Saturday, March 04, 2006

Well, Mr. Blake, now you know how Larry Summers felt...

An open Letter to Nathaniel Blake

This is a letter posted in the comments section to Mr. Blake's second piece on evolution. Since I think rather highly of my writing, I'm posting it here, as an open letter. Enjoy!

...continued in full post...

Some ideas, you know, are off limits in some quarters.

Large blocs in the conservative movement are extremely distressed at the notion that our existence on this planet is due to anything resembling a mechanistic law.

We can remove the Earth from its place in the center of the universe, and even move the sun to the suburbs of our galaxy. Some folks will complain, but things settle down and we adjust.

We can turn phenomena such as diseases, earthquakes, floods, and lightning strikes into the results of natural forces. No longer do Thor and Zeus hurl lightning at those who offend them. Some folks will suggest that diseases, floods, earthquakes, and the like, occur because God is angry with a person or group. (And Pat Robertson has apologized to Ariel Sharon's relatives.) But no one is demanding that science classes allow room for Targeted Thunderbolt Theory or Tidal Wave Intentionality Theory.

I suppose if someone could offer good statistical proof that lightning only struck people who had just done something immoral, and that people singing hymns were never killed or injured by lightning, quakes, tornadoes, hurricanes, etc. we might have grounds to suspect that something was up.

But any such evidence is pretty hard to find. It's almost as if any deity running the universe doesn't want his (or her) existence to be subject to objective, empirical proof.

Be that as it may, people have made their peace with the mechanistic nature of physics and chemistry. They don't mind that electrical phenomena, including lightning, can be explained by electric fields and charged particles. They don't mind that all chemical reactions can ultimately be explained by Schroedinger's wave equation.

But the closer the explanation gets to us, in terms of our natures and origins, the less comfortable we feel. Psychiatric medicine makes people nervous, especially when mental disorders and even mental states are attributed to chemical reactions in the brain. And evolution makes people nervous, because it tells people that their existence was not an intended result of the processes that made the universe.

Stephen Jay Gould liked to point out how improbable we are. On a personal level, my genetic code is written on 46 chromosomes. Each chromosome was selected at random from two possible choices in my parents' chromosomes. That means every chromosome in my DNA had only a 50% chance of being the winning member of a chromosome pair.

Calculate that out, and the odds against my particular combination resulting from my parents' mating were roughly 70 trillion to one. My parents could have repopulated the earth ten thousand times over and still had only about a 70% chance of duplicating my genetic code.

Statistically, I am a very unlikely result of any mating between my parents. Does that mean the Creator has a special purpose for me? Theologically, maybe so. Does it mean the Creator took special care to make sure I was born instead of someone with a different possible combination of DNA? Probably not. In any event, we can't tell.

If I'm an accident of history, then how much more so for the human race, all of whose members are as statistically unlikely as I am? And when we look at the history of life, we see any number of places where things could have been different. Aim an asteroid in a different direction, and the person typing these words might have had scales and claws, and hatched from an egg deposited in a high-tech incubator by a reptilian mother.

People want to be special. As I mentioned in my comment about spontaneous order, the right and the left have their own ways of feeling special.

The left wants to be in charge. They want to be the axis around which the world turns, because they, in their wisdom, make it turn.

The right wants to be the purpose of those in charge. They want to be the axis around which the world turns, because the Creator, in his wisdom, put them there.

Both of these are articles of faith. Neither can be proven by science. And those who torture science to force it to support either article of faith are doing a grave disservice both to science and to their chosen causes.

Mr. Blake, there is one serious flaw in your premise. You're right.

It's the same flaw that got Professor Summers tossed out of the office of President of Harvard.

And Mr. Blake, you have a serious virtue working in your favor – you are willing to speak up for the truth as you see it. You're willing to stick by it, even when the choir – made up of your friends – acts as if you've thrown a grenade into it, and even when it throws some back.

In Harry Potter and the Sorceror's Stone, Professor Dumbledore states that it's one thing to stand up to an enemy. It takes a lot more courage to stand up to a friend. Lawrence Summers lacks that courage. You don't.

No comments: