[00:00:04] Speaker A: ID the Future, a podcast about evolution and intelligent design.
[00:00:11] Speaker B: What if life isn't just a collection of molecules bumping around?
What if every living thing, from a single cell to a human being, is doing something much more surprising, processing information and communicating in complex, purposeful ways?
Welcome to ID the Future. I'm your host, Andrew McDermott. Today my guest is Dr. Eric Hedin, a physicist and author who's been asking bold questions about the hidden patterns of life. He's argued recently that the way living systems handle information and communicate is more likely evidence of intelligent design, not blind, undirected processes. Dr. Hedin is professor emeritus of Physics and Astronomy at Ball State University in Indiana. He is author of the book Canceled what Some Atheists Don't Want yout to See. He speaks at universities around the country and writes regularly on the evidence for intelligent Design at Evolution News and science
[email protected] Eric, welcome back to the podcast.
[00:01:13] Speaker A: Thank you very much, Andrew. It's great to be with you again.
[00:01:16] Speaker B: Well, our conversation today dovetails nicely with a chat that you and I recently had on the podcast and about why life is the most unnatural thing in the universe. I love that conversation, and I love that idea about life just being really, really rare and really, really therefore unnatural.
One of the takeaways I got from our conversation was this. A universal principle of nature is that natural processes always take the shortest possible path in the shortest amount of time to the lowest available equilibrium state.
And if we didn't have the unique ability to metabolize environmental energy, we'd be unable to push against those laws of physics. And instead of being able to live and move and accomplish all the things we do as living beings, we'd simply be puddles of organic matter on the ground.
And that's part of your argument for life being the most unnatural thing there is.
Now, today we're taking that principle that living systems are unnatural, meaning they're rare in a universe of non living matter.
And we're adding more examples. Now, Eric, you've recently written about two attributes that living things possess. You call these bio signatures, the ability to process information and the ability to communicate. Let's start with information processing. You're arguing that life doesn't just react to things, it makes choices, even at the tiniest level. Tell us what you mean by information processing and give us a few examples of how it plays out in life.
[00:02:48] Speaker A: Well, one of the most obvious examples and something we could all relate to, is our own ability to acquire information and to process it, use it for our decision Making I was just outside taking a walk before this podcast started and it was kind of threatening weather and I thought, okay, I can take in information about the sight of the clouds and the look of the wind and blowing the trees and make a decision that perhaps I ought to hurry for home or maybe that I should put up my umbrella.
And of course, we also communicate in very complex ways, such as we're doing right now, through speech and comprehension as we hear each other talk.
There are also other areas of communication and information processing, we might say within our physical bodies that we may even be not particularly consciously aware of.
And a lot of aspects of our being are necessary.
Our nervous system monitors various environmental and internal signals and then regulates aspects of our physical being that affects our emotions, our behavior, other things like our heart rate, our digestion and so on.
We know that within a single cell there is a lot of communication that goes on with enzymes that may in fact travel like kind of walking aliens along DNA strands who work around each other in, in the process of folding of DNA into familiar chromosome shapes.
There are also more recent research studies that have discussed something called recurring design logic in living systems, looking at how cells can use two component regulatory systems to detect and respond to environmental stimuli. And I suspect that as researchers probe more deeply into the complexity of living things, even at the single cell level, but alone with more advanced multicellular organisms be simply more and more discoveries of information processing and more complex communication that is taking place within the living organism, let alone with the more advanced forms of communication such as speech that we're employing right now.
[00:05:52] Speaker B: And you know, you think, well, it's such a hallmark of, of human beings to be able to information process. I mean, from the moment we're born, even before we develop the ability to communicate with words, we are, you know, constantly looking around us, processing what we see, building conceptual models about our world, even as a tiny baby, you know.
[00:06:15] Speaker A: Yes.
[00:06:15] Speaker B: Which is actually, you know, part of science is, is building these models of, of the world around us and refining them as we get new information. And we do that before we can even talk.
Now communication, we'll get to it a little, little while here. But first it's just this information processing, this taking in of, of stimuli and, you know, things that we can sense and then having a response to that. It's such a powerful hallmark of being alive. Now we can contrast this with stuff that isn't alive, like rocks, stars, water and so on. What is it that governs non living matter if it's not information processing like living Systems.
[00:06:59] Speaker A: That's a great question. And I think it goes to the heart of this discussion that there is a contrast, a distinction between things that are alive and things that are not alive. And you ask what governs non living matter? And the answer is simply that they're composed of atoms that follow physical laws without regard to any consequences or functionality or purpose.
