Divine Name Verification: An Essay on Anti-Darwinism, Intelligent Design, and the Computational Nature of Reality

Front matter

An Essay on Anti-Darwinism, Intelligent Design, and the Computational Nature of Reality

Noah Horwitz

AN ESSAY ON ANTI-DARWINISM, INTELLIGENT DESIGN, AND THE COMPUTATIONAL NATURE OF REALITY

Part Two: The Computational Nature of Reality (continued)

§18. Infinite Collapse: The Possible is Not the Actual

§21. Divine Name Verification: Chaitin’s Omega and the Compressibility of Being

§22. The Kabbalah of Biology: The Programming of Life

§23. The Other, the Omega Point, and the Garden of Eden

Bibliography

267 305 315 333 363

ABBREVIATIONS

AG Margulis and Sagan: Acquiring Genomes: A Theory of the Origins of Species

EE Behe: The Edge of Evolution

ID Dembski: Intelligent Design

LS Morris: Life’s Solution

NBC Spetner: Not By Chance NFL Dembski: No Free Lunch

NKS Wolfram: A New Kind of Science

PC Egan: Permutation City

QM Harman: Quentin Meillassoux

RU Poundstone: The Recursive Universe

TH Lewontin: The Triple Helix: Gene, Organism, and Environment

WDGW Fodor and Piatelli-Palmarini: What Darwin Got Wrong

$1

INTRODUCTION: FROM HARDWARE TO SOFTWARE

The age of Darwin is ending. And with its end, its legacy of eugenics, the ‘master race, social Darwinism, the ‘selfish gene, ‘survival of the fittest, ‘natural selection and mutation, memes, and the interpretation of all biological and social phenomenon, in terms of their alleged teleological use value for reproduction, will pass into historical curiosities discussed only by future historians of science rummaging around in the archives of the past. And when those future historians document that history, they will describe it in classic Kuhnian terms—for it consisted of the erection and establishment of a classic paradigm, one that fought off and denounced as heresy all criticisms aimed at demonstrating the failure of Darwinism as a theory of life and its development.

While the series of criticisms that have been articulated (many of which we will later document) were dismissed as mere religious fantasy that could not conquer the reigning secular dogma, in the future the words of Lynn Margulis will continue to echo: ““Neo-Darwinism,’ she said in a 1990 piece in American Zoologist, should be seen as ‘a minor twentieth-century religious sect within the sprawling religious persuasion of Anglo-Saxon biology.””' In fact, one

‘Lynn Margulis, quoted in Daniel Dennett, “The Hoax of Intelliwill in retrospect say that it was the inherent failures of Darwinian theory itself that made it so that the criticisms continued to mount until the proverbial dam broke. That event of breakage itself will be signaled ultimately and prominently by at least two names—the aforementioned Margulis (with her notion of ‘symbiogenesis’) and Maximo Sandin (and his work on the role of the virus in evolution). In the near future, we will all be ‘Sandinistas.’

However, of course, not every aspect of Darwinism will be rejected. Often Darwinism and evolution are only defined in the most generic of terms. It is sometimes even taken as being identical with the notion of change over time. In this way, evolution is taken as simply being synonymous with the idea of ‘descent with modification’ and is thereby contrasted with only the most dogmatic forms of Creationism and Aristotelianism. However, even creationists accept that the world changes. Most creationists are willing to say that the world, since its inception, develops according to its own pattern. The Bible itself states that “the earth brought forth life” (Genesis 1:11). A ‘primordial soup’ is thus an image in keeping with this passage. Each and every being is not then necessarily created by God out of nothing, and clearly each human being is formed by the joining of a sperm and egg. No one doubts one can rewind the tape of an individual’s existence and arrive back at that moment. If an individual human develops in this way, then why should all of life be any different? At Genesis 1:20, the Bible speaks of life swarming out from the waters (‘the water teemed with creatures’). It is only after there is aquatic life that life on earth develops in full.

