[00:00:04] Speaker A: ID the Future, a podcast about evolution and intelligent design.
[00:00:10] Speaker B: Two characteristics that distinguish life from non life in the universe are the ability to process information and effectively communicate. But where did these features originate?
Welcome to ID the Future. I'm your host Andrew McDermott. Today I'm welcoming back physicist and author Dr. Eric Hedin to discuss how living systems communicate and why that provides evidence of intelligent design, not blind undirected processes.
In part one, we talked about information processing in living systems, a unique ability found in all life from the simplest single celled organisms right up to creatures like us human beings.
Today we zoom into a second hallmark or biosignature, as Dr. Hadeen puts it, of living systems and that is communication.
Now, in case you don't know him, Dr. Hadeen is Professor Emeritus of Physics and Astronomy at Ball State University in Indiana. He is author of the book Cancelled what some atheists don't want you to see. He speaks at universities around the country and writes regularly on the evidence for Intelligent Design at Evolution News and Science Today, which you can
[email protected] let's jump back into the conversation now.
Well, let's switch gears and discuss another related article you penned recently on communication in human life and beyond. Here's another unnatural and therefore extremely rare attribute in living the ability to effectively communicate. Humans can do it and beyond us. Communication saturates the animal kingdom in a plethora of ways. Even in the plant world, trees communicate with each other and share water and nutrients through underground fungal networks. Both trees and plants communicate by releasing volatile organic compounds. So you have this whole world of communication going on around living systems.
Dr. William Dembsky, in his book Being as Communion puts it this to exist is to be in communion, and to be in communion is to exchange information.
So the fundamental aspect of the universe is not matter, he holds, and that's materialists holding to that. It's actually intelligently formed information and the communication of that information.
Now can you review the three features of effective communication that you lay out in that article?
[00:02:34] Speaker A: Yes, I think that it's something that a conclusion most anybody could arrive at with a little thought.
We understand that communication is not just receiving, but it's a two way process.
And to be effective it always includes three features. There is the expression, you know, it's sending out a message, a signal. You know, if we talk about speaking, communication, it's our voices, it's reception.
You can send out a signal throughout the history of the universe, but it's pointless and meaningless unless there's another organism that can actually detect that signal.
But even that doesn't result in communication.
There's a third step, which I call comprehension, Meaning I can talk to, say, my dog all day about quantum mechanics, but there's no comprehension going on in the dog's brain about my discussion of Schrodinger's equation and the wave function. And so it's wasted. It's not communication. The dog gains nothing, and I waste my time.
We'd be better off just going for a walk, I think.
But anyway, so expression, reception, and comprehension, I think we'll find, are present in all forms of communication.
[00:04:19] Speaker B: Yeah. And why do you say that this type of communication is irreducibly complex?
[00:04:25] Speaker A: Well, an irreducibly complex system of any kind means that if you take away one part of it, it breaks down. And I think that communication does rely upon the operation of all three of these features.
You know, if you, like I said, talk to someone who has no understanding, or perhaps to an animal that has no understanding, you're not communicating with it, you know, unless you're just saying very simple things like, you know, oh, good dog. But if you can't talk, but you can hear and understand, then it's. It's very difficult to communicate.
If you can talk and understand but you can't hear, again, you're going to be lacking the ability to communicate, at least auditorily.
So each of the aspects of communication are necessary for it to function effectively. And there's more as well.
The systems that are behind each of these three aspects of communication are, each, in themselves, irreducibly complex.
Each of the features entail specific, complex biochemical and neurological functionality.
So communication actually comprises a system of irreducibly complex systems.
[00:06:10] Speaker B: Wow. Can you tell us about the coordinated anatomy that allows us to form sounds, as you and I are doing right now, as well as what helps us interpret the auditory signals, which is part of receiving those messages, isn't it?
[00:06:25] Speaker A: Well, this is a field of study that goes far beyond my expertise. And so I'm just going to be referring to others who have studied, say, the human ability to speak. And creating sounds involves vocal cords, the pharynx, tongue, mouth, lips. But that's just the first step in the communication process to say that we need these things.
Let's just focus in on one of them. Perhaps we might not even really think of it, but the part of the three throat called the pharynx, highlighted in a previous post on Evolution News by physician Howard Glicksman and engineer Steve Laughman.
In quoting their work, they say the Pharynx affords us the dual abilities to breathe and swallow food and water, but it does much more. It affords the ability for speech, language and tonal activities like lyrical speech and singing.
