If one has a philosophical commitment to materialism, then one has to believe speciation, the origin of life, of the universe, the fine-tuning of the universe et al, to be explicable by natural forces. Such a commitment is sound from the standpoint of maintaining one's faith.
I think Lewontin was merely too honest for most in his camp.
Speaking for myself, if the "bottom-up" approach converges compellingly on a superhuman designer, I'll sign on. I maintain that any honest scientist, when faced with a shift in the premises, shifts the model to fit the facts.
Mind you, the facts that would support such an extraordinary intellectual frameshift would have to withstand seriosuly adversarial review. To quote Carl - "Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.'
The scientific evidence is actually pretty extraordinary but it can be gotten around if one is inventive enough to imagine an infinity of universes each of which is different from the rest - for an unknown reason:
Science's Alternative to an Intelligent Creator: the Multiverse Theory
Our universe is perfectly tailored for life. That may be the work of God or the result of our universe being one of many.
by Tim Folger
published online November 10, 2008
A sublime cosmic mystery unfolds on a mild summer afternoon in Palo Alto, California, where I’ve come to talk with the visionary physicist Andrei Linde. The day seems ordinary enough. Cyclists maneuver through traffic, and orange poppies bloom on dry brown hills near Linde’s office on the Stanford University campus. But everything here, right down to the photons lighting the scene after an eight-minute jaunt from the sun, bears witness to an extraordinary fact about the universe: Its basic properties are uncannily suited for life. Tweak the laws of physics in just about any way and—in this universe, anyway—life as we know it would not exist.
Consider just two possible changes. Atoms consist of protons, neutrons, and electrons. If those protons were just 0.2 percent more massive than they actually are, they would be unstable and would decay into simpler particles. Atoms wouldn’t exist; neither would we. If gravity were slightly more powerful, the consequences would be nearly as grave. A beefed-up gravitational force would compress stars more tightly, making them smaller, hotter, and denser. Rather than surviving for billions of years, stars would burn through their fuel in a few million years, sputtering out long before life had a chance to evolve. There are many such examples of the universe’s life-friendly properties—so many, in fact, that physicists can’t dismiss them all as mere accidents.
“We have a lot of really, really strange coincidences, and all of these coincidences are such that they make life possible,” Linde says.
Physicists don’t like coincidences. They like even less the notion that life is somehow central to the universe, and yet recent discoveries are forcing them to confront that very idea. Life, it seems, is not an incidental component of the universe, burped up out of a random chemical brew on a lonely planet to endure for a few fleeting ticks of the cosmic clock. In some strange sense, it appears that we are not adapted to the universe; the universe is adapted to us.
[ Note that physicists "likes" are explicitly driving the direction of physics. Its not a case of following the evidence. ]
Call it a fluke, a mystery, a miracle. Or call it the biggest problem in physics. Short of invoking a benevolent creator, many physicists see only one possible explanation: Our universe may be but one of perhaps infinitely many universes in an inconceivably vast multiverse. Most of those universes are barren, but some, like ours, have conditions suitable for life.
The idea is controversial. Critics say it doesn’t even qualify as a scientific theory because the existence of other universes cannot be proved or disproved. Advocates argue that, like it or not, the multiverse may well be the only viable nonreligious explanation for what is often called the “fine-tuning problem”—the baffling observation that the laws of the universe seem custom-tailored to favor the emergence of life.
.....
By the mid-1980s Linde and Tufts University physicist Alex Vilenkin had come up with a dramatic new twist that remains nearly as controversial now as it was then. They argued that inflation was not a one-off event but an ongoing process throughout the universe, where even now different regions of the cosmos are budding off, undergoing inflation, and evolving into essentially separate universes. The same process will occur in each of those new universes in turn, a process Linde calls eternal chaotic inflation.
Linde has spent much of the past 20 years refining that idea, showing that each new universe is likely to have laws of physics that are completely different from our own. The latest iteration of his theory provides a natural explanation for the ANTHROPIC principle. If there are vast numbers of other universes, all with different properties, by pure odds at least one of them ought to have the right combination of conditions to bring forth stars, planets, and living things.
“In some other universe, people there will see different laws of physics,” Linde says. “They will not see our universe. They will see only theirs. They will look around and say, ‘Here is our universe, and we must construct a theory that uniquely predicts that our universe must be the way we see it, because otherwise it is not a complete physics.’ Well, this would be a wrong track because they are in that universe by chance.”
.....