Evolution is seen as having introduced the idea that life arose from past ancestors rather than species being empirical instances of substantial eternal forms. But such a view for creationism only made sense insofar as one accepted a gent Design and How It Was Perpetrated,” in Intelligent Thought: Science versus the Intelligent Design Movement, ed. John Brockman (New York: Vintage, 2006), 33-49, 46.

Platonic or Aristotelian notion of essence (eidos). It was, of course, the overturning of this ancient Greek heritage that made John Dewey revel in the new Darwinian paradigm in his seminal The Influence of Darwinism on Philosophy from 1909. There, Dewey noted that philosophy of nature had been dominated for 2000 years by the idea that the concepts of the mind existed as reified entities in some eternal realm. All that existed in nature was but instantiations of these essences. In advocating essences, philosophy preferred the eternal and unchanging over the developing and impermanent. It looked at the final form of the thing as the truth of its nature. Anything that was variable was considered lesser. But Darwinism, Dewey explained, debunked the idea of permanent species that existed for all time or covered all individuals of a certain type. Essences were no longer fixed for all time, and there was no perfection in this world or another. Darwin had given birth to a form of thinking that affected all aspects of thought by showing that no species is eternal and that species have a particular history and date. Species themselves were now things that come into and go out of existence. Nature no longer was ordered by final causes. It was subjected to contingency and chance. Change was to be the dominant principle of science and philosophy. Flux would take priority over ends or purposes. One no longer searched for the final essence that things would realize to understand them, but rather traced their history and treated each as singularities. There is no finished and perfect state because all things are evolving into something new and unexpected.

Dewey also emphasized that nature could no longer be seen as efficient and thereby designed. Nature seems to be excessive. It allows things to arise that are only later destroyed. It works seemingly in vain and without ultimate goal. There is no obvious pre-designed goal according to this view. One type of bird will only lead to another. While human breeders can direct how a particular animal will develop, nature apparently subjected such creatures to the mere whims of chance and its consequences up to and including extinction. It is not just individuals who are mortal. All species are mortal and will pass away. Concepts could then not be seen as anything more than useful fictions. As for discussion of metaphysical issues, they would seem to obscure more than illuminate:

Such argumentation is a reversion to the logic that explained the extinction of fire by water through the formal essence of acqueousness and the quenching of thirst by water through the final cause of acqueousness. Whether used in the case of the special event or that of life as a whole, such logic only abstracts some aspect of the existing course of events in order to reduplicate it as a petrified eternal principle by which to explain the very changes of which it is the formalization.’

Darwinism means more than simply that all life developed from previous life forms and that life forms can come into and out of existence. It means more than that just a rejection of the idea that creatures are exemplifications of eternal forms in the mind of God. It means life in itself is a random and contingent development. And as random and contingent, the development of life can only ever be known via its actual history. While one can formulate general principles for how life develops in its long, purposeless march, one cannot know in advance where it is going. Every species and every life form is merely an accident of natural selection and random mutation. This means that life is governed by chance rather than design. Life could have been different. Humanity need not have arisen. Life only has direction because it keeps reproducing itself. But what continues on is just simply what does (we will return to this tautology).

? John Dewey, The Essential Dewey (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998), 43.

Even in the new, emerging synthesis that incorporates the insights of Margulis (who was initially denounced) and Sandin and thereby rejects random mutation and natural selection as the key motors of life’s development, contingency, accident, chance, etc., sill govern life’s development—for even if life develops by viruses laterally transferring genes or life forms merging into one another, it is taken for granted that there are no basic laws that are being followed or played out such that one could predict what next step life will take. One can only investigate what actually happened as an archeologist or historian and recount the history of life in its accidental nature. Life could have been otherwise, even on this model. There was no necessity or design. To suggest otherwise would be to suggest that life has a goal and purpose and that humanity might be the pinnacle of creation.

