Father of the Big Bang

Georges Lemaître died fifty years ago today, on 20 June 1966. If anyone deserves the title “Father of the Big Bang,” it would be him. Both because he investigated and popularized the Big Bang model, and because he was an actual Father, in the sense of being a Roman Catholic priest. (Which presumably excludes him from being an actual small-f father, but okay.)

John Farrell, author of a biography of Lemaître, has put together a nice video commemoration: “The Greatest Scientist You’ve Never Heard Of.” I of course have heard of him, but I agree that Lemaître isn’t as famous as he deserves.

The Greatest Scientist You've Never Heard Of from Farrellmedia on Vimeo.

150 Comments

150 thoughts on “Father of the Big Bang”

  1. Owlmirror:

    If you had written “there weren’t even any regional floods that could reasonably have been Noah’s flood“, I wouldn’t disagree.

    Yes, of course. Civilization arose in river deltas, and river deltas flood spectacularly with some frequency. And the Mediterranean itself was once a valley that flooded from the Atlantic once the Straights of Gibraltar were breeched. But that event was long before civilization, and the flooding of the Nile and Euphrates and the like has never even come close to the epic scale described by Genesis.

    Specifically, as I think I wrote, Genesis clearly describes at least the mountains of Galilee as being submerged, when there isn’t even enough water on Earth to make it a third of the way as high as Jerusalem. So the only way Noah’s Flood could have happened was by pure magic with the same magic being used to wipe away all evidence that it ever happened, leaving behind nothing but an ancient oral tradition of one very small and localized ancient and primitive tribe of barbarians. That’s much, much too conspiratorial for any sane modern person to take seriously…and, yet, it’s exactly the official theological position of most Christian denominations — including Catholics, Protestants, Baptists, Adventists, and the rest.

    Cheers,

    b&

  2. @Ben

    “One of the already-excluded possibilities is anything that requires or implies as-yet-unknown physics — which is what you’re proposing.”

    You kept saying that panpsychism can’t work because there is no ‘extra’ degree of freedom unaccounted for by ordinary physics, and I kept repeatedly pointing out that this isn’t true.
    The ‘arrow of time’ *has* been detected in physics experiments and it *isn’t* accounted for by ordinary physics, but needed an ‘extra’ principle to be explained – namely the fact that the entropy was extremely low at the big bang. This is important, because it’s related to how thermodynamics works *today*.

    So the bottom-line is that there *is* an extra degree of freedom in most things (‘the arrow of time’) , it *has* been detected in physics experiments, and it *isn’t* accounted for by ordinary physics, but needed an extra principle not in the ordinary laws of physics to work , which is important for how thermodynamics works right now.

    “When we hook people up to advanced medical imaging equipment and have them think various thoughts, we can observe in real-time their brains physically changing in ways that directly correspond with their thoughts.”

    You misunderstood the point I was trying to make there. Of course physical changes in the brain correspond to changes in thoughts.

    But at any given *point* in time, there’s an informational state x that corresponds to thoughts y.
    For example, at exactly 4:53:23 pm there was a certain informational state of your brain that corresponded to certain thoughts.

    So this shows that the information is something objectively real, not just a ‘description’ of the brain state. A given specification of an informational state of your brain at a given point in time has a real particular conscious experience associated with it. Only a finite number of informational descriptions can be consistent with that particular conscious experience.

  3. @zarzuelazen

    Sorry, I can’t agree with your insistence that there is such a thing as “pure information”. Neither “consciousness” nor “information” has ANY characteristic that call out for the need to create separate fundamental conceptual categories. “Information”, whether it’s encoded as scribbles on a cave wall, on paper, in your braincells, in radiowaves, in fiberoptic cables, or in SSD drives etc. will ALWAYS have an underlying physical representation.

    And the word “information” (like “consciousness”) is just a word coined by humans because we can give these concepts fairly distinct definitions and they make sense as concepts in our everyday conversations. Your attempt at flipping things around and making this fundamental is just as silly as the pre-scientific classical elements (water, air, earth, fire, aether).

  4. zzrzuelazen

    The ‘arrow of time’ *has* been detected in physics experiments and it *isn’t* accounted for by ordinary physics, but needed an ‘extra’ principle to be explained – namely the fact that the entropy was extremely low at the big bang.

    We’ve been through this one before, too. The arrow of time is no different from the arrow of up. Physics doesn’t make any distinction between “up” and “down”; there is no inherent “arrow of space.” But the proximity of the Earth’s substantial gravity field creates a local directionality that we can use to distinguish up from down. In pretty much exactly the same way, the low entropy of the Big Bang creates a local directionality in time that we can use to distinguish future from past, thereby giving us the arrow of time.

    To therefore claim that physics is incapable of explaining the arrow of time is as bizarrely untrue as to claim that it can’t explain why apples fall from trees.

    For example, at exactly 4:53:23 pm there was a certain informational state of your brain that corresponded to certain thoughts.

    So this shows that the information is something objectivity real, not just a ‘description’ of the brain state.

    I’m not at all sure what you’re trying to argue here. Are you under the misconception that descriptions aren’t themselves real? Can you not reach out and trace these very words you’re reading right now with your finger? Have you never found your way to a friend’s home simply by remembering the verbal description she gave to you over the phone of the route to take? Would you be astounded to take a picture of something, hold the picture in your hand next to the original, and see pretty much the same thing?

    Cheers,

    b&

  5. Simen S:

    Your attempt at flipping things around and making this fundamental is just as silly as the pre-scientific classical elements (water, air, earth, fire, aether).

    Wait — I thought the Fifth Element was not aether, but a rather young Ukrainian fashion model…?

    Cheers,

    b&

  6. Guys,

    I’ve made all the points I wanted to make, so I’m going to have to leave it there. I’ve put the case for ‘augmented naturalism’, so at this point we just have to agree to disagree.

    In closing, I would say that ‘information’ and ‘consciousness’ are the very means by which we reason about and perceive reality, respectively. It is therefore quite ludicrous to suppose that these things aren’t fundamental to the very fabric of reality itself.

    Let’s put it this way: I’m very confident that Sean is eventually going to end up writing another book called ‘The Even Bigger Picture’ in which he explains how I was right all along 😀

    Cheers!