It leads to the percussion and acoustic shaping of the tongue, teeth, throat, oral and nasal cavities, and most of the other parts of the pharynx. They're all absolutely required for the nuanced communication that's essential to the human experience.
Just comparing human kind of vocal anatomy to other animals, from what I understand, is that it's not just that animals like the primates are not smart enough to speak. They don't have the anatomical features that allow them to form clear and distinct vocal communications, such as humans employ from the time they're toddlers on throughout their lives.
Of course, that's related to the expression aspect of communication. One of the other irreducibly complex features is the reception. And so for that, let's just think about the ear and how we hear. And again, relying on a biologist, in this case Dr. Jonathan McClatchy, writing about the sense of hearing, he says that the process of hearing begins with the production of sound waves.
Okay, we just talked about that, which are pressure fluctuations propagated through the air.
So now how do we receive these? These waves are funneled into the ear canal by the external part of the ear. And the ear canal carries the sound waves to the eardrum, which causes it to vibrate. And these vibrations then are transmitted to three precisely shaped, very small interconnected bones within the inner ear.
They amplify the vibrations. One of the bones, called the stapes, is connected to the so called oval window, another membrane covered opening to the inner ear.
Vibration of the stapes bone against the oval window, like someone tapping out a window, creates pressure waves in the inner part, called the fluid filled cochlea. As the pressure waves pass through the fluid in the cochlea, they cause vibrations of something called the basilar membrane.
This results in the bending of hair cells, special hair cells called microvilli, against the so called tectorial membrane. And you get the picture that this is extremely complicated, right? I mean, this wasn't something that somebody found out in just an hour of studying about the auditory process.
This has taken researchers a long time to unravel and sort out and try to understand.
But these vibrations that result in the bending of hair cells, they have to trigger neurotransmitters because eventually this has to be converted into electrical signals that are transmitted to the brain by the auditory nerve. And now we come to the third Part of the communication triad, the irreducibly complex triad, we have expression, reception, but now comprehension.
The brain receiving the electrical signals in the auditory nerve has to have the ability to interpret these electrical signals as sound within the cerebral cortex.
So within the cerebral cortex, we have to be able to comprehend what we're hearing. Just getting electrical signals to an organ in the body, it's not guaranteed that that's going to result in comprehension.
And so our ability to comprehend sounds as speech, even the complex speech that I've just been uttering, as I've been reading this paragraph about how hearing works, there's a lot of background that could go into that.
Some MIT researchers stated that the complexity of interpreting audio signals or auditory signals within the brain has challenged our understanding. I think that's some understated modesty there.
They say that for neuroscientists, human hearing is a process full of unanswered questions.
How does the brain translate sounds, vibrations that travel through the air into the patterns of neural activity that we recognize? That's the comprehension as speech or laughter or the footsteps of an approaching friend?
[00:12:09] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, it's so important to have all three, isn't it? The mouth, the ear, the brain, and all the systems represented there. And hence why it's irreducibly complex. You take one of those out and you cannot have effective communication. You might be able to send some kind of signal, but it's not going to be effective, as you document in your articles.
[00:12:31] Speaker A: That's right.
[00:12:32] Speaker B: And it's so easy to take these systems for granted as well.
It's one reason I like what Michael B. Says in his book Darwin's Black Box in order to understand why, you know, unnatural, sorry, unguided processes, like evolutionary, you know, mechanisms can't produce these systems. We have to bite the bullet of complexity and really kind of get into the technical aspects of it just enough to understand why, you know, these can't come about through an unguided process. So. But very easy to take for granted. I know some years back I had a bad case of laryngitis that lasted weeks. And as a podcaster, that's bad news. Of course.
[00:13:16] Speaker A: Yes.
[00:13:17] Speaker B: But also on a personal level, you know, can't. Can't yell. I mean, talk to my kids, you know, and. And communicate with my family. Just not a great time. But it. It really gave me a new appreciation for this amazing system. I have my. My voice and my ability to express. So, yeah, something we can easily forget.
[00:13:39] Speaker A: Right. If we. If we lose some part of it, we Suddenly don't take it for granted anymore.
[00:13:46] Speaker B: Yeah, well, you write about another example of communication that is happening unconsciously, but without it we'd go unconscious. Can you unpack the physiology that controls our blood pressure just a little bit?