This belief in a lack of inevitability then is one of the legacies of Darwinism that will take more than the work of Sandinistas to overcome. Even if one rejects the idea of species slowly changing step by step via mutation and selection, one still has left intact the idea that the evolution of life is not making improvements or leading to some end. It is this randomness and purposelessness that makes evolution ultimately incompatible with theism. In challenging Darwinism then one must also see the development of life as not merely the result of accident and chance. While, epistemologically, we can, in retrospect, suggest other, possible directions life could have taken in theory, these routes can only have existed in theory if one is to reject Darwinism. The end of Darwinism will not come until we see that life could not have unfolded differently, was not accidental, and was not a product of chance.

Once one accepts this lack of accident, then life’s having a goal and purpose will seem more and more reasonable. While any individual life form is mortal, and thus any species can go out of existence, as well as change, it would then not be the case that any life form can appear after the previous ones. This means, as well, that life is advancing and becoming more intelligent. While retrogression may occur, one will need to see future descendants as working out the purpose of life itself rather than just being some new creation. Life therefore creates more complex forms in the sense of life itself becoming more inflected and self-referential. We see this already in the advent of the human mind out of life itself. Self-awareness arose out of life itself. This means humanity, along with all other living things, does not emerge out of blind, natural forces that do not have it in mind. If one advocates intelligent design, one is then advocating that the most important aspects of the history of life are not the result of chance and randomness, but follow some sort of fundamental plan.

Such a view does not have to reject the idea that life came from a single organism (although this idea might itself need to be revised and the acceptance of multiple origins of life might be in order). But it does require that we see all life as emerging from one principle. For this reason, in ending Darwinism, one must go back to the very definition of life and understand what it is. As Stephen Wolfram notes, many definitions have been offered for life, and any such definition both ends up including phenomena normally not considered to be alive and excludes creatures normally thought to be living.’ For example, life is often defined as that which can re-produce itself, but then mules are not alive, while fire is (NKS 1178). In fact, such a definition means that no single being can ever be considered living, since it is only the coupling of a male and female or their equivalents that leads to reproduction.’ A fertile male and female couple, then, can self-produce as a unit taken together, but many such couples of males and females, of course, do not and cannot. Does that mean they are dead? For this reason, we have to say that the only truly living

> Stephen Wolfram, A New Kind of Science (Illinois: Wolfram Media, 2002), 1178. All subsequent citations indicated as NKS.

* John Barrow and Frank Tipler, The Anthropic Cosmological Principle (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), 515.

thing is the cell or its equivalent, and other things are living due to being made up of cells.

We also know that crystals will self-replicate when put in a saturated solution, for instance. How do cells differ from crystals and flames? The key difference is that cells have DNA, software. The origin of life lies in the origin of software, for it is not enough to reproduce to be alive, but, also, one needs to contain within oneself the very instructions and code for producing a new version of oneself. Life evolves. And it is the change and alteration done to the code itself, the software of life, which enables this development. But then is not computer software alive? It might be, if it reproduces on its own and also contains and passes on the code for that reproduction. For this reason, we also have to say that what marks a cell is a membrane. No membrane, no life—for what the membrane creates, by incorporating software within itself, is what institutes, for the first time in the universe, the distinction between hardware/software.

Following Wolfram, we can say that any phenomenon is, itself, the product of code. A flame or crystal is itself a computational reality wherein a basic pattern repeats itself. But the flame or crystal does not contain within itself the very coding of that pattern that enables it to reproduce as a material subset. For this reason, software is not alive, because it is only software and not hardware. Life begins with something that reproduces itself and contains in its very being the hardware / software distinction. Again, it’s the cell that is alive, and all living things are alive only insofar they are made up of cells. Flames and crystals are thus computational realities that are like electronic devices wherein the hardware and software are one and the same thing. Such devices cannot change or be re-programmed (their reproduction cannot therefore involve evolution):

The ability to separate in a computer the program from the physical instantiation that performs the computation is an advantage, not a limitation. First of all, we do have electronic devices with dedicated circuitry in which the ‘computer program’ are not two, but one. Such devices are not programmable but are hardwired for one specific set of algorithms. Note that I am not just referring to computers with software (called ‘firmware’) in read-only memory, as may be found in a cell phone or pocket computer. In such a system, the electronics and software may still be considered dualistic even if the program cannot easily be modified.”

