; the same inferential chain that stops with a melodramatic thud when something is said to arise from nothing within well-understood systems comes to the same bad end when applied to the universe as a whole. It is for this reason that physicists invest all that nothingness with some remarkably well-defined physical properties.
As for myself, I do not even share Mr. Rapport’s conviction that we understand more familiar miracles: how, for example, an imaginative world arises from a series of flickering images on a movie screen, or from a series of letters on the printed page. Familiar miracles these may be, but from the point of view of mathematical physics—our only serious science—miracles nonetheless.
Finally, I do not know what important distinctions I am supposed to have blurred, or why the blurring of those distinctions is a tactic of the religious Right. I have nothing against the religious Right, and nothing against the agnostic Left; my observations are ecumenical.
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In reply to Louis S. Lyons, I do not think, nor did I write, that “cosmologists are on the wrong track.” Cosmology is a rich speculative science, and whether particular cosmologists have gone wrong depends entirely on what track they happen to be following. Nor do I charge cosmologists with believing that the “universe came from nothing.” What I contend is that cosmologists often affirm that the universe arose from nothing whatsoever while at the same time smuggling a good deal of something into all that nothing.
Do I, “without ever stating as much,” seem to be invoking the idea of intelligent design, as Mr. Lyons suspects? If I thought that intelligent design, or any artful contrivance like it, explained anything in any depth, I would leap to the cannon’s mouth and say so. I do not and I did not.
The argument from design proceeds along a natural path. Complicated human artifacts—a watch, a thimble, a nuclear reactor—make their appearance on the scene as the result of some form of agency. In explaining the existence of a watch, we appeal to forethought, intention, and the translation of these mental acts into a world of matter.
There is nothing wrong with this—as an inference. We make such inferences all the time, and we rely on them as well. The watch does have a watchmaker; the nuclear reactor, a design team; those long-awaited signals from outer space, an author or authors. The trouble is that these inferences explain very little. The design inference makes sense only on the assumption that we quite understand what it is for human beings (or animals) to frame intentions, conceive of certain ends, and then act to bring them about. We do not. No analysis of these activities ever goes beyond the activities themselves. We explain our intentions by invoking our intentions; we understand our passions by reference to our passions.
The world in which we find ourselves is closed, and we cannot withdraw from it. From the point of view of the sciences, the process by which an intelligent agent shapes a sheet of tin in order to make a spoon is simply a mystery, one that we overlook simply because the mystery is so common. We do not even understand intelligent design when we ourselves have the intelligence and do the designing. I am not for a moment disputing what seems to me obvious: that living systems are shot through with traces of intelligence. I scruple only at the conclusion that this observation functions as a satisfying explanation.
Mr. Lyons reminds us that scientific mysteries do get solved, and of course I agree. It would be foolish to insist otherwise. But I would draw a distinction between problems that are simply difficult or vexing and problems that are, currently, unfathomable.
An example may help. Turbulence is a difficult problem in Newtonian physics. None of the currently available solutions seems entirely free of difficulties. Nonetheless, the problem of turbulence, while insoluble in the plain sense that it lacks a solution, is hardly unfathomable. We are quite able to imagine what a solution would be like. We simply do not have one.
Unfathomable problems are different. They leave us baffled in almost every respect We do not understand how a world comes into being, whether in ordinary life (as when we read), or in biology (as when a new organism comes into existence), or in cosmology (as when what is on view is the drama of creation itself). The facts are clear enough. It is the solutions that are baffling. We cannot imagine their ultimate shape. We haven’t a clue.
In writing my essay, my aim was hardly to argue that scientific progress has now come to a halt but rather to show how, given the unfathomable nature of certain problems, the concept of information has come to enjoy essentially a magical role. This concept does no work; it offers little by way of intellectual relief.
Matthew Johnson asks whether I believe in the existence of cells. Sure. DNA, too. But as for “current theories about the behavior of cells and DNA,” just which theories does Mr. Johnson have in mind, and where might they be found? Quantum electrodynamics—now, that’s a theory. First- and second-order linear differential equations—a theory can be found there, too. But what theory is at work in molecular biology? The closest is quantum mechanics, which offers a very partial and incomplete explanation for the nature of the chemical bond. But what we really find in molecular biology is a brilliant and successful application of ordinary chemistry to living systems—an application, note, in which matters of fact predominate and theories are conspicuous by their absence.
What about Darwin’s theory of evolution, which Mr. Johnson accuses me of dismissing as so much “rubbish”? Although I regard that contraption as the last of the great 19th-century mystery religions, the word “rubbish” would never pass my lips, if only because it is not generous enough to encompass the gorgeousness of the current Darwinian display, in which both rape and altruism are successfully explained as tactics of survival.
