By Joe Felsenstein
December 11, 2024 22:00 MST
[An intermediate step]
One of the intermediate steps that Granville Sewell does not mention, and which Eric Hedin sort-of-knows occur. (a), Reconstruction of a very early vertebrate, the fossil Nuucichthys,
which lived 518 million years ago, with (b) its inferred position shown on the vertebrate phylogeny.
From a paper by Rudy Lerosey-Aubril & Javier Ortega-Hernández, CC BY 4.0 From Wikimedia.
Physicist Eric Hedin has posted to the Discovery Institute site Evolution News on 27 November 2024 an argument that the processes of physics cannot account for intelligent life. As he is a well-trained physicist (whose Ph.D. degree was from my university), and who has done experimental work on plasma physics, we can expect a mathematically sophisticated argument which would give us all pause.
Well, here’s the guts of his argument, from the Evolution News post:
In fact, for making anything other than large-scale conglomerations of matter (such as stars and planets), nature has only one tool in its bag — the electromagnetic force. This tool primarily manifests as the electric force, causing opposite charges (such as electrons and protons) to attract, and like charges to repel. It is completely indiscriminate, and cannot select between multiple options, preferring one charge over another, except for the rule that the bigger the charges and the closer the distance between them the stronger the resulting force. Can you imagine such blind, brute forces pulling together countless atoms of specific elements into the necessary configurations to result in a functioning laptop computer?
and
The “boundaries of science” refers to the common-sense conclusion that nature is limited in what it can produce to outcomes consistent with the laws and forces of nature. Natural processes are sought and found to be sufficient for natural phenomena, such as star formation or precipitation.
However, attempting to naturally explain the origin of some things found within our universe comes into conflict with the boundaries of science. Positing a natural explanation for the origin of the universe itself, the origin of the specific suite of physical parameters finely tuned to allow life, the origin of life itself, and the origin of conscious, intelligent minds, all defy what we have discovered about the limits of natural processes.
And basically, that’s the argument. Evolutionary biology does not pretend to address the origin of the universe, or the issue of fine-tuning in physics, and even the origin of life is outside its scope, though adjacent. But somehow Hedin knows that physical forces cannot explain “the origin of conscious, intelligent minds”. I wonder how he knows that.
Meet Granville Sewell
Hedin’s argument is quite similar to Granville Sewell’s. Sewell asks (rhetorically) whether it is not implausible that advanced technology such as iPhones could have resulted from natural forces, which involve only random collisions of particles. An example of his argument will be found here, where he asks it is possible to
Explain how life could have originated and evolved into intelligent humans, through entirely natural (unintelligent) processes.
Granville Sewell is a mathematician, who is Professor Emeritus in the Departrment of Mathematical Sciences at the University of Texas at El Paso. He is a specialist in differential equations. Here is how he invokes physics to solve this problem:
Well, I have a very simple proof that the biological problem #3 [the one mentioned above] posed above is also impossible to solve, that does fit in the margin of this document. All one needs to do is realize that if a solution were found, we would have proved something obviously false, that a few (four, apparently) fundamental, unintelligent forces of physics alone could have rearranged the fundamental particles of physics into libraries full of science texts and encyclopedias, computers connected to monitors, keyboards, laser printers and the Internet, cars, trucks, airplanes, nuclear power plants and Apple iPhones.
These are from a 2021 post at Evolution News (which I linked is above). It should be obvious that these two arguments are similar, since they invoke physics. They are also similar in lacking mathematical details, although elsewhere Sewell does present a partial differential equation for the simple diffusion of a chemical element outwards from an area of concentration.
What Sewell has left out
Granville Sewell’s argument has been repeatedly promoted by him, in various versions. In addition to the link in the previous section, examples of his advocacy will be found in blogs such as Evolution News and Uncommon Descent and in papers, book chapters and videos (here I take a deep breath) here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, and here.
I may have missed a few, but you get the idea.
Granville Sewell’s argument has been commented on many times over the years. The late physicist Mark Perakh (here), the mathematician Jason Rosenhouse (here), and physicist Dan Styer (here, and here) sternly criticized his assertions that evolution contradicts the Second Law of Thermodynamics. Sewell has since quietly backed away from his original assertions about the Second Law of Thermodynamics, instead coming up with an ill-defined concept of “X-entropy”.
His arguments have been commented on many times here. I have posted a number of times at Panda’s Thumb and at The Skeptical Zone (here, here, here, here, and here).