All phenomena prior to life then can be said to be computational realities wherein the hardware and software are one. But, with life itself, something new arises. There is material software encoded in the cell that can change and be passed on. This software contains the program itself for how to produce the thing. Bill Gates is, of course, well known for having said that DNA is not just a computer program, but “one far more advanced than any software we've ever created.” This is not a metaphor or analogy. DNA is chemical software. That it is written in acids rather than electronic circuits is simply another way for it to be embodied. It is a coding. It has, just like a computer program, subroutines (genes and proteins).

Before the split between hardware and software, all phenomena had a code. But no snowflake contained in itself has some materially inscribed place for that code. With life, this split occurs. We can then say that mind itself (consciousness) is a split within the software itself. It is the point at which the software actualizes its ability to compute universally directly. For example, one might find in nature phyllotaxis (the spiraling patterns found in leaves) that follows the Fibonacci sequence of numbers (0, 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8..

` Ray Kurzweil, The Singularity is Near (New York: Viking, 2005), 444,

é Quoted in Donald E. Johnson, Programming of Life (Alabama: Big Mac, 2010), 450.

.). But that plant will not also produce leaves or stems via the sequence of prime numbers. It can then compute one sequence, but not all. Even though the plant has a code capable of universal computation, it is, in its actuality, a form of dedicated circuitry. The human mind can not only compute the Fibonacci sequence, but also the sequence of prime numbers and any other computation. Life is then a split within hardware wherein software emerges, but mind is a split within software wherein universal computation is actualized. In the end, we will see that, at the Omega Point, human consciousness, or its equivalent, will enable the universe, itself, to shift from dedicated circuitry to such actualized universal computation.

However, we want to focus on life itself more so for now, since our main critique of evolution is about life rather than mind. Following Margulis on symbiogenesis, we will have to say that, even if one can find isolated strands of RNA or DNA, for instance, and even if those strands reproduce into something with the same coding, one always has life when those strands are incorporated into a nucleus, into a membrane. Then, in reproducing, the code itself is also reproduced, but with it a body, hardware, and an environment. It would be as though one’s computer, due to its programming, suddenly instructed itself to make another computer including the keyboard, for a cell membrane will include in itself not just the software but also fluid and materials not related directly to the code. It is then the incorporation of DNA or something equivalent into the membrane that causes the cell to be animated unless one can show that the membrane itself is an outgrowth of the DNA itself, something the chemical sprouts and builds around itself (I will return to these issues).

The mystery of the origin of life is thus not simply the mystery of how DNA formed out of non-living matter, but also how DNA became the software of some hardware. Here the membrane also partitions chemicals interacting. If one imagines some sort of primordial soup with chemicals interacting such as RNA molecules with their lettered sequences and interacting with themselves and other chemicals in the environment, then without a membrane to partition a chemical system, it will eventually be enveloped into the overall environment, and whatever work it does be absorbed and dissipated. Thus, if one imagines a DNA interacting with other chemicals in order to be reproduced by the system or produce amino acids, then without the membrane, this system will be easily broken up by whatever is in the area. It needs the protection of the membrane and the creation of an inside/outside distinction. At the very beginnings of life is the differentiation between inside and outside.

No rock or flame knows such a distinction. Life is about partition and separation in order to form some thing, a first self. Within the membrane, then, all the chemicals working together can produce their products and have a regulated interaction with whatever is on the outside. The membrane determines inputs and outputs. Any system that would include instructions would only be able to survive within a membrane, which is why it is probably the case that membranes were enveloping chemicals (life is thus just a lucky accident that arose from membrane bubbles sucking in chemicals) or simply happened upon such a system or there was first system that was able to in producing products and even reproducing something like DNA was able to also produce a membrane as well. Thus, one needs to find both the system that can reproduce parts of itself, does so by having instructions within itself, and also has an output encircling and partition it from the world.