  7. Again note that all your cherished “fundamental” concepts are imprecisely defined bucket terms, useful only for categorization purposes in the context of our everyday lives.
    In looking for increasingly fundamental understanding of the specifics you decide to put in each bucket it will always go like this:
    Matter -> physics
    Information -> physics
    Consciousness -> physics

  8. zarzuelazen:

    Let’s put it this way: I’m very confident that Sean is eventually going to end up writing another book called ‘The Even Bigger Picture’ in which he explains how I was right all along 😀

    And, if Sean does, I’ll go out and buy an hat just so I can eat it. You see, if you’re right, it doesn’t merely mean that physics is incomplete (which we already know it is). It means that physics is profoundly, irredeemably worng, and that countless of our best experiments in multiple fields across decades have been fatally flawed. It would be a scientific revolution no smaller than abandoning today’s Core Model for pre-Copernican Aristotelian geocentric metaphysics. It could happen, of course…but I (and Sean) would no more expect it than for the Sun to rise in the West tomorrow.

    In the mean time, do read The Big Picture! It’s a delightful book that would simultaneously serve as a great introductory text for freshman classes in physics, ethics, and philosophy — a most remarkable achievement, again especially considering how much fun it is to read.

    You might also wish to read Sam Harris’s latest book, Waking Up. It will radically reformulate your way of thinking of consciousness. If nothing else, you won’t any more be able to think of yourself as an unitary whole entity with a monolithic self, and you will come to recognize the many and diverse bits and pieces of your self that sometimes work independently or even at cross purposes. Get to that point, and you’ll recognize that at least some of those individual parts could be altered or even eliminated and you’d still function, but differently…at which point the fragile (but impressively durable) and fractured (but impressively integrated) true nature of your own consciousness will surprise you. You’ll never think of yourself or even others the same way — and this is a very, very good thing.

    Lastly…it’s the weekend, so go grab a favorite beer or glass of wine or whatever, enjoy it, ideally with a good meal with a loved one, and re-read this post shortly after the last drop is drained. When you get to this point, observe how the very same words have induced a different subjective experience. Congratulations! You’ve just completed a simple, small experiment probing the nature of your very own consciousness.

    Cheers!

    b&

  9. OwlMirror

    I don’t see any contradictions in what I said last post, and will attempt to respond if you spell them out.

    On big bang cosmology, I am not that convinced that it is not in part an exercise in propping up what has gone on before and steering all models as far as possible to support the prevailing hypothesis. This may be because I don’t know that much about it. The vacuum catastrophe shows that there are rather major things we just don’t get in physics.

    We start from our own day-to-day context and have developed our maths and physics from there. But as Heisenberg said, that leaves us investigating reality from a certain angle.

    I believe God has cohered a reality with a large amount of mathematical self-consistency evident to us, combined with the sort of hints we are getting that we don’t have the full story. I also believe other quite different realities could be framed by God, and that he could transition from one regime to another quite effortlessly and in a way totally beyond our capabilities or even comprehension (Isaiah 34v4, Revelation 6v14). I also believe that our physical framework is merely a servant of God’s purposes and has no great meaning in itself. To use the fabric to evaluate the painter is not going to give the complete picture (sorry). The essence of our humanity is somehow transferable between different physics ‘fabrics’ or ‘canvases’.

  10. Simen S

    A reasonable stab can be made at defining information and representing it with human artifacts. Consciousness?

  11. Simon Packer:

    On big bang cosmology, I am not that convinced that it is not in part an exercise in propping up what has gone on before and steering all models as far as possible to support the prevailing hypothesis.

    Cosmology has undergone a number of radical revolutions in the past century and a bit. Cosmologists haven’t propped up what went on before; rather, they repeatedly ripped the rug out from under their own feet. And they’re likely going to do it again in the next couple decades or so, as the smart money is on a solution to quantum gravity significantly altering perceptions on the conditions that led to the Big Bang. But, in a very short time, we went from the Universe being just the tens of thousands of visible stars, to just the Milky Way, to the Milky Way as but one of a small handful of galaxies, to practically innumerable galaxies, and so on. Before Hubble, the idea of an expanding universe was absurd. At the time of Hubble, the idea of an accelerating universe was ridiculous. Today, a multiverse naturally falls out of our best-to-date explanations of observations…but we still don’t know.

    I also believe other quite different realities could be framed by God, and that he could transition from one regime to another quite effortlessly and in a way totally beyond our capabilities or even comprehension (Isaiah 34v4, Revelation 6v14).

    Alas, you can’t have your Kate and Edith, too.

    Either your gods are comprehensible and you yourself comprehend them; or they’re incomprehensible and you yourself are clueless about them. That you’re so insistent upon the latter…well, why should you be surprised when everybody else is so dismissive of your claims to speak of that which you yourself brag of being ignorant of?

    And do note that no scientist claims anywhere near the certainty in naturalistic conclusions as you yourself repeatedly express in your supernaturalistic ones. There’s no certainty in science; only well-hedged bets with clearly-defined odds. Indeed, the surety of faith is the greatest fault of religion, the one mistake from which all others naturally follow.

    In Bayesian terms, scientists assign a non-unitary value to the prior probability…but the very mathematical definition of “unshakable faith” is to go ahead and start with a prior of exactly 1. And of course no posterior observation can change the result when that’s your prior….

    Cheers,

    b&

  12. [trying again; my comments have been disappearing]

    @Simon Packer:

    «I don’t see any contradictions in what I said last post, and will attempt to respond if you spell them out.»

    Tell you what; why don’t you define the phrases “hypothesis” and “implicit assumption”, and give examples that aren’t about the bible?

    An example that came to my mind is: When Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson were doing a microwave-frequency survey of the sky, they came up with the hypothesis that the reason they were detecting microwaves uniformly everywhere in the sky might have been because there was too much pigeon crap in the radio horn. They falsified the hypothesis by cleaning the radio horn thoroughly, and yet still detected the same uniform microwave signal everywhere.

    They decided (after coming up with other hypotheses, and falsifying them), that the microwave radiation was real. They talked to the physics theorists, who pointed out that the microwave radiation matched what would be predicted by the black body spectrum from a high-energy expansion of the universe — the big bang.

    And, an example for the other phrase: There is an implicit assumption in science that the real world is not a deliberate falsehood.

    Your turn.

    «On big bang cosmology, I am not that convinced that it is not in part an exercise in propping up what has gone on before and steering all models as far as possible to support the prevailing hypothesis. This may be because I don’t know that much about it.»

