Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: Foreign the Future, a podcast about evolution and intelligent Design.
[00:00:11] Speaker B: Welcome to ID the Future. I'm your host, Andrew McDermott. Today I'm excited to welcome to the show Dr. David Berlinski to discuss his book, Signs After Babel, available from Discovery Institute Press.
Dr. Belinsky is a senior Fellow at Discovery Institute's center for Science and Culture. He received his PhD in Philosophy from Princeton University and was later a postdoctoral fellow in mathematics and molecular biology at Columbia University.
Dr. Belinsky has taught philosophy, mathematics and English at such universities as Stanford, Rutgers, the City University of New York, and the University of Paris.
And of course, he's author of numerous books, many of which you'll have heard of, including A Tour of the Calculus, the Advent of the Algorithm, Newton's Gift, and the Devil's Delusion.
His latest 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 to Einstein and Godel to catastrophe theory, information theory, and the state of modern Darwinism.
David Galer, professor of computer science at Yale University, called Signs After Babel a striking and beautiful and absolutely necessary book. David Berlinsky at his spectacular best.
David, welcome to the show.
[00:01:40] Speaker A: Thank you so much. And thank you for that magnificent introduction.
[00:01:45] Speaker B: Oh, absolutely. Well, this book, Signs After Babel, it's an anthology of your essays related to science, some of them recent and some of them stretching back a while. If you had to single out one or two of the most prominent recurring themes in the book, what would you say they are?
[00:02:02] Speaker A: Well, you know, every, every writer likes very much to think that there's a deep inner continuity in his books. I've written, I don't know, 15 or 16 books now, and in the privacy of the night, when I contemplate those books, I like to think that there are really deeply connected. Perhaps other people will find it a little bit of a stretch to find the point of continuity, but certainly in this book, the essays that are collected in this book, there's a general theme of neither quite perplexity nor mystification. Perhaps puzzlement is the better word about the relationship between the most abstract part of the sciences, which is mathematics, and the physical world that ostensibly it illuminates. I've always found that mysterious. And many of the essays in this book, especially the more technical ones, play out in that rather striking mystery that this enormous apparatus of entirely abstract concepts should prove to be fundamental in the physical sciences.
Not quite so fundamental. In the biological sciences. And just why is that? Those are the kind of questions that I think link one essay to another in a kind of daisy chain.
[00:03:22] Speaker B: And I can't think of anybody who would be better to address some of these things than you.
I like the metaphor you pick for signs in this book, in the introduction you set it up for. As you describe modern signs as an immense tower, Some parts of it are sound and sturdy, others less so. If we are moved to admire its size, you say, we are also bound to acknowledge its faults.
So why. Where did the tower analogy come from? And why is it a good way to look at things today?
[00:03:53] Speaker A: Both the tower analogy and the title of the book really go back to Bruegel's magnificent painting, the tower of Babel. And the painting goes back to the biblical story of Babel.
A great tower is constructed, and God looks at the architects, sees their ambition, which is to reach the heavens, and in an inspired moment of confusion, sees to it that the architects cannot communicate in a common language.
So that the tower increasingly is constructed, but it lacks all coherence and it cannot rise past a certain point because of the confusion of the architects.
And some of that is true of modern science.
But at the same time, we must recognize if that is a fact. It is also a fact that the tower is still standing. In many respects, it's like a cathedral, incomplete. The aspirations of a gothic cathedral are always incomplete because the cathedral cannot penetrate the heavens. It. It can only suggest the heavens. But at the same time, the cathedral of modern science is incomplete, perhaps more in Bruegel sense, because the architects are not really speaking the same language. They're not communicating successfully.
[00:05:15] Speaker B: Yeah, and that can certainly make it hard with all the different scientific disciplines, the tendency to overblow results, or at least make them worth the. The funding, the. The media not understanding certain aspects of science.
It can take somebody from within to. To point out the. The frailties. And that you certainly have done. Well. The first section is titled Darwin checking in. Here in four essays, you give Darwinism its due without ever falling into anything like boosterism for the theory. In fact, there are moments when one could be forgiven for seeing you as damning evolutionary theory and with faint praise.
Is Darwinism really do anything, or are you just having fun at a dying theory's expense?
[00:06:01] Speaker A: In this section, having fun at a dying theory's expense?
No, I don't think that was ever my intention. Look, there. There is something right about Darwinian theory.
I'm not talking about the evidence, say the fossil evidence or the genetic evidence or the common idea of universal common descent. I'm not talking about those evidentiary patterns which may or may not support the theory. I'm talking about the idea that it was a relief to the biological sciences in the 19th century, for a time at least, to get rid of teleological notions, to get rid of theological notions and see what they could accomplish without them by imagining a mechanism that had no power of forward contemplation, that worked in the present by something like an optimizing process. That's the essence of Darwinian thought. And the mathematical model for that. Or the mathematical structure is a Markov process, which was clarified in the 20th century. Finite state Markov process, or a probability transition system, so that some system reaches a certain state. It is now the present, it's being influenced by the environment.