In 1998 two teams of researchers observing distant supernovas—exploding stars—found that the expansion of the universe is accelerating. The discovery was baffling. Just about everyone had expected that the cosmic expansion, which started with the Big Bang, must be gradually slowing down, braked by the collective gravitational pull of all the galaxies and other matter out there. But built into the very fabric of space, it seems, is some unknown form of energy—physicists call it simply dark energy—that is pushing everything apart. Many cosmologists were skeptical at first, but follow-up observations with the Hubble Space Telescope, along with independent studies of radiation left over from the time of the Big Bang, have powerfully confirmed the reality of dark energy.
dark energy appears calibrated for stars, galaxies, and us.The idea that empty space might contain energy was not the part that surprised physicists. Ever since the birth of quantum mechanics in the 1920s, they have known that innumerable “virtual” particles pop into and out of existence all around us, a sort of quantum white noise, always there but forever beneath our notice. What astonished them was the peculiar specificity of the amount: exactly enough to accelerate expansion, yet not so much that the universe would rapidly rip itself apart. The observable amount of dark energy appears to be another one of those strange anthropic properties, calibrated to allow planets, stars, and us.
“If [dark energy] had been any bigger, there would have been enough repulsion from it to overwhelm the gravity that drew the galaxies together, drew the stars together, and drew Earth together,” Stanford physicist Leonard Susskind says. “It’s one of the greatest mysteries in physics. All we know is that if it were much bigger we wouldn’t be here to ask about it.”
Nobel laureate Steven Weinberg, a physicist at the University of Texas, agrees. “This is the one fine-tuning that seems to be extreme, far beyond what you could imagine just having to accept as a mere accident,” he says.
.......
For many physicists, the multiverse remains a desperate measure, ruled out by the impossibility of confirmation. Critics see the anthropic principle as a step backward, a return to a human-centered way of looking at the universe that Copernicus discredited five centuries ago. They complain that using the anthropic principle to explain the properties of the universe is like saying that ships were created so that barnacles could stick to them.
“If you allow yourself to hypothesize an almost unlimited portfolio of different worlds, you can explain anything,” says John Polkinghorne, formerly a theoretical particle physicist at Cambridge University and, for the past 26 years, an ordained Anglican priest. If a theory allows anything to be possible, it explains nothing; a theory of anything is not the same as a theory of everything, he adds.
IF THE PLANCK SATELLITE detects bending light, that would be evidence for the multiverse. Supporters of the multiverse theory say that critics are on the wrong side of history. “Throughout the history of science, the universe has always gotten bigger,” Carr says. “We’ve gone from geocentric to heliocentric to galactocentric. Then in the 1920s there was this huge shift when we realized that our galaxy wasn’t the universe. I just see this as one more step in the progression. Every time this expansion has occurred, the more conservative scientists have said, ‘This isn’t science.’ This is just the same process repeating itself.”
If the multiverse is the final stage of the Copernican revolution, with our universe but a speck in an infinite megacosmos, where does humanity fit in? If the life-friendly fine-tuning of our universe is just a chance occurrence, something that inevitably arises in an endless array of universes, is there any need for a fine-tuner—for a god?
“I don’t think that the multiverse idea destroys the possibility of an intelligent, benevolent creator,” Weinberg says. “What it does is remove one of the arguments for it, just as Darwin’s theory of evolution made it unnecessary to appeal to a benevolent designer to understand how life developed with such remarkable abilities to survive and breed.”
On the other hand, if there is no multiverse, where does that leave physicists? “If there is only one universe,” Carr says, “you might have to have a fine-tuner. If you don’t want God, you’d better have a multiverse.”
As for Linde, he is especially interested in the mystery of consciousness and has speculated that consciousness may be a fundamental component of the universe, much like space and time. He wonders whether the physical universe, its laws, and conscious observers might form an integrated whole. A complete description of reality, he says, could require all three of those components, which he posits emerged simultaneously. “Without someone observing the universe,” he says, “the universe is actually dead.”
.....
Cosmic Coincidences
If these cosmic traits were just slightly altered, life as we know it would be impossible. A few examples:
• Stars like the sun produce energy by fusing two hydrogen atoms into a single helium atom. During that reaction, 0.007 percent of the mass of the hydrogen atoms is converted into energy, via Einstein’s famous e = mc2 equation. But if that percentage were, say, 0.006 or 0.008, the universe would be far more hostile to life. The lower number would result in a universe filled only with hydrogen; the higher number would leave a universe with no hydrogen (and therefore no water) and no stars like the sun.
• The early universe was delicately poised between runaway expansion and terminal collapse. Had the universe contained much more matter, additional gravity would have made it implode. If it contained less, the universe would have expanded too quickly for galaxies to form.
• Had matter in the universe been more evenly distributed, it would not have clumped together to form galaxies. Had matter been clumpier, it would have condensed into black holes.
• Atomic nuclei are bound together by the so-called strong force. If that force were slightly more powerful, all the protons in the early universe would have paired off and there would be no hydrogen, which fuels long-lived stars. Water would not exist, nor would any known form of life.
T. F.
discovermagazine.com
|