    (emph added)

    Yeah, maybe before you implicitly accuse scientists of being lazy, sloppy, and/or dishonest, you should learn about what they’re actually saying.

    « The vacuum catastrophe shows that there are rather major things we just don’t get in physics. »

    Sigh. There are still problems in physics, therefore, a young earth and universe are still on the table? That’s what you’re going with?

    I am convinced that creationism is nothing more than an exercise in propping up what has gone on before and steering all models as far as possible to support their falsified hypothesis — because I’ve made the effort to learn about what creationists claim vs what science demonstrates.

    «I also believe that our physical framework is merely a servant of God’s purposes and has no great meaning in itself.»

    And yet here you are, on the blog, of a physicist, saying that physicists are lazy, sloppy, and/or dishonest. Why, exactly? Why not just stay on religious blogs and talk about what God wants?

    «To use the fabric to evaluate the painter is not going to give the complete picture (sorry).»

    I don’t believe that you really believe that this is necessarily true. If microscopy and telescopy had shown that “I, Yahweh, made this” written very small on molecules (or atoms, or whatever) and very large on distant stars, theists would be jumping up and down and screaming about how the universe itself had been actually signed by its painter, I mean, creator.

  13. Owlmirror

    Back to your original comment which implied that I was claiming that the Bible was both hypothesis and revelation. OK, I said the Bible purports to be divine revelation. So does, say, the Koran.

    If I decide to analyse these claims, as I have done, then I treat the following statements as hypotheses:

    -The Bible is divine revelation
    -The Koran is divine revelation

    My own conclusions, as you probably know, are that I believe the first statement and not the second. In other words, if I hypothesize both of these, I find the first works, so I believe the hypothesis. The second does not, and I don’t believe it. I occasionally step back and demote my view of the Bible back to hypothesis to check up why I still believe it. It always passes the test.

    I am not an expert on Big Bang cosmology and that would be a relative term. Many people I know would probably say that I was, but I am not. I am unlikely to become an expert. Within the community of world-class physicists and mathematicians, there are a fair few dissenters. Its accuracy affects my worldview relatively little. Lemaitre would have probably said the same. I am not a brilliant physicist though I have a degree from Durham in the UK in Applied Physics.

    “Sigh. There are still problems in physics, therefore, a young earth and universe are still on the table? That’s what you’re going with?”

    Yes. The vacuum catastrophe is more a staggering discordance than a problem, but yes. I told you why. QFT as it stands is missing something really major. And it is a QFT based equation people keep telling me covers all events we encounter day-to-day. Sorry, I don’t buy it.

    Incidentally, Sean’s book is not available in the UK until September.

    I did look at Jerry Coyne’s book ‘Why Evolution is True’. Particularly the chapter “Evolution’s Engine’.
    This book will have zero influence on my worldview. By comparison, I would see Behe as methodical and definitive, and far more in the spirit of real science in terms of analysis. Coyne performs the universal evolutionist sleight of hand by brushing over the utterly intractable problems of basic implausibility of the mutational mechanism combined with the irreducible complexity problem. You can wash over this with words, but statistically, you would have no chance whatsoever, unless you are prepared to simplify to Dawkinsian levels, which is way to far. These issues are washed over with hogwash, the first one on page 128. Sorry, but hard science this is not.

    Nothing new then, Ernst Meyr is better but still hopelessly inadequate, in ‘What Evolution Is’. Neither will move an IDer an inch, and for good reasons.

    I have found nothing here meriting me changing my worldview in the slightest. I don’t think that this is laziness; it is just repeated experience. Unguided evolutionary writing doesn’t hold water, and consistently fails to address huge issues, and quietly minimizes them. No amount of trite phrases about creationism and comments on the amazing depth of insight of Darwin can hide this. The hardline reductionist physicists do much the same with the vacuum energy/cosmological constant problem.

  14. Owlmirror:

    I don’t believe that you really believe that this is necessarily true. If microscopy and telescopy had shown that “I, Yahweh, made this” written very small on molecules (or atoms, or whatever) and very large on distant stars, theists would be jumping up and down and screaming about how the universe itself had been actually signed by its painter, I mean, creator.

    This is a very important point that can’t be repeated often enough: if there’s something that would be used as positive evidence to support a claim, than its absence or other negation must be used to diminish the claim.

    Had Michelson and Morley detected a difference in the speed of light in orthogonal directions, that would have been used as evidence of the existence of the Luminiferous Aether. But they did not detect any such difference, and so our belief in the Luminiferous Aether was greatly diminished — to the point that Einstein was compelled to develop General Relativity.

    If General Relativity is true, we should expect to detect gravity waves. And so we went and looked for them with LIGO. We found them and so our strength of belief in GR is greater; had LIGO not detected gravity waves by now, there’d be some serious grumbling about whether or not it’s time to finally ditch GR.

    If supersymmetry is true, we should expect the LHC to start detecting new particles in the next few-to-several years. If it does and those particles look supersymmetric, then we will start to think that SUSY has a really good chance of describing reality. But if, a decade from now, there’s still no new particle announcements made at CERN, we’ll likely set aside SUSY and start looking in earnest at other explanations.

    So, too, the case should be with religious theories…but it’s not.

    Centuries before the Caesars, Epicurus observed that, were there powerful moral agents active on Earth, we would not observe evil. Humans are less-powerful less-moral agents than the gods are claimed to be, and humans mitigate evil to a very discernible extent; the gods would therefore be expected to mitigate evil to an even greater extent. And, yet, the only evidence we have of evil being mitigated is through human action. No god, for example, has even done so much as to call 9-1-1 — a trivial act to mitigate evil that even the least capable and least moral human is still expected to perform, and we judge harshly those who don’t even bother to try to alert authorities in times of crisis. If the gods do exist, they are clearly either (or both) less capable or less moral than a child with a cellphone…and how could one reasonably attribute divinity to such a pathetically weak and / or immoral entity?

