[00:00:00] Speaker A: Foreign the Future, a podcast about evolution and intelligent Design.
[00:00:12] Speaker B: Welcome to ID the Future. I'm your host, Andrew McDermott. Well, today I'm welcoming back to the show Dr. David Berlinski, the one and only to continue discussing his book Signs After Babel, available from Discovery Institute Press.
Dr. Berlinski is a Senior Fellow at Discovery Institute's center for Science and Culture. He received his Ph.D. in philosophy from Princeton University.
Dr. Belinski has taught philosophy, mathematics and English at such universities as Stanford, Rutgers, the City University of New York and the Universite de Paris. He is author of numerous books, including A Tour of the Calculus, the Advent of the Algorithm, Newton's Gift, and and the Devil's Delusion.
His latest, though, is called Signs After Babel. It's a collection of essays challenging the prevailing beliefs and pronouncements of contemporary science with his unique blend of deep learning, close reasoning and sharp wit.
In it he reflects on everything from Newton, Einstein and Godel to catastrophe theory, information theory, and the state of modern Darwinism.
Michael Denton, biochemist and author of A Theory and Crisis, calls Signs After Babel mandatory reading for anyone interested in a critical assessment of much current scientific thinking. No other recent publication comes close.
High praise. David, welcome back to ID the Future.
[00:01:36] Speaker A: Thank you so much. It's a pleasure to be back.
[00:01:39] Speaker B: Our first episode exploring Signs After Babel touched on what you consider to be the significant overall themes of the book.
There we focused on the first two sections of your book where we're considering the current state of Darwinian theory and, and the discontent that's been brewing in evolutionary biology for decades. Here I want to focus on the middle portion of the anthology and I thought we'd begin with section three. Microbe to Man. You start out with the origin of life question and in particular you take aim at the so called RNA world hypothesis for the origin of the first life.
Now, for those of the listeners that are new to this issue, what is the RNA world hypothesis?
[00:02:19] Speaker A: Well, let's just step back and retreat to a proverbial question which is often addressed to children.
Which came first, the chicken or the egg?
Now, it happens to be a very good question because instinct and experience would suggest that neither came first because neither could possibly be first. If the egg was first, where did it come from? If the chicken was first, where did it come from?
So it's a very, it's, it's kind of a dark question because it has far more packed into it than you would otherwise suspect. If you say the question is unanswerable in its present form because neither came first, you're faced with an infinite regress in poultry management, right? An endless regress of eggs and chickens and eggs and chickens. There's nothing wrong with that intellectually, except for the fact that life seemed to have started on the Earth roughly 4 billion years ago. That's incompatible with an infinite regress of chickens and eggs.
The same question could be asked about the universe too, but that's another story.
On the other hand, if you reject the infinite regress, if you say that, well, ordinarily life only comes from life, but it had to originate, then you're left with only one other possibility. At some time in the past, at some time in the past, this is almost a logical inference.
The chicken was the egg. That is, the identities begin to collapse as you go further and further back into the past.
Now, origins of life research has been a continuous theme in biology even since the 19th century, when Darwin wrote about some warm, wet little pond. We with life spontaneously emerging in the 1950s, 1960s and thereafter, it became a kind of subfield of synthetic chemistry with the attempt to demonstrate that, yes, by any number of accidental processes, life could have originated from non life.
Now, obviously, if life originated from non life at some point directly thereafter, we're at the stage where the chicken and the egg are one. That is some fundamental beginning point cannot be fragmented into species as we know it. The primordial element of life has to somehow embody different properties that are now quite distinct in the modern cell, for example, there are the informational macromolecules, large molecules like DNA and RNA and their proteins, which are long chains of amino acids.
The informational molecules, the macromolecules, give the instructions, the proteins execute the instructions, but the proteins execute the instructions from information they get from the macromolecules.
One depends on the other. You can call the first the chicken, the second the egg, but you have a chicken and egg problem to begin with. In the modern cell, it's simply reproduced on the level of the cell itself.
This, of course, is enormously vexing for origins of life scenarios.
Rather than supposing that something like the modern cell could possibly have emerged from the primordial ooze.
Very sincere hard working chemists conjectured that there had to be an earlier stage favoring something.
Well, it couldn't be the proteins because they were constructed according to the information in the macromolecules and it couldn't be DNA for a variety of reasons, because it was not quite supple and flexible enough to be distorted. Therefore it had to be rna, the intermediate between DNA, the library, and the proteins, the servants of the library.
