By Fred Reed for the Saker Blog
In today’s column, we will revolutionize science, and establish that much of what we believe, at least regarding living things, is at best improbable and likely impossible. Science won’t notice, so no harm will be done.
As we explicate the Theory of Impossibility, we must begin with particle physics. This will give the column a touch of class. Specifically, the Fundamental Theorem of Quantum Mechanics states, “If a thing makes no sense at all, wait until you get used to it, and then it will.” For example, the idea that a particle can simultaneously be a wave is absurd, but is now everywhere accepted, like potatoes. The EPR effect, holding that if one of a pair of entangled photons, in Scarsdale, changes polarity, its entangled partner, in Alpha Centauri, will simultaneously change polarity, is ridiculous. How would it know? Neither of these things can happen. But they do, so we regard them as reasonable. Here we enunciate and underlying principle: A thing is not necessarily possible merely because it happens.
Unless something is going on that we do not know about.
Scientists see the universe as if it were a gigantic crossword puzzle. Crosswords are inherently solvable. While the great puzzle of life and existence has not been entirely elucidated, we assume that it can be, given time and effort. We may not know a five-letter word ending in Q that means “seventh-century Persian coin,” but we assume that it exists and can one day be found. But…is this so?
This reminds me that when I was in college, before the invention of fire, sophomores quoted Gödel’s Theorem as saying that in a logical system of sufficient complexity, there were questions that could not be answered within the system. Whether the theorem actually says this, I forget, but we said it said it, and felt very wise.
Here we come to one of my favorite clichés, by the British biologist J.B.S. Haldane, “The world is not only queerer than we think, but queerer than we can think.” Just so. Perhaps there are questions that can’t be answered, and therefore won’t be. This cannot be a comforting thought to a new-minted chemist as he rushes forth from CalTech, which may be why anything suggesting inherent unanswerability is rejected. But it may be that we just aren’t smart enough to understand everything, or maybe even much of it. Here we come to another cliché by my favorite philosopher (me): The smartest of a large number of hamsters is still a hamster.
Now, impossibility. Suppose I showed you a pair of tiny gears and said, “See? When I turn this one, it meshes with the other and makes it turn too.” You would respond with a lack of surprise. Suppose I then showed you fifty such little gears in an old-fashioned Swiss watch in which they all turned to make the hands move. You might say, “Isn’t that ingenious.” Suppose that I then told you that someone had assembled, literally, a cubic mile of such tiny gears and that they meshed perfectly for fifty years to do many complex things. You would ask me what I was smoking.
Even though each step in a cubic-mile process could be shown to be possible—gear A turns gear B, which turns gears C and D—you would sense that the entire complex wouldn’t work, however plausible each sub-process might be. You would be unconsciously applying the law that the improbability of the whole is greater than the sum of the improbabilities of the parts. The improbability is not a linear function of the number of parts but increases without limit as the number of parts goes above, say, one thousand.
Does that sound dreadfully portentous, or what? One day it will be the foundation of ponderous overpriced textbooks to extract money from sophomores. At least I hope so. I could use the money.
To a neophyte of biochemistry, the textbook description of a cell seems the mapping of a robotic Japanese factory onto a swamp. For example, in what sounds like a computer-controlled assembly line, enzymes uncoil the DNA, others unzip it, complementary nucleotides snap into place, a zipper-upper enzyme glues them together, click, click, click, whereupon the mRNA rushes purposefully off to a ribosome where, click, click, click. This is probably AP biology in decent high schools, if any, and has been verified thousands of times by biochemists. But…it sounds like mechanical engineering, not mindless undirected glop in solution.
You say, “But Fred, you don’t know anything about biochemistry.” True, but so what? You don’t have to know anything about it to know that it is impossible. Too many little wheels. You’ve got mRNA and microRNA and rRNA all rushing about, or sometimes holding still, and doing complex and purposeful things, and tRNA codons and anticodons coupling like drunken teenagers, and busybody enzymes editing this or that on the fly in the manner of bioschoolmarms or splicing this and some other thing and ribosomes and lysosomes and spliceosomes and palindromes and maybe aerodromes and really twisty long molecules with names like 2,4-diethyl-polywannacrackerene—and all of this is said to run with the efficiency of a Mexican drug cartel. All of this in a tiny space where everything ought to bang into everything else and just lie there in smoking rubble.
To us barbarians on the outside, the cell looks like a microscopic globule of goop with sticky stuff diffusing mindlessly about. I do not doubt that biochemists, whom I respect, have shown all of this to happen by careful experiments. I just don’t believe it. It’s the cubic mile of gears again. You have hundreds of reactive species in close proximity doing extraordinarily complicated things for sometimes a hundred years with what sounds like precisely coordinated purposefulness–instead of congealing immediately into a droplet of disagreeable mush. I do not doubt that lab folk have proved that it happens. I just don’t think it is possible. Unless something is going on that we don’t understand.