Now, many think the hardware/software distinction means that the hardware itself becomes less important:

In life hardware consists of the body, the software, and the genes. The thermodynamic cells and percolating nucleotides we find together today are logically, and historically separable. Just as one can imagine a computer without software . . . so one can picture early thermodynamic life without any genes.

First came the apparatus, functioning and physiological, and then came the operating systems, user manuals, and codes for making new, improved metabolic machines.’

What Dorion Sagan (Margulis’s son and often co-author) and Eric Schneider suggest here, not surprisingly, is that the hardware came first. In this way, they would say the cell itself existed in some sense and only later incorporated DNA into it. However, we should not discount the possibility that the cell itself, including its membrane, arose out of DNA as such. They may also have simply been coeval. What this means is that, at its origins, life is the joining of two things together. However, even if the hardware did not emerge from the software itself, the very existence of software reduces the role of hardware, for DNA can be transmitted and extracted. It must exist in some hardware, but is fully detachable from any particular environment. It is a code and language that can be transferred materially and incorporated into another message. Both hardware and software can exist distinctly. One can picture a computer without any software (it makes for a nice paperweight), but the hardware itself can only be plugged into another device in terms of parts and never in terms of elementary elements at the level of letters. By plugging in letters and code into something, the very instructions of the thing change. If we plug some fluid from one cell into another, it does not change at that level. Evolution does occur simply through incorporation of parts and wholes (as Margulis and Sagan have demonstrated). But given that there are basic instructions that can, on their own, lead to a creature, it is probable that it is the code itself which is more fundamental biologically as well as ontologically. For evolution to advance beyond simple forms, there need to be changes to the

7 Eric. D. Schneider and Dorion Sagan, Into the Cool: Energy Flow, Thermodynamics, and Life (Chicago: University of Chicago, 2005), 169.

very genomic software itself, rather than just incorporation into a cell of new organelles or the joining of cells together. Just as incorporation can happen in the life of an individual, Sandin has shown us—via viruses, for example—how these changes can occur in the lives of individuals (Darwinism said changes in software only arose due to random mutations). Such information is then inherited by future offspring. The Lamarckianism here is pronounced. Genetic changes occur in the operating system of a thing outside of the process of reproduction. We will see that this means, quite literally, that the bits/letters of the code are flipped, added, duplicated, and transposed.

Now, as Sagan and Schneider note right before the passage quoted above, this distinction between hardware and software was first developed by John von Neumann who must be seen as the non-biologist who truly instituted the new revolution in our thinking about life (as opposed to Schrödinger). Already, in 1948, von Neumann showed how computer cellular automata could reproduce themselves and thus replicate the hardware/software distinction.* Today, it comes as no surprise to anyone who uses a computer to know that computer viruses and worms reproduce, as many of us have had to pay money to repair the damage they do. However, nothing shows that a computer virus changes, because it is not clear that any process other than direct human intervention causes its code to change over time. Computer viruses are thus not living in and of themselves. Also, just like a biological virus, a computer virus requires a host program to replicate. Von Neumann is said to have demonstrated how a software program, on its own, gave rise from out of itself to the hardware/software distinction. How did von Neumann do this?

So Von Neumann adopted an infinite checkerboard as his universe. Each square cell could be in any

8 See Schneider and Sagan, Into the Cool.

number of states corresponding roughly to machine components. A ‘machine’ was a pattern of such cells.”

Von Neumann needed “a cellular array with 29 different states for its cells. Twenty-eight of the states are simple machine components; one is the empty state of unoccupied cells” (RU 15). Usually, such cells of automata only have two states (filled or blank). In this system, the current state of a cell is directly linked to the states of bordering cells (RU 16). Using this checkerboard and multiple states for each cell, von Neumann showed that there exist “patterns that can reproduce themselves” (RU 16). Such self-reproducing patterns give rise to the same pattern over and over again: “Start with a self-reproducing pattern, let the rules of the cellular space take either course, and they will eventually be two patterns, and then four, and eight” (RU 16). William Poundstone here claims that such repeating patterns are not like a crystal, but rather an elementary form of life. He believes this since each pattern contains “a complete description of its own organization” within itself (RU 16). Because the pattern here uses a self-contained set of rules to make new copies of itself, it is more similar to life than a crystal. This experiment by Von Neumann is similar to his one on the universal constructor. Such a universal constructor is a machine that can build any pattern, the rules for which can be inputted into the constructor. The constructor thereby can build another version of itself. It self-reproduces. For Poundstone, what von Neumann’s experiment shows is that there is no “life force,” but only information itself as a set of rules, an algorithm, that is needed for self-reproduction to take place (RU 17). Von Neumann’s automata are, therefore, the origin of the idea that for something to be living it must “contain a complete