Thus was formed the RNA hypothesis. Now, the great problem with the RNA hypothesis is that RNA is a macromolecule, but as a macromolecule, it does nothing. It just sits there, looks blankly, it lacks all enzymatic function. It doesn't do anything except exist like the lilies of the field.
The discovery in the 1980s and 1990s that there was in fact a form of RNA with some enzymatic properties of its own was as striking as a thunderclap on a clear day.
That was the riboson.
It was RNA that is was loaded with information, but it was a ribozyme, not a ribonucleic acid in a classical sense, and it could execute certain enzymatic functions.
At that point, origins of life researchers were completely convinced that they discovered the point where the chicken and the egg had become one. It wasn't the ribozyme. Not a bad conjecture by any means. Not a bad conjecture and a resolution of the original question. Which came first, the chicken or the egg? Neither. There was a point where there were one.
[00:07:42] Speaker B: Wow. I like the way you put that chicken and egg question.
Well, in the next essay, you step back from the particulars of this or that origin of life theory and you make a wry observation about how evolution skeptics are treated. The title of the essay is the activity of a cell is like that of a factory. That's an observation well worth making, given that scientists in Darwin's time pictured cells as largely undifferentiated blobs of protoplasm. But if life began as a single cell, and if even the simplest cell is a sophisticated factory, how do you go from non life to a factory? And not just a factory, but one that can build factories upon factories. Of course, that isn't the point of your essay. Your point actually has to do with how science journalists react to pronouncements, such as we find in the essay's title, a night and day difference, depending on who's doing the pronouncing. Tell us a little bit about that.
[00:08:36] Speaker A: Well, you pose the question in a way which I think admits of an unequivocal answer. How do you go from undifferentiated group of primordial chemicals to anything like the modern cell? And the answer is, you don't. It's impossible.
I think almost everyone acknowledges that you don't go from a junkyard to an IBM supercomputer in a single step either. The question is, what are the intermediate Steps.
And it's really, if you look at origins of life research, say from 1955, when it really began with the Urey Miller experiments, a beaker full of of stuff, lightning bolt strikes and they get some amino acids out or something to 20, 23.
There are two ways to think of the origins of life.
It's getting somewhere or it's going nowhere. And both have very ardent spokesman. Jim Tour, who's an outstanding synthetic chemist, is the foremost defender of the thesis. It's going nowhere. It's getting nowhere because he sees insuperable chemical obstacles to any kind of origin of life scenario. Any kind of accessible origin of life scenario is completely open to the possibility it may occur in the future. Scientific breakthrough may occur in the future. On the other hand, the leading figures who do include some outstanding chemists, like John Sutherland's magnificent synthetic chemist, Soztac is excellent. All sorts of shrewd, smart people are involved in the field. We'll say, well, we haven't reached a complete explanation of the origins of life, but we've made a lot of progress. We've shown a lot of proof of concepts how synthetic pathways could be formed, and it's quite true, they've only been formed under laboratory conditions. But the next step is to show that they could be formed under prebiotic conditions. So you have this very interesting dichotomy. It runs straight through commentary about the origins of life. On the one hand, the media largely, and that includes the scientific journal Science and Nature, are very partial to the thesis that origins of life research is going somewhere.
Of course they are. Nobody likes a negative assessment. Nobody wants to publish an article in science or would publish an article on science saying origins of life is getting nowhere. Absolutely dead end. On the other hand, there's been a steady sosaurus of discontent about this propaganda apparatus. Jim Tor is not the only one. It goes back, for example, Bob Shapiro in the 1980s, a very, very good biochemist at NYU. A friend of mine published an outstanding book where he says, you know, you guys are just not getting the point. You're cooking up something in the laboratory that may work, but could not have worked under prebiotic conditions because you guys weren't there supervising the laboratory reactions. And without laboratory supervision, this experiment or these experiments goes nowher.
So you have a very interesting example of a richly funded field with outstanding people participating in it who come to diametrically oppose conclusions and who have partisans, some in the media and some in the academic world. Remember the title of my book is Science after Babel. This is a form of Babel. What somebody who has no understanding of synthetic chemistry, no interest in origins of life research will conclude is pretty much, I think, based on the propaganda apparatus in place. And that will lead him to the supposition they've got it almost all figured out now.