And between its state and the environment and its probability calculus, it goes to the next state, it goes to the next state blindly.
That turns out to be quite a powerful idea.
It did not turn out to be as powerful as it really is until quite recently with the advent of ChatGPT, which is simply at its heart a finite state Markov process, a Darwinian process.
That's not all it is. But anyone who says, as I may have said in the past, poo poo, this is a system that can't do anything is wrong. It can do something, but it can do something only in a highly constrained designed environment.
That's something worth noting too. So if I said poo poo in the past, I reject and denounce what I said. Not quite poo poo, not making fun of a dying theory, but I like your formulation very much. Giving the devil his due.
[00:08:22] Speaker B: I like the way you put that. And I, I also like the idea of walking away for a time from our religious comforts, if you will, collectively, and giving this idea, this methodological naturalism, this, this materialism, this stuff, a chance, and, and in the process being able to explore and illuminate its limitations.
So I really like the way you, you phrase that.
[00:08:51] Speaker A: I think you're absolutely right. I think there, there are two things to appreciate or to be sympathetic with and, and there are contraries. They're not the same thing. On the one hand, in order to understand physical phenomena, we know perfectly well, say from 20th century physics, that you need a variety of hideously complicated mathematical structures.
General relativity, for example, or quantum field theory. These are not easy things to assimilate and to grasp. On the other hand, to understand a variety of other phenomena, it's a Big mistake to ignore some very simple mathematical structures like a finite state Markov process. Big mistake to say it must be mathematically exotic and elaborate. That doesn't seem to be the case.
[00:09:43] Speaker B: So the ability to acknowledge simplicity where it. Where it exists is important.
[00:09:50] Speaker A: Well, we can get it, sure, yeah. But that sort of follows the historical development of Western science, I like to say, because it's a convenient formula, that all of Western science, this incredibly elaborate panorama, is really based on two distinct ideas. One is the idea of the algorithm, which is nothing more than a sequential series of steps ending somewhere or other. And that idea goes right back to the 17th century, and it's completely discrete. The other idea is the calculus, the body of mathematical analysis based on the continuum, which is not discrete, it's continuous. And these two ideas inform every part of intellectual life, but in quite different ways. And very often you see them competitively engaged.
What can be done algorithmically can't quite be done in terms of the analytic apparatus of mathematics and vice versa. They're very distinct. You see this, you. You see the distinction emerging again and again and again.
But to have those two ideas fixed as the. The chief ideas of Western science, I think, is very helpful.
[00:11:02] Speaker B: Well, once you check in with Darwin and the. The theory these days, the next section in your book is Checking out of Darwin. It begins with you checking out of leaving the US and going to Paris. But very quickly it becomes about you checking out from the great house of Darwinism, so to speak. That first essay in this section is particularly evocative. I thought you tell about your time in Paris with the great mathematician Marcel Schutzenberger. Much of this essay reads like a novel, not surprising since you've had some success there. But what we find here is that Schutzenberger is a very colorful character and that you and he begin building a mathematically rigorous case against modern Darwinism. This is what the 1970s. And we later see these ideas taken up and further developed by Bill Dembsky, Stephen Meyer, Douglas Axe. So for those of us who follow the history of the evolution debate, it's pretty exciting stuff. Tell us about that trip to Paris and those meetings with Schutzenberger. Marco, as you came to call him.
[00:12:04] Speaker A: Yeah, everybody called Schwarzenberger Marco. That's how he liked to be called. He was not only an unforgettable character for me, but for almost everyone who knew him. He came from an old, established, distinguished Alsatian family. His father was a very important physician, and he himself was not trained as a mathematician. He was trained as A physician, and he practiced as a physician. But he was overwhelmingly interested and curious about mathematics. And he became a self made mathematician, which is an unusual, accomplished, a very, very distinguished self made mathematician.
Interested chiefly in finite mathematics, graph theory and algebra. But he had an extraordinary life. I don't know whether I have even begun to suggest the full scope of his life. He was in the Resistance during the Second World War and as he said to me, well after the Second World War had been ended, almost everyone in France now claims he was in the Resistance or she wasn't the Resistance. He asked me to take that with a grain of salt. But he was also deeply involved romantically with someone, a Chinese woman involved in the revolution. And he said he came within a whisker of following her into the maelstrom of the Chinese Revolution. At the last minute he drew back and she disappeared forever into the Revolution. Extraordinary story in its own right.
He was a very combative personality, very engaging, very, very funny. He spoke English with a thick French accent, but he spoke it perfectly, grammatically, perfectly.