    Similarly, if the holy texts contained unambiguous wisdom inaccessible to the ancient primitives who penned them, we would consider that as evidence of their authenticity. Indeed, we see such claims put forth non-stop. Yet, none of the examples given are remarkable for their time. Indeed, it would have been trivial for even so unremarkable a god as an interstellar alien to give a clear description of the Cosmic Microwave Background to primitives, simply by speaking of the light redder than red that fills the sea of space and has waves whose measure is so-many cubits. The ancients would attribute it to the same sort of incomprehensible mystery as theists today remain so fond of…and, yet, when we did discover the CMB and found its wavelength to match the number recorded in the Bible, that would be such an overwhelming demonstration of the access to knowledge the author had that we wouldn’t be having this discussion. Since we find nothing like that, especially since everything in the Bible perfectly reflects the common superstitions and misunderstandings of the day, we conclude that the authors were no more (and decidedly less) inspired than Homer.

    And even if we do no more than take seriously Christian claims to a superior foundation for morality, we would expect Christians to be disproportionately noble. And yet the most Christian governments of history were also the most horrific (the Crusades, the Inquisition, the Conquistadors, and so on). Even to this day, the Church still makes headlines for the predominance of such horror as child rape being a far-too-common practice of Church officials…and if Jesus’s official spokesmen can go that far off the rails, what possible sense can it make to pretend that Christianity is any good at building moral citizens? Wherever the morality of the majority of people who happen to be Christian comes from, it’s clearly got nothing to do with Jesus — else those closest to him would not have led Crusades and would not today rape children. Even if you want to dismiss the Crusaders and child-raping priests as not being true Christians, that does you no good. When was the last time Jesus held a press conference to condemn the actions of his priests — let alone reveal to authorities the sins that his priests had confessed to him?

    And so it goes, on and on and on. Countless scientific theories have been tossed into the wastebin of academia once incompatible evidence came to light. It goes all the way back to geocentricism and epicycles, and includes alchemy and astrology. Our best theories to date, Newtonian Mechanics and Darwinian Evolution, have both needed minor-but-significant modifications since the were first proposed — with Newton requiring two radically different and fundamentally incompatible brand-new branches of physics to explain the barely-detectable edge cases where it breaks down. And Craig Venter is in the midst of rendering Darwin moot, with his lab having the first living organisms on Earth that aren’t related to the Universal Common Ancestor since said UCA died at least a few billion years ago.

    How has religion adapted to discoveries incompatible with its tenets? Well…it hasn’t. Which, considering that the most basic tenets had already been demonstrated incompatible with observation centuries if not millennia before the founding of the major surviving religions, isn’t at all a surprise.

    Or, in short, science is for those who are willing to let reality be what it is and do their best to understand what that might be. Religion is for those who would much rather invent their own fantasies and hew to them no matter how distant it is from real reality.

    To be sure, fantasy is a good thing, and a vital part of what not only makes us human but what makes us so unique and important to the universe. To the best of our knowledge, nowhere else are new universes being created save in the minds of humans. But failing to recognize that these new universes are entirely contained within our very small minds…that’s a good recipe for disaster. Maybe Newton doesn’t apply in your fantasy world and you can step off the cliff and not fall down. And that’s amazing and wonderful and something to be savored. But if you forget to leave your fantasy before you actually step off the cliff, you will fall down and you will die a painful death as a result — and you’ll destroy your fantasy world at the same time, to boot.

    Cheers,

    b&

  15. Simon Packer:

    QFT as it stands is missing something really major. And it is a QFT based equation people keep telling me covers all events we encounter day-to-day.

    You’re missing the matter of scale.

    Newtonian Mechanics is very well known to be incomplete. It cannot accurately describe Mercury’s orbit nor the diffraction of an electron. Yet, Newtonian Mechanics is more than adequate to describe everything going on at a baseball game, from the construction of the stadium to the trajectories of the pitches. There is nothing in Quantum Mechanics that would let the pitcher “diffract” the ball and simultaneously throw a strike and tag out the runner trying to steal second. There is nothing in Relativistic Mechanics that would let the batter hit the ball fast enough for Lorentzian contraction to move the far wall close enough to make home runs easier. And you’re never going to have to worry if the gumball machine is going to dispense a black hole whose physics can’t currently be described at all.

    Sean’s Big Equation is simply an observation that our knowledge of physics isn’t merely such that the physics of baseball is complete, but that our knowledge of physics extends all the way from just after the Big Bang to just outside black holes’s event horizons, with a few other similarly-remote caveats.

    If you’re comfortable with the fact that Newtonian Mechanics is all you need to know what is and isn’t possible at the ballpark, then you should be equally comfortable with the fact that Sean’s Big Equation is all you need to know what is and isn’t possible not only at the ballpark but everywhere else in the Solar System and a good ways beyond. And that includes your own body and mind. Just as we know the physics that prevents the pitcher from throwing a faster-than-light fastball, we know the physics that keeps his mind inside his brain.

    Coyne performs the universal evolutionist sleight of hand by brushing over the utterly intractable problems of basic implausibility of the mutational mechanism combined with the irreducible complexity problem.

    If you would, please give us the single best example you’re aware of demonstrating irreducible complexity. And I’ll make you a similar bet as I implicitly offered to zarzuelazen: if your example actually is irreducibly complex in a way different from the architectural archway (which is a good analogy to Behe’s beloved bacterial flagellum), I’ll go out and buy an hat just to eat it.

    And your “implausibility” objection bears no more merit than a similar complaint that you weren’t the person who won that half-a-billion-dollar lottery jackpot this weekend. (And before you start tossing around big numbers, you should be aware that I’d respond with a far, far bigger number than any that Behe has ever used.)

    Cheers,

    b&

  16. Ben

    The QFT/vacuum energy/renormalization problem is nothing to do with scale. It is an underlying paradox of profound proportions arising from Quantum Field Theory, a branch of quantum mechanics. There is no rational reason for QFT to suddenly fail to be relevant at large scales. It remains the relevant method of defining the vacuum energy.

    Field theory is a pragmatic fix to get real world answers, and this is widely recognized. We insert measured values to make it work. To restate: QFT is missing something basic; the renormalisation/cosmological constant/vacuum energy set of problems/discrepancies proves this with finality. It can only possibly be, as it stands, a partial description of reality, even within the everyday remit. The Core Equation is I believe an elaboration of QFT formalism.

    Like many others, I don’t think this core equation is definitive and I wouldn’t derive metaphysics from it. Many more qualified than me thought so in the original post.