For example, water droplets that form in clouds may fall and they're simply governed by the force of gravity and the interaction with the air. On the way down, they'll hit the ground. And if the ground is say, made of dust or dirt, where they land, the force of the impact will splatter up some of the water along with the dirt. And again, the trajectory of all that is simply the laws of physics, the forces of nature that are very simple and there's no decision making, they don't have any particular purpose or intent, they just follow the basic laws of nature. And if life was simply a materialistic phenomenon, it would do the same thing.
[00:08:24] Speaker B: The decision making comes from the living beings who can see what's happening with the non living matter and make decisions about that, you know, such as, hey, it's raining, I better get home.
[00:08:38] Speaker A: Right. And even someone may be objecting here and thinking, well, you know, a microprocessor can do information processing and make decisions based on input that it receives.
And that's true.
[00:08:54] Speaker B: Right.
[00:08:56] Speaker A: My thermostat, digital thermostat in my house, it can sense the temperature and then it is programmed to, in a sense, make a decision. If the temperature gets above a certain threshold, it kicks on the air conditioning.
And so someone might say, well, what's the big deal? I mean, even inanimate things like a thermostat can do this.
But I would ask someone to then consider whether or not that thermostat could exist even if it didn't have an intelligent designer.
[00:09:32] Speaker B: Yeah. Something programming it behind the scenes. Right. To, to do something at a particular time. That's what an algorithm is. An algorithm isn't necessarily happening naturally, but it's set up purposefully by someone with foresight.
[00:09:48] Speaker A: Yes, yes.
[00:09:49] Speaker B: Yeah. Well, I want to reiterate something you write in your article.
You say the study of the physics of nature has made one thing very obvious.
Matter, energy and forces do not make goal directed choices. They simply follow the rules. So there's a lot of stuff in the universe that is just following the rules, and then there's us, a minuscule fraction of the entire universe. And we get the good stuff. We get to push back on the Rules and make stuff happen.
And of course that's, that's great freedom, but also great responsibility, right?
[00:10:21] Speaker A: Well, yes, that's sort of what defines us to be alive. We might say that we do get to do things that aren't just following the underlying laws of nature. We make stuff happen that wouldn't happen naturally.
Like consider this communication assistant we're using here.
The software on the computer, the laptops themselves, the Internet, you know, connected, whether it's via fiber optic cables or electrical cables or through satellites.
None of that would ever happen in a universe like ours without intelligent agents putting it together.
[00:11:12] Speaker B: Yeah, these amazing aids we have to communicate today, all intelligently designed. Well, this idea of cognition, that living things have the capacity to make genuine choices and act creatively in response to environmental cues to pursue goals, this is cognition. And it's not a new idea in biology, is it?
[00:11:34] Speaker A: Well, not especially a new idea, of course, for advanced animals and humans. We've known for a long time, of course, that animals, humans, can make genuine choices in response to information.
But the idea does seem to be somewhat new as it's applied to single celled organisms and very simple organisms.
An earlier paper that I quoted in one of my articles, a biologist, Dr. Shapiro, claims that cells are sentient beings. And I think that's a relatively new idea.
And he says that contemporary research in many laboratories on cell to cell signaling, symbiosis and pathogenesis, as he says, shows that bacteria, even single celled bacteria, utilize sophisticated mechanisms for intercellular communication.
And so this is amazing. You know, you've got a single celled organism, where is its brain?
Where does it have the ability to do anything that implies a purpose?
And so this researcher, Dr. Shapiro, says that this remarkable series of observations about cell communications requires us to revise our basic ideas about biological information processing and recognize that even the smallest cells are sentient beings.
[00:13:20] Speaker B: Yeah, so it's not just complex life like you and I, or, or, or the animals, but we're talking a complexity that boggles the mind even at the, the lowest forms of cellular life.
[00:13:33] Speaker A: Yeah. So science is recognizing that life seems to possess more and more remarkable properties. You know, in this case, sentience, the ability to make purpose driven decisions.
And that it's not just a machine, the kind of machinery of the biochemistry. That model isn't sufficient to explain what's going on in the cell anymore. I think that's a very exciting frontier of biological research.
[00:14:07] Speaker B: Yeah, and maybe that's the new part of, of cognition and biology is just the, the boldness to look at living systems through that lens, I think, is, is a bit more rare.
[00:14:20] Speaker A: It does take boldness, I think, to propose a new idea that challenges the rather old and I think, increasingly outdated simple evolutionary paradigm.