And of course, like all highly intelligent men, he had nothing but amused contempt for everyone else except for a handful of distinguished mathematicians. And I'm. When I say amused contempt, that's exactly the feeling he had for me. Affectionate, fond, amused contempt. He thought I was rather a slow witted imbecile. And he probably had good reason to think so. He was extremely fast, extremely sharp and extremely skeptical about everything connected with Darwinian theory for two reasons. One, he thought the structure of the theory was absurd, but also he thought there was a very important tradition in French biological thought which had nothing to do with Darwin being unjustly neglected. For example, he was very close to the great zoologist Pierre Grasset, who wrote, I think 10 volumes, a history of animal forms or something like that. I have the title in French somewhere. It's not really read in the United States in the Eng speaking world, but an extremely important book in the French zoological tradition.
And Grasset was also completely indifferent to Darwinian theory. He said it was missing the fundamentals in the organization of life. And Marco of course felt a very French solidarity with that strand of French biological thought which to this day is not deeply committed to Darwinism.
[00:15:01] Speaker B: So very much a Darwin skeptic for mathematical reasons.
[00:15:05] Speaker A: It sounds like mathematical, cultural, traditional, historical.
Marco always said that when he read someone like Richard Dawkins, he simply could not construct a real theory around it. And I think he was right.
When he tried to construct a real theory around it, he found that the theory very quickly opened up to any number of serious difficulties, and I was extremely, pleasantly surprised. Oh, maybe six months ago, Andrew, I picked up a journal. I don't remember why it picked up. You know, I was a member of the Institute of Advanced Studies outside of Paris for a year, and I knew all the mathematicians there, and I picked up one of their journals. I saw an article by an outstanding French mathematician and man by the name of Gromov, G R O M O V.
And I was just thumbing through the article. It was his own take on the philosophy of biology from the mathematical perspective.
And I was astonished to see that one of the arguments that Marco had been advancing in the late 70s and early 1980s was right there on the page. Gromow, of course, had not read our work, but he had come to the same conclusion independently.
It was an astonishing indication of the way certain ideas, even if not fully developed, have a serpentine way of slithering through history and reappearing at a later time.
[00:16:26] Speaker B: Yeah, well, that's especially interesting given that in chapter six of your book, Darwin and the Mathematicians, the essay, you say that until recently, mathematicians had been skeptical of any discipline beyond mathematics, and Schutzenberg are very good example of that. But you say that changed, and one of the agents of change there being Erwin schrodinger and his 1944 book, what is Life?
Did Schrodinger encourage the biologists and physicists in their materialism? What was changing around this time?
[00:17:00] Speaker A: No, no, I. I think Schrodinger appealed to the biologists because they knew he was one terrific physicist and he was a very sympathetic physicist. Bear in mind, not quite like Heisenberg, who was not sympathetic at all, and certainly not like Einstein or Bohr. But Schrodinger had the ability and certainly had the genius to approach biology from the perspective of a physicist, no question about that.
And come to radical conclusions that in the mid to late 1940s, biologists had not yet seen clearly, for example, that there must. There simply must be a code script in every organism to handle the matter of replication, duplication, the next generation.
You know, it seems so obvious to us now we say DNA. Yeah, that's, you know, that's it. DNA. One generation to the next, information is transmitted, the cell divides, the organism multiplies. What could be? Well, it wasn't quite so obvious until Schrodinger published what Is Life? And said, this must be the case. And he also identified, he said, the code has to be some sort of crystalline structure. It's got to be stable enough to be Transmitted.
The book is filled with not necessarily powerful arguments, but powerful insights.
It's a first rate mine. Leaving his own field of quantum mechanics, addressing theoretical biology and reminding biologists in the 1940s of what they should have seen underneath their nose.
[00:18:29] Speaker B: So someone looking up and sort of giving others in the field and unrelated fields the bigger picture.
[00:18:35] Speaker A: Don't Forget that until 1944, late 1944, 1945, although biologists, biochemists knew that there was something roughly like DNA in the cell, it had been misidentified until Avery's great experiments identifying DNA as a nucleic acid, not a protein.
This is another part of the story. Avery, who certainly should have won a Nobel Prize and was denied his prize, publishing his stuff at exactly the moment Schrodinger was publishing. What is life?
Schrodinger saying? This has got to be there. Avery's saying, I found it.
[00:19:12] Speaker B: And do you think the human toll of the, the Great wars and the, the looking forward to, to the nuclear age and Cold War, do you think all that took a toll rather on mathematics and on the sciences?
[00:19:24] Speaker A: No, I really don't. I think the history of mathematics in the 1940s, 1950s and thereafter, the history of physics in the 1940s and 1950s could be written by an historian who knows nothing about the first and Second World War.
The only relevance is the number of talented mathematicians and physicists who perished in those wars. That's something else.
[00:19:46] Speaker B: Sure.