[00:13:59] Speaker A: Right. So I had mentioned earlier in the introduction that even within living systems such as our own bodies, there's communication that's happening.
It's essential for our existence to continue, but we aren't aware of it.
Kind of subconsciously controlled in blood pressure.
The physiology that controls our blood pressure within our circulatory system, in fact utilizes all three features of communication and complex hormonal chemicals such as epinephrine, angiotensin, when emitted, so there is the expression, they interact with sensors and receptors throughout our body. So there's the reception, and in order to regulate, there's the comprehension or blood pressure and maintain it within required tolerances.
So our body is continuously sending signals, other parts of our body receive the signals. And then you have to ask, how did this happen?
Without some intelligent design, the reception of the signals actually causes the correct biofeedback that regulates, in this case, blood pressure and maintains it within required tolerances. And if we didn't have that, for example, just getting up out of bed would result perhaps in a drop in blood pressure to our brains that would cause us to go unconscious. You know, that'd be a bad way to start the day.
[00:15:44] Speaker B: Sure would, yeah. And that, that does bring up the idea of, of conscious communication and unconscious, unconscious. And, you know, living systems are exhibiting both all the time.
Now we know that animals are engaged in expression, reception and comprehension of communication as well. But let's look at one example further afield of ourselves and animals, and that's trees. And it's not just one way communication either. Without messages being received and acted upon when necessary, communication would be rather pointless. So how do trees do it?
[00:16:20] Speaker A: Well, the idea of trees actually communicating is maybe not something that is universally taught and agreed upon within the scientific community.
But there are researchers who have discovered, I think, some pretty convincing lines of evidence that suggest that trees do communicate.
And this is interesting. There was an article actually in Smithsonian magazine, I was reading about this, and it perhaps argues against the traditional Darwinian view of survival of the fittest, where all organisms are thought of as striving, kind of disconnected loners competing for resources that are perhaps scarce.
In the case of trees, this would be water, nutrients, sunlight, and the know, winner takes all sort of a thing.
This article points out that there's a substantial and growing body of Scientific evidence that refutes this idea, showing instead that trees of the same species are. Are communal, will form even alliances with trees of other species. So alliances, not trying to be the lone survivor, that trees form relationships maintained by communication.
So how in the world would trees communicate? We don't hear them speaking, but it's a different kind of speech. You might say trees in a forest are connected to each other through underground fungal networks. It turns out the. The soil that the tree's roots are embedded in is not just an inorganic substance that somehow they get nutrients out of. Trees, of course, share water and nutrients, but these underground networks are called Mycor networks. It's essentially scientific word for fungal networks. The fine hairlike root tips of trees joined together with actually microscopic fungal filaments that are within the soil.
Miles of these fungal filaments within a small handful of soil, and they form a network which allows the trees and the fungi to establish a symbiotic, meaning, a mutually beneficial relationship.
So what are trees communicating through this fungal network?
Meaning the fungal filaments actually permeate the soil, allowing the roots of one tree to communicate through the fungal network to the roots of another tree. And trees apparently send chemicals, hormonal signals, and slow pulsing electrical signals, which scientists apparently are just now beginning to decipher.
And so trees are being shown to exhibit a cooperative, communal aspect, which kind of goes against the survival of the fittest.
It's kind of let's work together and help each other and that becomes more effective.
And the other thing that we might address here is some of the criticism of this idea that trees are actually communicating, meaning they're, they're expressing themselves, receiving signals, and then comprehending what those messages mean. And I think trees do all of that.
But here's a quote from a critic of this idea.
So this critic says the appearance of purposefulness is an illusion.
Get this. Like the belief in intelligent design.
Natural selection, he says, can explain everything we know about plant behavior.
Now, this actually warrants some comment.
To explain the admittedly complex system of trees. Being able to express themselves by sending, whether it's chemicals, electrical signals, hormones, through a fungal network.
And the other trees be able to respond to that and to understand what the signals mean. I mean, there is understanding.
To try to attribute all of that to undirected natural selection is patently a stretch of what I would consider valid scientific research.
Because in my field of physics, you can't just say something happens. You've got to show the mechanism.
And the mechanism has to be founded within the understood and well accepted abilities of the laws of nature.
And to say that something can just happen by natural selection, I call that educated ignorance.
People who say such a thing have been educated to believe that natural selection can accomplish these things.