But something deeper is plainly at work in the disagreements between Mr. Johnson and me. The scientific community regards itself as a uniquely self-aware collective, one whose members are prepared, even eager, to subject their most cherished assumptions to a veritable firestorm of critical analysis. Yet the same community warms to the view that general criticisms made of various scientific disciplines, especially when they are severe, are not, in Mr. Johnson’s words, “very helpful.” Not helpful, as in not needed; not needed, as in not wanted. There is plainly a fissure here between two self-conceptions, the one open and confident, the other narrow and defensive. To put it another way: in science, as in politics, large and general principles are often upheld precisely to the extent that they are not believed in.
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I would say to George Jochnowitz that no, I haven’t changed my mind, but evidently I failed to make myself entirely clear. The sentences that Mr. Jochnowitz quotes from “The Deniable Darwin” make two points. The first is that religious doctrine has always assigned creation to some form of agency, and the second is that this and other such doctrines arise from very natural, unforced sentiments, or from “experience.”
In the case of the biological world, these same sentiments have historically taken the form of arguments from design—arguments that move from the complexity of living systems to the intervention of some designer, an intelligence that is either supernatural, as in the Bible, or simply alien, as in Francis Crick’s theory of directed panspermia. Darwinism breaks the grip of this ancient inferential impulse—which is why Richard Dawkins, in The Blind Watchmaker, says that Darwin’s theory is profoundly liberating.
To which I would respond: it is profoundly liberating if true. I am as willing as the next man to be liberated; I am simply not persuaded that Darwin’s theory is true. Or even plausible. I remain where, I suspect, most of us find ourselves. I regard Darwin’s theories and various theories of design as inadequate; I have no replacement for either.
I would add only (to revert to the subject of my recent COMMENTARY essay) that the use of information in contemporary biology is simply another mirror to the biblical account, a matter of displacing the fog from a Designer onto a magical concept. This may well be the best that we can do, but that is a question for the future.
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In answer to Alfred R. Matthews, I chose my rhetoric to evoke precisely the allusion Mr. Matthews cites, but I can no more place my confidence in John 1:1-3 than in information. The words are suggestive; they are moving; and they have haunted the Western intellectual tradition. For all I know they may express the plain, literal truth. But for all I know, they may not.
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Need I say that I am in complete agreement with Eric Julber? It is quite true that an appeal to the divine is no longer in fashion. The decline of religious faith is a complex and disturbing topic, but the facts are what they are: sophisticated men and women rejoice in their atheism, prepared to believe in nothing and simultaneously prepared to believe in anything. Those who concur with Richard Dawkins that Darwin has made atheism intellectually respectable have often demonstrated a degree of credulity that would embarrass a seminarian. How else might one explain currently fashionable doctrines of evolutionary psychology, a field so richly preposterous that, in reading its literature, only a man born with a petrified diaphragm, to quote H.L Mencken, could fail to laugh out loud?
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I agree with much that Evelyn Fox Keller writes; indeed, I would go further. The information resident in DNA is clearly not sufficient to bring an organism into existence, if the DNA is considered as a molecule in isolation. But then again, the information in a cookbook is not sufficient to bring a soufflé into being, either. The words must be read and understood; but any attempt to specify that understanding quickly empties out in a virtually infinite regress.
We accept the regress in daily life because it reflects a familiar human world. But what of the cell? The information resident in DNA is not sufficient to account for the construction of an organism. It is not sufficient because information is never sufficient for such purposes; no language explains itself. As far as we now know, the informational macro-molecules are the only entities within the cell capable of conveying information; but it would not help us to discover other sources of information, since that information would have to be interpreted as well. As so very often happens in the sciences, an entirely secondary concept—information—has been made to play a role that it cannot play.
Something is at work in biological systems that we have not yet properly defined, or even grasped. After all, if the current doctrines were even roughly correct, we should be able to write a recipe, place it on a table, and then observe with satisfaction how the recipe, quite by itself, makes a cake. We cannot do this, and we have no idea how it might be done.
It is true that the information in DNA is used in the context of a physical structure—the cell itself—and that DNA does not pass naked from one generation to another. But this only deepens the mystery: if the cell is needed to interpret its own DNA, whence the information needed for the interpretation? If no information is needed, why is the information in the DNA even relevant?
I suspect that when we come to understand biological systems, the entire conceptual superstructure to which we now appeal—information, organization, self-regulation, and the like—will disappear. We will see the cell entirely in terms of—but that is just what I do not know.
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