The foregoing is not orthodox biochemistry and may encounter initial resistance in the trade.
A problem of biology for years has been the inability of evolutionists to explain how life or many of its manifestations can have evolved, irreducible complexity and all that, the usual response being ok, we aren’t sure, but any day now we will have the answer. The check is in the mail. But in fact the inexplicability grows ever greater year on year as more and more complexity is discovered, such as epigenetics, and the more complexity, the less likelihood of coming about by chance. But we advocates of Impossibility Theory assert that not only can living things not have evolved, but also that they can’t function. Too many little gear wheels. Therefore life doesn’t exist.
Consider the retina, a very thin membrane consisting of ten distinct sublayers engaging in appallingly complex biochemistry, somehow maintaining position and function for, occasionally, a hundred years. These layers consist of millions of cells doing the impossibly tricky chemical dance mentioned above, more or less perfectly. In the rest of the eye you have the three layers of the eyeball, sclera, choroid, retina, and the five layers of the cornea, epithelium, Bowman’s membrane, stroma, Descemet’s membrane, and posterior lamina. And a lens consisting of a proteinaceous goop contained in a capsule, attached to the muscular ciliary body by suspensory ligaments, and an iris of radial and circumferential fibers innervated competitively by the sympathetic and parasympathetic subsystems of the autonomic nervous system. No way exists of explaining how this purportedly evolved—or how it works for many years without the layers of intricacy, biochemical through mechanical, collapsing. (I know this stuff because I have eye problems connected with Washington’s foreign policy.)
The intricacy of life is layered. We start with a zygote which, being a cell, is bogglingly complex. This little time bomb develops into a baby, which is impossible. If you don’t think so, try reading a textbook of embryology. The migration of cells, this control gradient, that control gradient, DGRNs, perfect inerrant specialization to form implausibly precise and complex things like incus, malleus, stapes, tympanum in the ear and (very) numerous other examples, all impossible individually and more so in aggregate.
Impossible, at least, unless we can come up with an auxiliary explanation. Magic seems a good candidate.
All of the organs of the baby are in varying degrees impossibly complicated and, even more impossible, almost always all of them are perfect at once. Everyone knows Murphy’s Law: If something can go wrong, it will. A baby should bring joy to Murphy because the opportunities of disaster are nearly infinite—yet things almost never go wrong. It is like a federal program that actually works.
The functioning of said baby is as mysterious as its formation. Babies grow. Children grow. How does this happen? For example, the baby has various small, hollow bones which grow year after year into large hollow bones. For this to work, cells (osteoclasts) eat away the bone from the inside, making the hollow larger, while other cells (osteoblasts) lay down new bone on the outside. Complex and wildly implausible communication between blast and clast purportedly makes this work. Medical researchers, honest people, no fools, assure me that this happens, and I believe them. Sort of. The idea that this evolved by random mutation is, if I may use a technical term, nuts. So, according to Impossibility Theory, is its precise, inerrant functioning. We come back to magic.
The whole baby does this sort of thing. The skull grows. Kidneys grow. The heart grows. All, with few exceptions, perfectly. Meanwhile, kidneys excrete, endocrine glands secrete, neurons weirdly but correctly link up, skin grows in perfect layers, nervous system deploys—perfectly. Do you believe this? It isn’t possible.
Unless there is something we haven’t figured out, and perhaps can’t.
I don’t know much about anything (readers delight in assuring me of this). However, I don’t know less about computers than I don’t know about biology. I want an engineering information-flow analysis of cells and a baby. Probably there are courses and books about this, and I just haven’t heard of them.
Consider a drill, perhaps in a factory, controlled by a computer. The total information involved in this transaction presumably consists of information flowing from sensors on the drill to the computer, and from the computer to the drill. Digital bits are easy to understand if you have at least two fingers. Cells are dauntingly analog.
A whole lot of things have to happen in a cell at the right time and produce the right amounts of all sorts of stuff. But to my naïve gaze, not only do processes have to produce things in correct amounts, but the systems that tell them how much to produce have to know how much that is, and these interrelationships all have to interrelate with each other. How much is that in gigabytes? Again, I am a barbarian of such things, but I wish a software engineer would reduce the whole shebang to data-flow diagrams, including how it knows when things are wearing out and the information paths needed to repair them. And why everything doesn’t just stick to everything else.
Thee you have the elements of a theory of impossibility. Doubtless it will rank with general relativity and Watson and Crick. You saw it here first.