[00:19:47] Speaker A: I think the physicist had a spasm of guilt after the first atomic bomb was exploded in late 1945. August 1945. I think so. Or perhaps it was July. And Oppenheimer especially, you know, he, he approached Harry Truman with his hands held high and said, I have blood on my hands. And Truman said, get that ludicrous to take out of here.
But that moment passed very quickly.
[00:20:10] Speaker B: Wow.
Well, the final essay in section two of your book is actually new to this volume, so never before released. It's titled A Long Look Back, the Y Star Symposium. Let me just read the opening paragraph for, for listeners, the Y Star Symposium was held in April of 1966. The meeting reflected a certain discontent that had been simmering in biology for many years.
In his opening remarks, Peter Medawar put the facts of the matter as plainly as the immediate cause of this conference is a pretty widespread sense of dissatisfaction about what has come to be thought as the accepted evolutionary theory in the English speaking world, the so called Neo Darwinian theory. These objections to current Neo Darwinian theory are very widely held among biologists generally and we Must on no account, I think, make light of them, end quote. So what was the big deal about this meeting? And why dredge up a conference from more than 50 years ago? What happened there that's worth thinking about today?
[00:21:08] Speaker A: It's very, very unusual in biology or physics or even mathematics. It happens occasionally, but it's very unusual that you get a group of people together and instead of saying, yeah, yeah, instead of giving one jury talk after another, a few of the attendees indicate a radical sense of discontent. I think the first and second Solovey conference for physicists had something of that same feeling, especially the one where Einstein and Bohr had it out about quantum Mechanics. That was 1927, I think, had some of the same effects. People are still referring to the Solovey Congress of 1927 about Einstein's thought experiment, about Bohr's reputation, things like that, which led right to the Einstein, Podolsky, Rosen famous paper about quantum mechanics being incomplete.
The Wistar symposium was unusual. First, because it had really good people there, very, very competent mathematicians, biologists, maybe one or two physicists, people who were first rate. Second, because 1966, 1967 was before the enthronement of Darwinian biology as a contemporary orthodoxy. 1966, you could, and many people did, say, that's just a 19th century fairy tale, roughly on the same order of Freudian psychology.
That was perfectly acceptable. You know, I was in graduate school in the early 60s and then at Stanford in the late 60s as a professor. And in the first place, no one ever mentioned Darwinian theory was simply not part of the thought horizon of professors or students. And in the second place, if you had said, as mathematicians very often said, the stuff is just preposterous, it makes no sense, nobody would have said boo. That changed. That changed in a way that we certainly do not understand. Darwin became contemporary orthodoxy in the United States and indeed in the English speaking world very quickly, perhaps with a publication of Richard Dawkins, the Selfish Gene, which is a great book, no question about that.
But thereafter it became enthroned, and enthroned became enshrined. But in 1966, you could see fault lines forming that have persisted to this day. Murray Eden, a very good electrical engineer and a friend from mit, and Marco from the University of Paris at just here, where I later taught, both presented some very serious arguments that continue to resonate to this day. You know, when I'm, when I look back and read Murray eden's stuff from 1966 and then I look at the contemporary journals, I think I Might have put it in this paper that I wrote. Every now and then I'll come across somebody who said, you know, I just read Murray eden's paper from 1966 and nothing's changed. Protein space is still a mystery.
When I was corresponding with Dan Tofik in Israel about his work in protein chemistry, he said the same thing. You know, at the beginning there's something like a miracle, which is roughly what Murray Eden said.
And I think it's the problem that's been repeated again and again and again, one generation after the other, with the acknowledgment as from Dan Taufik in Israel. A lot of other protein chemists say the same thing. Well, look, yeah, that's interesting problem, but sooner or later, evolution will figure it out.
You know, Crick of the Watson Crick, famous Watson Crick DNA discovery, he was perfectly aware of this problem and he wrote about it a little bit. He couldn't. He had nothing to say about it. I think is true to this day, 2023, we do not know how the protein family originated and what the topology in the entire space of proteins is that makes possible the development of new proteins, still largely unknown.
[00:25:03] Speaker B: And your book certainly reveals this and is very honest about this. And just like the Wistar conference, it's a breath of intellectual fresh air.
Well, David, we need to leave it there for now.
I could be talking to you all day for sure.
[00:25:19] Speaker A: Okay, good talking to you.
[00:25:21] Speaker B: Thank you, David. Listeners, I've barely scratched the surface here with this book's riches. I want to encourage you to get your own copy and read it for yourself. Order it at signsafterbabble.com that's the website. Hop on it. Signsafterbabble.com for ID the Future. This has been Mr. David Berlinski and Andrew McDermott. Thank you for listening.
[00:25:46] Speaker A: Visit us at idthefuture.com and intelligent design.org this program is copyright Discovery Institute and recorded by its center for Science and Culture.