°? William Poundstone, The Recursive Universe: Cosmic Complexity and the Limits of Scientific Knowledge (New York: Contemporary, 1985), 15. All subsequent citations indicated as RU.

description of itself and use that information to create new copies” (RU 18). For von Neumann, the information contained in his cellular automata could be run on any computer and on any number of different types of hardware. It therefore demonstrated the difference between hardware/software in yet another sense.

It also important to note, already, at this point, that the “cellular space” of von Neumann’s constructor machines was “finite” since it took place over a finite amount of time and had a finite number of possible states and rules (RU 187). Biological organisms are, of course, always limited in this way and take a limited amount of time to produce offspring. They only produce a defined number of offspring. Life’s finitude in this way makes itself possible. If there was an infinite regress, life would not be possible. What would such an infinite regress look like, and why would it make life impossible? We have said that the living contains within itself a complete informational description of how to make that living thing, a set of informational blueprints. But what if the blueprints themselves contained a description of those blueprints, etc.? “A cell’s DNA contains a complete description of all essential parts of the cell except for the DNA itself (no infinitely regressive blueprints)” (RU 189). It is important that, at some level, there be an element that is not itself repeated. There must be some level at which there is no further mirroring. If there was, one needs an infinite amount of time to copy an infinite set of instructions in order for reproduction to take place. Life can only ever be finite. Its coding must ultimately be encoded in something that is not, itself, encoded in some sense.

This is also true even of a computer program. Without some mark of finitude, life will not be possible. The most fundamental unit for DNA as well as for computers is the bit. The bit is the relationship 0/1. It is the possibility of two states (on/off). DNA encodes bits by way of its four chemicals (cytosine, guanine, adenine, and thymine). It is not arbitrary that these four chemicals are represented by four letters (A, C, G, and T), for the letter is another name for the bit. In its fundamentally differential nature, the bit/letter ensures that there is no infinite regress and forms the ‘atom’ of the final level (although as we will see any type of entity at any scale can function as a bit). In any event, what is important here is that life itself is about the encoding and mapping of the very informational description that makes it up and determines it. The question, then, becomes whether those changes in coding occur by way of random mutation, by way of other processes that are themselves not subject to underlying rules, or are themselves the unfolding of fundamental rules.

What is amazing is that consensus seems to be that, despite seeing Darwinism collapse due to its reliance on purely random mutation in the coding to account for speciation and for natural selection to account for how new creatures arise, all biologists seem to think that, as life develops, the changes in coding that occur in the software are not part of the unfolding of the very initial program of life itself. Take Stephen Wolfram, for example. Wolfram has hinted in a few places that he believes the entire universe is a cellular automaton. That is, Wolfram thinks all that is, is the unfolding of a program with a few basic simple rules. And yet, when it comes to life, Wolfram says that the differences we see in living creatures “are in essence just a reflection of completely random changes in underlying genetic programs, with no systemic effects from natural selection” (NKS 396). While Wolfram here discounts the idea that natural selection gives rise to new programs in living things, he still holds on to the idea that such changes are totally random. This is amazing, given that it is Wolfram, himself, who has shown us how perfectly random patterns can be the result of programs with very simple rules. Rather than seeing higher and more developed organisms as resulting from some unfolding of a program, Wolfram insists that, “it is essentially just a consequence of strings of random mutations that happened to add more and more features without introducing fatal flaws” (NKS 398).