[00:14:37] Speaker B: Now, you also note that this information processing power, this bio signature, could even be used to identify extraterrestrial life. Tell us about that.
[00:14:47] Speaker A: Well, in one of the articles that I use to research and to use as background for, for my article on information processing, the authors propose that this idea of life's ability to employ information processing is so unique that it could be used as a bio signature in the field of astrobiology.
When we're looking for evidence of life outside of Earth and other planets, we sometimes have to avoid consciously the danger of assuming the life is just like us.
But their point was the idea that life of any kind is going to involve information processing. So let's look for signatures of that because that's going to cover life of any kind, even if it's extremely alien to us. And they give a few statements about that. One is that this type of information processing emphasizes the transition from information neutral systems, meaning just having information, to systems with semantic information, that is, systems that maintain their viability by sensing and, and responding to their environments.
And identifying the necessary and sufficient conditions for such transitions, they say, suggests new possibilities for understanding what they want to term abiogenesis. And they're obviously still thinking from a naturalistic point of view, not a intelligent design point of view, but they suggest that it could be a, a detection signature, this ability to process information.
[00:16:46] Speaker B: Yeah, because we're not just looking for that radio signal by itself. We're also putting out signals and waiting for a response. And it takes both. It takes the receiving of a signal, but also the response, as you're saying, to denote intelligent life.
Now, the obvious next question is this. How does a cell or a complex living system gain cognitive powers if the cell is merely a fortuitous concourse of atoms, which is the Darwinian view. That's a quote. From an evolutionary perspective, how does it gain the unnatural ability to make decisions and work toward goals? Does the evolutionary paradigm have a good answer for this kind of surprising power in life?
[00:17:35] Speaker A: That's an important question because there are, of course, many researchers who adamantly hold to an evolutionary perspective, a materialist perspective. And so they have to explain the origin of this cognitive power, whether you're talking about in a single cell or in an advanced creature like animals or humans.
And so, from my reading and discussions, I've found that one of the more popular ideas is to subscribe to some sort of an emergentist view of living systems. So that means that you get enough complexity in the biochemistry and something beyond what you would expect emerges, something that you can't even perhaps predict.
And so if you, for example, have a complex biochemistry that results in cellular life, then perhaps you can expect a consciousness to emerge out of that. Or if you have enough cells coordinated together in a multicellular organism, perhaps a consciousness or a communication system will emerge out of that.
And that really to me is appealing to something that at this point I would say is non scientific.
We have no scientific evidence of complex functional mechanisms, procedures, processes emerging out of anything natural without any intelligent input.
And the idea that, oh, there's complexity that can emerge naturally, I'm well aware of this, ideas of prigogen and so on, that there's complexity that may emerge. It's actually not complexity in the information sense. It's simply structural confirmation, like perhaps forming a vortex in a certain, you know, with certain differentials of pressure and temperature, say you can form a whirlpool or a tornado.
These are not somehow analogies for life, for information processing, for cognition, or for communication.
So I think that to claim that sophisticated emergent properties arise from collections of fundamental particles in some complex arrangement beyond what you could expect from the laws of physics is actually an unwarranted escape. It's, it's sort of an appeal to magic.
[00:20:52] Speaker B: You know, without an infusion of new information, you just don't get things emerging. You know, it's the no free lunch idea of Demski and others. You have to have information to be able to produce life, and we cannot take that information for granted.
[00:21:09] Speaker A: Right, right, that's, that's so important. Life and any sort of a living system, even a single cell, is nothing like the gradients of physical properties that you might find in any sort of a natural system that's operating far from equilibrium.
[00:21:28] Speaker B: Information processing is just one of the hallmarks of living systems that I discuss with Dr. Eric Hadim. In the second half of our conversation, we also unpack a second effective communication. Dr. Hedin discusses three characteristics of effective communication in living things. Expression, reception, and comprehension. We talk about examples of this going on not just in us, but also the animal and plant worlds. Eric explains why this type of communication is irreducibly complex.
And we'll look at why naturalistic explanations of communication fail to adequately explain these rare and indeed unnatural abilities in living systems.
So be sure to join us for part two of this conversation. If you're watching on YouTube, be sure to like and subscribe. We've got a brand new channel there and need your help to get the word out. That's YouTube.com dthefuture that's how to get to our new YouTube channel, YouTube.com@idthefuture. I'm Andrew McDermott. Thanks for joining me.
[00:22:34] Speaker A: ID the Future, a podcast about evolution and intelligent design.