    Behe points out that new, complex, complete structures in phenotype, especially when they are not paralleled significantly elsewhere in other species, must appear in the record with all components for function present simultaneously for survival advantages or even to avoid immediate non-viability (or death). He, like Simmonds, point out that this is vanishingly unlikely for an unguided or undesigned process given the very finite nature of the environment and timescale suggested. Yes, people use phrases like ‘evolution is massively parallel’. Well it is not nearly parallel enough. Or ‘evolution ‘scaffolds’ structures and we don’t have the ‘scaffold’ in the record. Ever? How convenient. Did you actually read any of Behe or Simmonds stuff? The only similarly huge discrepancy I know in science is vacuum energy! When combined with the implausibility of the basic mutational engine necessary for any species transitioning, you, in my honest opinion, have a complete no-hoper in practice. The biggest hoodwink job in science. How much space does Coyne give to how DNA coding for more complex phenotype, or radically different structures in the phenotype, arises by mutation? Maybe two or three very unpointed sentences as far as I can see. I told you where they are, pages 127-8. Put me right. In detail, on details. As I said several times, Meyr, though slightly better, is still void of any real explanations. 5^9 years and 10^39 molecules is nowhere near long enough for abiogenesis let alone speciation as we see it. Statistically, it won’t even get you to a single protein if all the molecules in the earth’s crust were amino-acids. And this is quite fundamental stuff. If you understand the problems I am describing, and you have substantial answers, point me in the right direction. I have looked and found nothing convincing.

    I know your overall opinions by now, but you aren’t saying anything new or offering anything solid.

    ‘No god, for example, has even done so much as to call 9-1-1 — a trivial act to mitigate evil’

    We have, and I believe God gave us, real freewill and moral responsibility. If you don’t think so, you are patently sailing along in your own little abstract world. I wouldn’t vote for a President/PM who was convinced we were just riders on the universal wave function or whatever your deterministic model is. Responsibility means choices and outcomes or else you are still in Kindergarten. God cannot save you constantly from yourself or others without reducing you to an imbecile. I happen to believe he does save us from a lot, but for good reason, not everything.

  17. Simon Packer:

    The QFT/vacuum energy/renormalization problem is nothing to do with scale. […] There is no rational reason for QFT to suddenly fail to be relevant at large scales.

    Never mind that you’re contradicting yourself there; your objection applies equally well to Newtonian Mechanics. There’s no “rational” reason for it to “suddenly” fail to be relevant for Mercury’s orbit or the diffraction of an electron.

    In reality, science is little else but effective descriptions of phenomena that apply only at certain scales. The Ideal Gas Law is profoundly reliable at human scales, too, but starts to break down at the scale of Brownian motion and can’t even be expressed sensibly at atomic scales. Any Periodic Table will give you at least four or five digits of precision for the atomic mass, yet no individual atom actually has that mass (since the Table incorporates typical observed prevalence of isotopes). The CDC can do a decent job at predicting which flu vaccines are most likely to be effective over the population as an whole, but nobody can predict if any given individual is going to get the flu or have an adverse reaction to the vaccine.

    And this is a good thing — and a most profound failure of religion that it pretends to be the exception that actually does have access to unquestionable absolute Capital-T Truth. Because, as we’ll see in just a moment, it isn’t merely the case that religion has no greater access to reality than anybody else; its insistence on unjustifiable claims results in the religious picture being the least accurate description of reality ever put forth.

    It might seem like a contradiction, that the proudly fuzzy picture is much sharper and detailed and true-to-life than the doggedly defined one. Yet any artist can tell you why, as the only way to get good at anything is by practicing and continually refining your efforts — which very often means tossing out something that’s not working and trying something new.

    We have, and I believe God gave us, real freewill and moral responsibility.

    Never mind that you have but named the form of YHWH’s malfeasance and / or incompetence; you are right here stabbing straight through the very heart of Christianity in a futile effort to protect its soul.

    Is there “freewill” in Heaven?

    If so, it cannot be the cause of evil; if not, it cannot be necessary, let alone desirous.

    Of course, the other possibility is that there is evil in Heaven, which would put the lie to all claims of salvation…

    …and, in fact, Christian theology holds firm that there is evil in heaven, that even YHWH’s most favored angels rebel — and such can only be the case if YHWH is the most corrupt angel of all.

    And if that bit of theology isn’t enough to convince you that men create gods in their own image, nothing will.

    Cheers,

    b&

  18. “Xeno couldn’t figure out how you could cover a finite distance because the distance is infinitely divisible. But Newton and Leibniz invented The Calculus, showing us how to (for example) sum an infinite number of infinitesimals in the series 1/2 + 1/4 + 1/8 + 1/16 […] to get the exact result of 1.”

    I have to intervene on behalf of my buddy Zeno who has been badly misunderstood, according to my understanding of what he was saying. His contention was that continuous motion was probably an illusion, because to travel a distance L with continuous motion you would have to traverse to its end a series of points which has no end. He then gave an example of those points: L/2, 3L/4, etc.

    He did not need the invention of calculus to tell him that S=L/2+L/4+L/8+… was equal to L. He had started with L and chopped it up. I would bet my life that if you asked him what S was he would say, “L”. He would probably also say that it was impossible to sum that series by physically adding up all the pieces, because they were endless, but that since he started with L and chopped it figuratively into those pieces he knew the sum must be L.

    Mathematicians use this method: define a series of partial sums (L/2, 3L/4, 7L/8, …). IF you can guess where it is headed (find its limit), and prove it using the epsilon-delta limit process, then you have found the sum of the series. They use this round-about method because … to sum all the pieces physically remains physically impossible, just as it was in Zeno’s day. I don’t see how this answers Zeno, and don’t think he would see at as an answer either.

    One valid answer is that space and time are quantized, and there is no actual continuous motion, just a series of tiny discrete moves, like the frames of a movie film. Right or wrong, I think Zeno deserves a lot of credit for that thought, and will continue to try to see that he gets it. Calculus does not answer it – unless you contend that nature is a mathematician and uses the epsilon-delta process to figure out how to get across a distance of L.

    (Calculus in my view is a very useful method of approximating discrete systems when the units of that system are very tiny. One can also tackle discrete systems using sums instead of integrals and finite-difference equations instead of differential equations, but the math becomes more unit-dependent, so the assumption of infinitesimal units can be a time-saver. Whether there is anything in this universe which actually has infinitesimal units is an open question, in my view.)