[00:12:14] Speaker B: And speaking of figured out, I do like your essay on Nick Matzky and some of the scientific hubris he puts on display. You also take on Harvard paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould and the notion that there isn't that much separating humans from chimps.
As far as Gould, what. What was the argument of Goulds that you took exception to, and how do you push back?
[00:12:34] Speaker A: Well, you know, Gould was a very sympathetic figure. He wrote a great many interesting essays. And I have no way of knowing this, but I suspect that he was a lot more iconoclastic and skeptical about orthodox positions in biology than he ever let on. He certainly felt that the orthodox position in biology and psychology and sociology, human affairs in general, is that there is no qualitative distinction between, I'm almost quoting us and the chimpanzees, only a difference of degree and not kind.
And I think that phrase should be attended to carefully. A difference in degree but not kind.
And I think that's just utterly ridiculous. I thought so when I wrote that. I still think so right now. I mean, just look around. You don't see the chimpanzees building skyscrapers, elaborate cities and energy infrastructures organizing their societies in certain ways. And you certainly don't see chimpanzee footprint on the moon.
That's something completely beyond them. This is not a difference in degree. It's not as if the chimpanzees had gotten halfway to the moon and fell.
It's simply beyond them, as other things may and certainly are, simply beyond us. So I think this is a fundamental mistake, and I think the idea of continuity between ourselves and our animal ancestors is fundamentally mistaken.
There is certainly a coordination of sort. We are part of the animal kingdom. There's no point in denying that we have animal bodies, animal digestions, animal visual systems and the rest of it. But in some way that we find very, very difficult to make clear, we are really an outlier in the animal kingdom, very far apart from everything else. I mean, the distance between us and the chimpanzees, Noam Chomsky once remarked, is much greater than the distance between the chimpanzees and the flowers, the last common ancestor and the flowering plants. It's an enormous distance in every single respect. I mean, don't forget the chimpanzees don't talk. They can't count, they don't cook. They know nothing about music. They know nothing about the organization of society. When they get together, they fight. That's it.
We certainly, and I shouldn't deny this, looking into the eyes of any of the primates, we recognize something. Of course we do.
Of course we do. You look in the eyes of a fish, you don't see anything except, would butter sauce be good on you?
But looking in the eyes of a gorilla or chimpanzee or any other primate, or a dog, for that matter, there's a point of recognition, a flash of recognition.
But that doesn't mean the differences are only differences of degree. They're not differences. They're fundamental differences.
And it's intellectually poor, hygienically, to deny it. It's. It's right there in your face.
[00:15:21] Speaker B: Huh. That's beautiful. Well, the next section of the book is titled Past, Present, and Future. A passage from the second essay inspired the book's title, actually, in the ineffable. Higgs, you again bring us back to that metaphor for modern science as a Tower of Babel when describing physics in the 20th century, that the thing is incoherent, you point out, everyone can see. What is rarely noticed is that it remains standing.
Next, I want to talk about Section 4's first essay, a Natural History of Curiosity. It explores a period in medieval Islamic astronomy when the Islamic world seemed almost on the brink of the scientific revolution, beating the west to the punch. But then. Well, I don't want to spoil the story. In your essay, you take up the story in the 1400s with the Mongol king and astronomer Mohammed Taragay Ulubaker. He promoted, through investigation and worthiness of the scientific venture a sort of new respect for science as its own field.
Now, something scientific, or at least proto scientific, was happening here. Tell us about it.
[00:16:27] Speaker A: Well, just let me step back for one second there. There are three examples in which I think historians of science can say, look, it could have happened there, but it didn't. And that's an interesting question. One was ancient Greece.
You look at the ancient Greek mathematicians or the classical Greek mathematicians, people like Euclid or Archimedes. You look at Aristotle, you look at Plato, you look at the incredible creativity of that culture, and you look at some of their technological inventions, which were apparently far more advanced than we imagine today. They dug up something that looks really like a computer from the 4th century BC it really looks like a computer and seems to have been able to predict eclipses and rotations of the heavens. Who knows what it was really used for, but it was incredibly sophisticated. The question naturally arises, how come they didn't take the next step? It was right there under their nose. Right there under their nose. The second civilization, where I think historians of science could ask the same kind of question is China. Tang China and Song China, say from the 7th century to the 12th century in China, filled with sophisticated technological inventions, things that did amazing things. Clocks, water wheels, pendulum systems, pulley systems, irrigation systems.
There are seven volumes by Joseph Needham, Science and Technology in China, which discusses this in elaborate detail.
And yet they too, they just didn't take the next step. Why not? We don't know. And the third is the Muslim, the great Muslim Arab empire that really had its origin, say in late 7th century, early 8th century. Baghdad, center of an enormous empire, came to an end in Baghdad in the 1250s with the Mongol invasion, but continued in asia for another 150 to 200 years, especially in Samara Khan, where the Ulagbeg Observatory was created.
Completely in ruins now, but it was ostensibly a magnificent astronomical observatory.
And yet 150 years later, a comparable observatory in Istanbul, Constantinople, Istanbul, same city was destroyed on orders of the sultan. And the impulse, the scientific impulse, which was achingly close to being completed, as it was completed in Europe in the 16th and 17th century, it came to an end.
These are really deep mysteries in history.
We are unable truly to answer these questions. There are all sorts of answers that have been given. Well, the Greeks didn't develop science because they had a lot of slaves to do manual labor. The Romans were engineering geniuses, but they didn't need to automate anything because it was much cheaper to use slave labor. Well, there is some truth to that, but my own view is there's some intellectual spark which seems to be largely random in history, which occurs very infrequently, which just happened to occur in Europe in the 17th century and no other place in all of human history, which is very remarkable.
[00:19:35] Speaker B: It is indeed intriguing. And you know, David, you and I are both poets and I appreciate the way you, you conclude the essays in this section. You actually quote some poetry. It's a chronicle written in 1581 by the Persian author Mansoor Shirazi. Describing that reign, you talked about the reign of Sultan Murad iii. Among other things, it recounts the creation and destruction of the Royal Istanbul Observatory. And at one point, the poem appears to directly address people of science, saying this, what hope then can you have of Uncovering these matters that you make diversions from the surface of the earth and indulge in celestial affairs. Come, let us get away from this egotism and wrangling for the old decrepit world is monstrously tricky and deceptive. Beware of her, for she may put our affairs in confusion.
Now you make the point that as the enchantment of scientific pursuit died out here, it was coming alive in Denmark with the observatory of Tycho Brahe, whose data was the basis for Kepler's laws of planetary motion. And of course, Kepler's work laid the groundwork for Isaac Newton. And then we're off to the races.
So it's. It's really interesting, as you say, that it didn't continue here, but it's connected.
[00:20:52] Speaker A: It is connected. And the intriguing historical fact is we're not able to see the connection in solid empirical terms. For example, to ask whether could Copernicus possibly have known anything about Ulag Beg's observatory if Copernicus didn't happen to read Arabic, There was no route of transmission for documents to go from Samaracand to Poland. There are all sorts of completely empirical connections. But this is almost a reason to form a belief in an idealistic view of history, where ideas influence one another by a process. We simply don't understand the idea in one place. Somehow or other, as Berkeley said, only ideas influence. Ideas occurred at another place without any kind of intermediate physical medium.
Pure action at a distance. Intellectual history is a lot like that. Intellectual history is the last place where we really, really are confronted with action at a distance. It's quite remarkable. Ideas have a kind of vivacity, a mysterious kind of causal power which leaps over time and space.
[00:22:04] Speaker B: I don't know how Our mutual friend Dr. Stephen Meyer goes into the Judeo Christian roots and ideas that continue to inspire the roots of modern science. And in fact, you dedicate your book to. To Dr. Meyer. I know you two are good friends.
[00:22:20] Speaker A: Oh yeah, we're old friends.
[00:22:22] Speaker B: Well, David, thank you so much for taking the time to unpack your new book. Signs after Babel with us. It's amazing stuff and I hope we can talk about it again in the near future.
[00:22:32] Speaker A: Okay, sounds good. Let's count on it.
[00:22:35] Speaker B: Listeners, check out more endorsements of the book and order a copy@science afterbabble.com that's science afterbabel.com and if you missed my previous discussion with David exploring sections one and two of the book, be sure to go back and tune in for ID the future. I'm Andrew McDermott. Thanks for listening.
[00:22:57] Speaker A: Visit
[email protected] and intelligent design.org this program is copyright Discovery Institute and recorded by its center for Science and Culture.