Anyone without exception may repost this column provided that it not be edited.
Brilliant. Before the Church of Scientism was formed, science was a wonderful quest for knowledge, tempered with humility. The wisest man knows that he knows nothing. No more. Arrogant fools run the academy. And they may get us all killed.
Nicht zu vergessen, dass bereits ein einziger dieser unmöglichen Organismen, der aus lauter bereits für sich allein betrachtet unmöglichen Teilkomponenten zusammengesetzt ist, in seiner Gesamtheit dazu in der Lage ist, eine Kolumne über die Unmöglichkeit der eigenen Existenz zu verfassen!!!
I think if it’s to be published, the mod should send the person an e-mail asking for a translation or apply the policy of not publishing without a translation, no? All I know is that he says we should not forget something.
Many commented on religion and “design”.
Isaac Newton believed in design not only based on one religion (Christianity) but also from just a logical standpoint: Two points that he once made stand out. These are unpublished and they are found (only) at the Newton Project website. Let’s keep in mind that he was the foremost mathematician and that he knew the meaning of “chance” better than others:
1) He pointed out to the diverse creatures all having two eyes only, and not only two eyes only but always in about the same location, side by side and in the front (he added something more). He said that this is not “chance.” His point was that this is evidence of design. That, with “chance”, some creatures would have maybe three eyes, others one eye, etc., and they would not always be in the same place – that that’s “chance.” Always two and in the same place is “design.”
2) He also pointed to the gravity balance that makes for the rotation of the planets. He said it took an exact calculation for this to happen and that this calculation could not be “chance.” Can one say in this day and age, “let’s not argue with Newton?” I’m afraid not (chuckle)! He said that is the calculation was too low the planets would fly in away in different directions, and if it was too high that the planets would all crash against each other.
He finally added that a very “powerful being” was responsible for this design, and that he or it should be “feared.”
Many commented on religion and “design”.
Isaac Newton believed in design not only based on one religion (Christianity) but also from just a logical standpoint: Two points that he once made stand out. These are unpublished and they are found (only) at the Newton Project website. Let’s keep in mind that he was the foremost mathematician and that he knew the meaning of “chance” better than others:
1) He pointed out to the diverse creatures all having two eyes only, and not only two eyes only but always in about the same location, side by side and in the front (he added something more). He said that this is not “chance.” His point was that this is evidence of design. That, with “chance”, some creatures would have maybe three eyes, others one eye, etc., and they would not always be in the same place – that that’s “chance.” Always two and in the same place is “design.”
2) He also pointed to the gravity balance that makes for the rotation of the planets. He said it took an exact calculation for this to happen and that this calculation could not be “chance.” Can one say in this day and age, “let’s not argue with Newton?” I’m afraid not (chuckle)! He said that if the calculation was too low the planets would fly away in different directions, and if it was too high that the planets would all crash against each other.
He finally added that a very “powerful being” was responsible for this design, and that he or it should be “feared.”
Indeed, tranquilocomp.
And to maybe add to your point 2: Newton argued that the force which *keeps* planets in their orbits can not be the same force which *puts* planets in their orbits. A bit like how the force produced by a spring which makes a watch keep time cannot be the same as the force which winds the spring.
Many people equate Isaac Newton with formulating the law of gravity to explain how the Moon orbits the Earth, but seem to forget that he is also the one who pointed out that this gravitational force cannot on its own cause the Moon to get into that orbit to start with.
And besides, Isaac Newton allegedly spent much time studying the Bible and arguing against the church’s doctrine of the Trinity.
I appreciate your first two points. I didn’t know that (sounds like him to me).
On your last point, I believe the Jesus of the N.T. would have been offended by the Trinity doctrine (a sacrilege to him), and this doctrine has never made any sense to the Jews. It is clear from just the introductions to his epistles that the Apostle Paul would have rejected it. My sense is that the apostle Paul of the epistles would have gotten downright physical in reaction to it. The Gentiles produced that doctrine and he sure didn’t give them his “gospel” for that. I have read some of what Newton wrote on the Trinity doctrine (I downloaded all his religious writings from the Project Newton website). He pulverizes it, going into all the history of how it started, the history from other religions, etc., His “Two Notable Corruptions of Scripture” is worth reading for anyone interested.