  19. JimV:

    One valid answer is that space and time are quantized, and there is no actual continuous motion, just a series of tiny discrete moves, like the frames of a movie film.

    But the flipside of that is that, if spacteime is continuous, then it’s a mistrake to think of there being a point that’s halfway between two others, as comes from the modern understanding of infinitesimals. Pick any point you might care to propose, and there isn’t merely another point infinitely close to it, but an infinite number of other points between the two. And with an infinite number of points to choose from, the answer in any naïve sense is obviously undefined.

    From the perspective you’re approaching (ha!) Xeno from, the problem would be intermixing the finite and the infinite. Either spacetime is quantized or continuous. If it’s quantized, you can’t describe motion as continuous, as demonstrated by Xeno’s paradox; rather, motion is as stepwise as spacetime itself. But it’s continuous, you now can’t describe spacetime itself as quantized…again as demonstrated by Xeno’s paradox — because there’s no intermediate steps that you’re stopping at, just one smooth continuous whole.

    We of course have excellent reason to suspect that spacetime is quantized, as everything else at the smallest scales appears to be. Indeed, Laplace’s Daemon strongly suggests that the passage of time is illusory and that all moments in time exist simultaneously — it’s just that, at any given moment in time, the entropic arrow of time would cause an entity to have freshest memories from recent moments and no memory of the future. That we only ever actually perceive the ever-present now is very strongly consistent with such a model.

    Cheers,

    b&

  20. “Behe points out that new, complex, complete structures in phenotype, especially when they are not paralleled significantly elsewhere in other species, must appear in the record with all components for function present simultaneously for survival advantages or even to avoid immediate non-viability (or death). He, like Simmonds, point out that this is vanishingly unlikely for an unguided or undesigned process given the very finite nature of the environment and timescale suggested. ”

    Every one of Dr. Behe’s claims has been debunked, most of them by Dr. Ken Hunter, an actual evolutionary biologist with numerous peer-reviewed papers who happens to be a Christian. Dr. Behe’s approach is anti-scientific. He starts with the premise that evolution does not work. Therefore his probabilities estimates are based on that premise. For example, in his calculation of the probability of the malaria virus becoming resistant to a certain drug he claimed there was only one mutational path to get there, with a probability of about 10^-40. Actual biologists went out and sequenced the genes of lots of samples, and have so far found seven paths. He claimed in DBB (exhaustively debunked by Dr. Miller in “Finding Darwin’s God) that three simultaneously-occurring factors were required to make blood clot in wounds. Biologists found the hagfish has only two of those factors and can form blood clots. The list goes on and on. Dr. Behe makes guesses, does calculations based on them to see if they support his premise, and if so, publishes them (in un-peer-reviewed publications); if not, he abandons them and tries something else. Like all scientists and engineers he uses the evolutionary algorithm (trial and error) to try to develop something new, but his evolutionary journey is backwards (away from the truth).

  21. JimV:

    For example, in his calculation of the probability of the malaria virus becoming resistant to a certain drug he claimed there was only one mutational path to get there, with a probability of about 10^-40.

    What always shocks me is that Christians never even stop to think of the obvious theological conclusion from such claimed examples of ID “theory.”

    If it really is true that Plasmodium cannot evolve drug resistance and that Intelligent Design is the best explanation for the origin of such resistance…then we must ask what sort of monster is intelligently designing our worst microbial foes to counter our best efforts to defeat them?

    Why on Earth would Jesus intelligently and with malice aforethought and only in the past few decades design resistance into a disease that would otherwise be much better controlled?

    I mean, it’s one thing for Jesus to not answer prayers to be cured of malaria…and another thing entirely to unleash whole new malarial epidemics upon unsuspecting populations.

    And we’re supposed to think of this archenemy as our best friend and only hope for salvation from his very own wrath?

    Indeed, the only redemptive quality the gods can possibly possess is the one they actually do possess: nonexistence.

    Cheers,

    b&

  22. Jim V

    Hello again, I think I remember you from the Don Page comments!

    There was a lot of to-ing and fro-ing at the time concerning the malaria example and various figures put on the mutation pathway probabilities, and Behe was indeed wrong in large part on the details of that one.

    ‘Every one of Dr. Behe’s claims has been debunked…’ Every one of them has been waffled about. Debunked; No. Had valid criticism made about them; Yes. Big difference. And yes, many Christians believe big picture EBNS in various forms. Francis Collins is an eminent Christian geneticist who seeks to converge mainstream EBNS with a Biblical framework.

    I personally would readily concede that EBNS driven by mutation explains changes in HIV variant population. It would be relatively easy to make a workable numerical model and I personally once suggested the idea to a pediatric HIV specialist working in Johannesburg.

    Still leaves huge, flat out unworkable questions on why selected random mutation would work to elaborate and speciate life when in practice it usually cripples a known species end of story. And yes…there is sickle cell anemia and it does improve malarial resistance. You can cherry pick and waffle, or smell the coffee and wake up to the real big picture. You got duped.

    On discrete or lumped systems, verses truly continuous systems, there is a lot of higher maths. Anything approaching the complexity of the core equation would have to be solved by numerical aprroximation, not analytically, of course. It therefore becomes incredibly hard in practice to decide where it starts to accumulate substantial error. This would apply whether reality is entirely quantized or not. Infinite dimensional systems is an area a recently deceased cousin of mine worked, Prof Charles Read.

    Ben

    Science

    OK bad choice of word , suddenly. The normalization fixes and vacuum energy prediction failures are there whatever scale you apply QFT to, in essence. An effective field theory works over a certain scale, but it assumes QFT is the valid paradigm. QFT, as a basis of the standard model, is more fundamental than the emergent phenomena you discuss, and the implications of problems are therefore more profound in scope. What I am saying is that I think it very likely that QFT emerges from something else, That is not a new suggestion, and the possibilities of the ‘something else’ being controlled or tweaked by Someone Else are there. That and the fact that whatever EFT simplification you use, you get a vacuum discrepancy that is really really big. It would be mean of God to tweak ‘something else’ just as we were doing a collision experiment. Perhaps he acts like the cows in the Far Side:)

    Yes, science must learn. Of course it must. But we are assessing a particular stage in its progress, the present state. And the present state is arguably one of little unambiguous progress on fundamentals. The tricky questions are pretty much the same as they were a generation ago. So the universal wavefunction, describing everything including how that wavefunction is itself understood by humanity in our minds, is in a place where the latter is not increasing very fast 🙂 …. 🙁 …….. 🙂

    Christian Theology

    There will be freewill in heaven. There are different realms of heaven (e.g. 1 Kings 8v27, Duet 10v14). The redeemed will dwell with God in highest heaven. They will share in inner communion with God. They will have freewill but no desire or vulnerability to sin. Satan and the fallen angels were expelled from highest heaven. Man has a framework for redemption in Christ which is complete, final and either/or (e.g. Psalm 2v13, John 3v18, Matthew 12v30 ).