In my 2021 post (the fourth one above), I noted that the processes that Sewell thinks that the “rearrangement” of fundamental particles includes quite a few steps that we generally don’t attribute to Design Intervention, including:
Elementary particles aggregating to form larger particles
Those particles forming atoms
Atoms becoming connected by bonds to form chemicals
Chemicals interacting to form cosmic dust
Cosmic dust forming clouds by the attraction of gravity
Gravity in dust clouds leading to clumps that become a solar system
... including the formation of a star and planets
Lots of geology (steps omitted)
An early Earth with interesting organic chemicals
Origin of life
Evolution of protists and single-celled eukaryotes
Evolution of multicellular life
Evolution of people
People producing tools
People producing agriculture
and civilization,
and technology
These include processes of physics, astronomy, geology, and chemistry. Those are fields that get along fine without any Design Intervention. Likewise we know people can produce agriculture, civilization, and technology. That’s already an awful lot of Granville Sewell’s process of “particles rearranging themselves”. There are numerous parts of the evolution of life (and the origin of life) that ID advocates dispute, but much of their concentration is on two of the list items, the origin of life and the evolution of humans.
Hedin compared to Sewell
Eric Hedin faces similar issues, but is more cautious in his assertions. He focuses on fine-tuning arguments, which are outside of the domain of evolutionary biology, but also on the origin of life and on the origin of conscious, intelligent minds. Hedin has written many posts on Evolution News (for a list of them see here). In one of the earlier ones last year, he argued that a conservation-of-information argument showed that an evolving species could not gain specified information. I disputed this in a post here at Panda’s Thumb. Reading Hedin’s post closely, it could be seen that while he didn’t think it was possible for evolving organisms to produce “novel complex functionality”, he did acknowledge that natural selection can accumulate information:
But what can this “ratchet” do? No more than it was designed to do — namely to reproduce daughter organisms according to its inherent mechanism of reproduction. Variations in the organism’s genome, by any unguided process, may lead to an increase in fitness and therefore survivability. But natural processes cannot produce unnatural results. Selection based on the ratchet mechanism of increased fitness cannot of itself produce novel complex functionality if each successive small change does not give some increased advantage towards survival and reproduction.
So while Granville Sewell implies, without proof, that accumulation of favorable mutants by natural selection is a thermodynamic impossibility, Eric Hedin acknowledges that it is a possibility. He confines his objections to “novel, complex functionality”. The chief example he gives of this is the origin of a conscious, intelligent “mind”.
Intelligent brains? Or “minds”?
We have to be careful here. It is tempting to think that Hedin is describing conscious, intelligent brains. After all, our mind is just stuff that happens in our brains, isn’t it? In Hedin’s terminology, “mind” is quite distinct from the mere activity of the brain. Hedin is a dualist, in that he thinks that our brain exists in the real world, while our “mind” exists in a spiritual world (see an article of his here).
I have no understanding of how minds might evolve in a spiritual world, so I am going to discuss only brains, under the assumption – or perhaps the delusion – that we should think about the evolution of brains, and leave the issue of “mind” to those who understand things spiritual.
Can brains evolve to get smarter? More conscious?
Can brains get better at thinking? They certainly vary from species to species in the ability to think. In their simplest forms they can’t do very much thinking. That’s where the image at the start of this article becomes relevant. It shows Nuucichthys, a recently-discovered early vertebrate, from the early Cambrian. It has eyes near its front, and it is quite a good assumption that they connect to a primitive brain. Given that bigger brains are needed to have more intelligent behavior, there is really no reason to imagine a barrier to the evolution of more intelligence by ordinary evolutionary processes.
And what about consciousness? We usually think about consciousness in terms of conscious behavior of humans, contemplating beauty, morality, and mortality. All very lofty and difficult. But if we take an evolutionary view of it, we can ask whether much earlier species could show the basics of consciousness. If a mouse is looking at its surroundings and is able to have some representation of them, a representation that includes itself, then if it can choose a route for itself to its burrow, that seems to me to be an early form of consciousness. “Let’s see, if I am there and the bush is there and the log is there, and my burrow is behind the tree, then I should go to the left of the bush, over log, and to the right of the tree, and there will be the burrow.” The mouse is making a representation of its environment which includes a representation of itself, viewed from outside. From there, more elaborate forms of consciousness could, I think, evolve.
And there is, in fact, evidence of such a map of the surroundings in the brains of rats. See, for example, this report).
If any of this makes sense then there is no reason to suppose that there is some barrier to the evolution of conscious, intelligent brains. In which case Eric Hedin’s argument boils down to simple incredulity, without any logical proof of a barrier to evolution by ordinary evolutionary processes.
Which is where Granville Sewell’s argument ended up, too.