“Isaac Newton allegedly spent much time studying the Bible”
He spent most of his time on his theological work (not on science). It’s a massive output! Now most of it is available on the Internet through the The Newton Project. It ran out of funding and so not everything is translated yet. I believe the following: Newton had faith. He knew he had a ‘responsibility’ to write on religion. He knew that what he wrote would not be published in his lifetime. I suspect that he had it in him to anticipate this day without exactly knowing or seeing it. That is, that his favored output would most likely be available for reading someday. I think he could do something like that if anyone could, and, if so, this might have been his most masterful move or thought (because it’s just too much!). He writes peacefully; it’s relaxing to read him (true even of his science). He writes with no concern of whether ‘this’ will be read or not. He addresses the readers sometimes, like once when he explains why he writes, and often in his conclusions when he tells the reader that he may choose to believe in the known alternative if he wishes. He is the sole, obvious inventor of Calculus, by the way. What a scandal. If Newton makes a case that someone has plagiarized him, like he did in this case, it is of course like all the cases he made. It is not made out of spite or envy or because he is ill, as they say.
“He knew that what he wrote would not be published in his lifetime”
I understand that he also wrote in French and Latin, out of caution for should his theological writings get out, that might bring him in stark conflict with the establishment of his time. Not to be published, yet he wrote, extensively even, so I agree, he might well have had some sense of a readership in the future.
As an aside, the impression I get from reading him is that he wouldn’t have minded responding to this thread if one of us would have asked him to.
So here’s to dear old Isaac!
Cheers. Your impression is right because his nephew says (said) that Newton made anyone who spoke to him feel comfortable, so he was approachable.
What an excellent example of why the west is falling behind in science and technology. The Chinese are building quantum communication networks and this guy sitting in his armchair says that quantum mechanics just isn’t possible because it’s counterintuitive and often poorly explained.
Enter the ineffable creator of it all. Then ponder else. Thus even the genius, eventually humbled, transitions from biology to belief.
Oh what fun!
Fred – if you ever come back here – I highly recommend Why Materialism Is Baloney How True Skeptics Know There Is No Death and Fathom Answers to life, the Universe, and Everything by Bernardo Kastrup. Here an ex CERN particle physicists who has now outgrown such childish pursuits logically takes us into the realm of spiritualism (versus materialism) showing that the apparently solid physical world most of us believe in is an epiphenomenon of mind, the underlying reality of all.
Reality is neither possible nor impossible nor both nor neither.
In today’s column we will revolutionize the news and establish that much of what we believe about the war in Ukraine is, at best, improbable and likely impossible.
As we explicate this Theory of I’mADumbass, we must begin with Putin himself. The theory that Ukro-nazis shelling the Donbass drew Putin into launching the Special Military Operation is absurd, but now it’s accepted everywhere. Just like plastic forks. How would he know? Neither of these things can happen. Unless something we don’t understand is happening. Consider that Putin himself is made of billions upon billions of cells, all interacting in intricate ways so that his orders are perfectly relayed to the battlefield. Consider that when an artillery strike is launched, some shells eat away at enemy soldiers while others create new craters into which new soldiers can advance. Without a perfect flawless designer none of these things could ever happen.
News analysts like to see the world as a game of checkers. If your opponent has no more pieces on the board and you have all of yours then you’ve won. But if I told you there was a giant checkerboard like the size of a football field you would ask me what I’ve been smoking. There would be too many checkers, and everyone knows that once you have more than about a thousand checkers everything is thrown into impossible chaos.
Improbability works better than “impossibility”, I think.
What you’re describing sounds an awful like Intelligent Design theory’s “irreducible complexity”.
I find it amusing that we insist on a gradualist, anti-entropic view of biological evolution when the entire cosmos itself began with a single !BIP! encoded with the essential instructions for an entire cosmos.
I also find it to be amusing, if bitterly so, that we think it matters all that much if we find an answer to the riddle of primogenesis, particularly that of life, when all we do with the knowledge we gain is to tinker with the billions of years of evolutionarily hard-won and hard-fought wisdom like a sorcerer’s apprentice to create nightmare microbes and unhealthy food, etc.
I disagree with and don’t like the prevailing belief that reflective conscious knowledge is the pinnacle of human awareness. Not only do all spiritual wisdom systems say the opposite, but so does science, which has been able to measure the bandwidth of surface consciousness as being at between 15-50 bits per second: our surface consciousness is an abject moron (while our subconscious is a sparkling if semi-chaotic genius).
We worship rational thought because, seems to me, we’re highly irrational beings who like to pretend we’re rational although rationality is a very small part of our thought processes. It’s a form of envious self-delusion, I feel.
So I just bow down and pray, close my eyes, and strive to still my mind enough to get e genuine reflection of myself perceiving the cosmos rather than this crazy-house quilt of learned cultural beliefs that pollute our minds these days.
“I’m looking for the face I had before the world began.” W.B. Yeats
Could Fred be kind to let us know if he has read and what he thinks about our comments…mods ask him for a response???…??
Thanks for the science of impossibility.