    The angels were in highest heaven and some were expelled without remedy. Man was then created and placed on earth, and is given the opportunity to inherit heaven. If he doesn’t inherit in Christ, he goes to hell, being man bound to sin forever without remedy. God became a man, not an angel, to redeem man, not angels. See Hebrews 1 and 2.

    Science and Religion

    ‘Why on Earth would Jesus intelligently and with malice aforethought and only in the past few decades design resistance into a disease that would otherwise be much better controlled?’

    Decent question. I believe that biological life is probably a God-guided or God-consrained reflection of the spiritual condition of men and angels. The creation reflects the cruelty which inevitably came with the fall of men and angels. I do not believe God put predation, disease and parasites on the earth in the very beginning.

  23. Simon Packer:

    Still leaves huge, flat out unworkable questions on why selected random mutation would work to elaborate and speciate life when in practice it usually cripples a known species end of story.

    But that’s just it. You yourself just explicitly admitted that, at least in the case of HIV, not all mutations are deleterious. You’ve established that some mutations are beneficial and some are deleterious — and, indeed, a mutation could also be neutral, or even, such as is the case with sickle cell anemia, deleterious in some circumstances but beneficial in others (since haploid carriers don’t have anemia but do have better resistance to malaria).

    What therefore remains is to empirically examine the frequency of mutations and their effect on survival. When you do so, you find that a great many mutations — and especially the deleterious ones you’re so focussed on — don’t even make it into germline cells in the first place because the genetic error correction mechanisms (mostly, the mirrored nature of the DNA molecule) prevent them from being replicated within a cell in the first place. A significant number of mutations are literally neutral, in that multiple DNA sequences will encode the exact same amino acid — and many more are effectively neutral in that they code for amino acids that are functionally very similar.

    A direct result of all that neutral mutation, especially when coupled with the blender of sexual reproduction, is a significant pool of genetic plasticity. That sets the stage for multiple mutations to accumulate and linger, none of which have any significance in and of themselves, but which provides for a range of variation that selection can act upon.

    Indeed, it is exactly this genetic plasticity which explains human-guided breeding of domestic animals, such as the dog. I think you’d agree that both the Great Dane and the Teacup Poodle were intelligently designed by humans — or, at least, the Dane, as I’m not so sure there was any sober intelligence that went into the Poodle. And you’d hopefully agree that both trace their ancestry back to wolves. And that there is no magic Platonic dividing line between the two breeds — and that the two breeds would, in many other contexts, be considered different species. And I would also suggest that you don’t think that we need to resort to any sort of magical impossible mutation to explain the genetic differences between them.

    When it comes right down to it, all Darwin put forth was that the environment itself will impose similar selective forces on species as humans do. Just as the breeds are a result of some individuals being better at reproducing (because human breeders picked them to breed based on some desired characteristic), the species are a result of some individuals being better at reproducing (because, perhaps, their coat patterns give them better camouflage).

    So, if you wish to hew to ID, it is incumbent upon you to explain why we can observe wolves being bred to Danes and Poodles, but we shouldn’t observe an ancient cat ancestor evolving into lions and tigers over a great many more generations.

    An effective field theory works over a certain scale, but it assumes QFT is the valid paradigm.

    You have spectacularly missed the point of an effective theory.

    An effective theory is one which does not care about the underlying “true” nature of the phenomenon which it describes. It is entirely agnostic about such phenomena — and the best effective theories are equally applicable to wildly different fundamental bases.

    I’m fond of the Ideal Gas Law for this example. We’re familiar with it as applicable to, for example, the air which we breathe. However, it is equally applicable to an atmosphere-free tin can in orbit filled with ball bearings, with some notable asterisks. And it is even better applicable to a naïve Newtonian computer model of said orbital can — even though the fundamental reality of that computer simulation is radically different from anything you could even imagine breathing. Nor would it be difficult to propose other systems where the Ideal Gas Law is applicable.

    Now, in the case of actual gasses, we have some other very effective theories — themselves independent of more-fundamental natures! — which describe the bits and pieces that bump into each other which provide the Newtonian foundation from which the Ideal Gas Law emerges. And we have other effective theories upon which those effective theories are built, and so on.

    Yes, it is certainly true that we don’t have an explanation for the nature of reality upon which Sean’s Big Equation (an ungainly grandiose unified theory of most things, but a very effective one nonetheless). But that doesn’t matter, because Sean’s Big Equation is perfectly consistent with every experiment ever performed — especially including an awful lot of experiments that would have falsified it but didn’t.

    So we don’t need to know what (if any) reality underlies Sean’s Big Equation, any more than we need to know if the “gas” in question is an admixture of nitrogen and oxygen and some asterisks or if it’s a computer simulation of a bunch of BBs in a tin can in orbit. We have the experimental verification that, whatever is going on, it all behaves in accordance with the effective theory to a most remarkably high degree of confidence — and we also have the experimental verification that rules out all the proposed competition to date.

    The redeemed will dwell with God in highest heaven. They will share in inner communion with God. They will have freewill but no desire or vulnerability to sin.

    Well, there you go. freewill is a red herring, and completely irrelevant to the question of why humans sin.

    And that leaves the question of where the “desire or vulnerability to sin” arises from. You, I’m sure, would start referring to a particular faery tale about an enchanted garden with talking animals and an angry wizard — the very absurdity of which should lay plain the fantastical nature of the whole discussion. Yet, even should I step into that fantasy world for the sake of argument, such a distraction must remain equally irrelevant.

    For that same story begs us to believe that YHWH Created Adam in YHWH’s own image — and yet the image the Bible paints of Adam is corruptible and corrupted. Even the ancients would be compelled to agree that perfection can produce only perfection — that a perfect artisan would not craft a flawed work; the art would be as perfect as the artist. Indeed, that YHWH is every bit as flawed as humanity is repeatedly demonstrated in the Bible, such as when YHWH displays all the maturity of a toddler when he throws his temper tantrum and Floods the Earth.