But without perhaps a serious critical analysis of what would be involved there they actually are passing along an ignorant myth, a type of one size fits all explanation, without actually understanding the mechanism, without seeing how could these complex systems arise in the first place?
How long would it take? How many more ways are there to go wrong than there are to go right?
With random mutations that maybe produce a slight change in an earlier form of the organism? You can't select for what's not there.
And so how do you get something useful in the first place?
And why should it be useful when there are probably many more ways to have a mutation produce something that's just deleterious to the organism? I think these are well established scientific principles. And so anyway, I find that the more we study nature, the more evidence for actually intelligent design we find and the less believable, the less plausible any sort of a, oh, it just happened by natural selection explanation could actually be.
[00:23:46] Speaker B: Yeah, and that gets to, to one of my last questions here is, is, and I really like the way you put it, educated ignorance. I was thinking to myself as you were talking about that particular scientist who is just attributing, you know, tree and plant communication simply to a natural selection process that betrays their, their training, their educated ignorance, as you're putting it. You know, if we're trained in a reductionist view of life, then that's going to filter into everything we discover and everything we come across in our study as a scientist.
But if you turn that around, you can do a 180 and really, you know, start to look at things differently.
But you do have to get rid of that educated ignorance that, that we can often have as scientists trained in that reductionist view.
Now you say that naturalistic explanations require an unbearable suspension of disbelief when accounting for information processing and communication in living things.
And you have been touching on it. But just again, why is it that intelligent design offers a more satisfying explanation for the presence of these particular biosignatures that you're talking about?
[00:25:09] Speaker A: Well, we started off talking about information processing as a biosignature and this is different than just a static presence of information rich systems.
For example, you could look at a biochemical that's part of every cell, a DNA molecule, and it's packed full of information. I think that's undisputable.
So Explaining that static, even though I'm not claiming DNA is just static, but just the presence of that information, that's difficult enough.
But then when you have a purpose driven responsiveness that we see in living systems to information, this responsiveness appears as a truly confounding enigma for naturalistic explanations.
Each of the features of communication that we've talked about, just reiterate them here. Expression, reception, comprehension entails specific, complex, biochemical, anatomical, neurological functionality.
And together, each of these essential components of communication comprise a system of irreducibly complex systems.
So it's not just an irreducibly complex system, it's a system of systems that's irreducibly complex.
[00:26:45] Speaker B: Yeah. Now if someone's hearing these ideas for the first time, I mean, maybe they're not familiar with irreducible complexity, or we've just boggled our mind by saying trees can talk, or just these layers of communication that are very unnatural in a universe of non living matter. If someone's hearing these ideas for the first time, what's one thing you'd want them to take away?
[00:27:10] Speaker A: I think that it would be wise to start with the consideration that the forces of nature, you know, and as a physicist, that's what we study.
The forces of nature have no purpose driven focus and so they do not resemble what we see in communication processes where there is an intention, a purposefulness to all meaningful communication.
So I would say also to consider that the existence of effective communication throughout the world of life is not only evidence of intelligent design, but, but it's a gift that allows us to be able to comprehend the expressions of wisdom, love and beauty coming to us from our creator.
So we can experience communication by perceiving the phenomenon of communication. And if we comprehend it properly, I believe that we are receiving a message from our creator.
[00:28:22] Speaker B: I like that. Well, Eric, thanks for taking the time to unpack your recent writing on these topics. You've given us two more reasons why life is the most unnatural thing in the universe. And if you haven't heard our discussion on, on just life being so unnatural in the universe, go back and listen to that. That was a great, great chat. Well, don't miss any of Dr. Hadeen's reporting on the evidence for intelligent design and the difficulties with the evolutionary paradigm. You can find his
[email protected] that's evolutionnews.org Click the writers tab, you'll see his name and you'll be able to see everything he's writing
[email protected] and don't forget to hop onto YouTube and subscribe to our new channel to be the first to know about video interviews, commentaries and more. You can certainly listen to this show, but we are now adding the element of watching, which adds a visual element, might, might add to your understanding. And we're making that available to people through our new YouTube channel. So go there, please subscribe. It's YouTube.comd the future. And we appreciate your support as we venture out into the world of video content as well as audio. Well, Eric, thanks again for your time. I'm Andrew McDermott. Friday the Future. Thanks for joining us.
[00:29:42] Speaker A: ID the Future, a podcast about evolution and intelligent design.