    I’m sure you’d agree with me that all the other gods of all the other pantheons were created by human authors in the images of the authors — and you’d have no trouble identifying all the telltale signs of such an arrow of creation.

    Yet here you must agree with me that YHWH and Adam reflect each other…but you somehow would convince yourself that the reflection is imperfect…but the imperfection is Adam’s fault, not YHWH’s…and that Adam’s imperfection is somehow not a powerful empirical demonstration of Adam’s creator’s own imperfection…and all this in the context of a book where YHWH brags about being jealous and commits horrific atrocities and is otherwise demonstrably by far the worst sinner of the book.

    By what conceivable measure can you possibly conclude that, though in all the other cases where the gods and men mirror each other the men created the gods, but, in this one case and this one case alone, it’s the gods who created the men?

    God became a man, not an angel, to redeem man, not angels.

    So you trust a god who gave up on his own family when he says he’ll treat his pets better?

    I believe that biological life is probably a God-guided or God-consrained reflection of the spiritual condition of men and angels.

    Back to zilbot particles, again. In all the genetics labs in all of history, not once has there been even the slightest hint of any divine meddling with DNA sequences — and every physics lab does nothing but produce evidence that such meddling can’t happen.

    I do not believe God put predation, disease and parasites on the earth in the very beginning.

    And yet it’s right there, on page two. Do you really take seriously the proposition that the most perfect creation of the most perfect being could go from Heaven to Handbasket in a mere dozen verses? That YHWH’s creation was so fragile or humans so powerful as to so utterly corrupt it so easily and quickly? Never mind the proposed method of corruption — innocents eating a fruit that to them was insignificantly different from all the other fruit they ate all day long. What incompetence put the tree there in the first place, let alone left it unguarded or Adam and Eve unattended? And to blame the victims rather than the gross negligence of their guardian!

    And that’s ignoring the Flood…YHWH decided to wipe the slate clean, but his most perfect human he picked to start all over again was a drunken fool, and the evil was right back again. What, YHWH couldn’t be bothered to detox Noah on the boat and give him some heavenly magic sin resistance at the same time? YHWH would have to know that, lacking said protection, it’d all go right back to where it was before…so the point of drowning all the kittens was…what, exactly? Pure sadism?

    Just how many Biblical examples of spectacular incompetence on YHWH’s part do you need to conclude that, yes, the flaws are the fault of humans — the humans who made up YHWH in the first place?

    Cheers,

    b&

  24. @Simon Packer:

    «Back to your original comment which implied that I was claiming that the Bible was both hypothesis and revelation.»

    It’s been a few days, but I know that wasn’t the wording I was asking about. The phrases you used, and which I asked to clarify your definitions and examples of, were “hypothesis” and “implicit assumption”. You still have not done this. And I would prefer non-religious examples, by the way.

    I’m going to add “revelation” to that mix. I suppose that will have to refer to religious examples, but oh well. As before, I’ll make my own attempt:

    I would understand “revelation” to itself have many implicit assumptions bundled in — that an invisible intangible superperson is a possible thing; that an invisible intangible superperson exists; that this invisible intangible superperson usually gives no sign whatsoever of existing; that this invisible intangible superperson will sometimes magically talk to a normal human person … And that magical talking is called a revelation. I might be able to break that down further, but that’s a start.

    If you disagree, please explicate what your concept of a revelation is.

    « I occasionally step back and demote my view of the Bible back to hypothesis to check up why I still believe it. It always passes the test. »

    So, for example, you read about grass and trees being created before the sun, moon, and stars, and this obvious contradiction to science gets a pass?

    Or you read Genesis 1, with animals being created before man and woman simultaneously, and then you read Genesis 2, where animals are created after man and before woman, and you say “Yup! Contradictions in sequence don’t invalidate this hypothesis, because it’s special! Pass!”

    Something like that?

    «I am not an expert on Big Bang cosmology and that would be a relative term. Many people I know would probably say that I was, but I am not. I am unlikely to become an expert. Within the community of world-class physicists and mathematicians, there are a fair few dissenters.»

    Such as? And are they any more credible than geocentrists?

    «I am not a brilliant physicist though I have a degree from Durham in the UK in Applied Physics.»

    Huh.

    «

    «”Sigh. There are still problems in physics, therefore, a young earth and universe are still on the table? That’s what you’re going with?”»

    Yes. »

    That’s as silly as someone stating after Newton but before Einstein that the precession of the orbit of Mercury meant that geocentrism is still on the table. No.

    Science does not go backwards. Logic does not go backwards. What always happens is that a new explanation is discovered that explains the anomaly, as well as everything explained by the old theory.

    «The vacuum catastrophe is more a staggering discordance than a problem, but yes. I told you why. QFT as it stands is missing something really major. And it is a QFT based equation people keep telling me covers all events we encounter day-to-day.»

    There’s a much larger staggering discordance — outright contradiction, even — between what the Bible claims internally and what we see in reality, and yet that doesn’t bother you. Presumably because the Bible is special.

    «I would see Behe as methodical and definitive, and far more in the spirit of real science in terms of analysis. »

    Real scientists — even Behe’s own departmental colleagues — disagree.

    Behe offers nothing but arguments from ignorance and incredulity.

    «Coyne performs the universal evolutionist sleight of hand by brushing over the utterly intractable problems of basic implausibility of the mutational mechanism combined with the irreducible complexity problem. You can wash over this with words, but statistically, you would have no chance whatsoever»

    Why is that creationists can go on and on about “implausibility” and “statistically impossible” without ever quantifying their objections?

    «These issues are washed over with hogwash, »

    The Bible is filled with hogwash in almost every chapter of every book — but it passes for you because it is special, right?

    «the first one on page 128»

    You can’t be bothered to specifically cite what you see as being a problem and why?

    « Sorry, but hard science this is not. »

    Regardless of your opinion on the matter, Coyne is summarizing the field of evolutionary biology. No creationist has any real counterargument, just lots of fallacious bluster.

    «Neither will move an IDer an inch, and for good reasons.»

    Showing flat-earthers pictures of the Earth from space won’t move them an inch either. Stubbornness qua stubbornness is not a sign of correctness.

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