Free Will by Sam Harris No2

Anyone who comes out of reading Sam Harris's brain event-provoking book fully convinced that they did not freely choose to do so, obviously need not bother procrastinating for long about whether to follow it up with Kenneth Weisbrode's On Ambivalence.

As for Hamlet, what a complete bloody waste of time! For it may appear that we are having trouble making up our minds, but we aren't...at least according to Mr Harris.

Free Will by Sam Harris No1

Being atheistic with regards to the existence of a creator, but agnostic with regard to the possibility of transcendentals, my not-strictly materialist cosmogony is one that finds itself intermittently beleaguered by the strident philosophical naivety of certain men of science and other commentators who march under the banner of Neo-Atheism.

This does not mean however, that I wish to count myself amongst the present wave of more accommodating cuddly atheists, in whose ranks the former Mistress of my college, Baroness Mary Warnock was recently listed — largely on the grounds that she has a partiality for a bit of religious sing-song — though on that basis even Richard Dawkins is a bit of a soft toy.

Sam Harris, American author of The End of Faith and now this little volume, which could be subtitled The End of Human Agency, clearly has no intention of being either snuggly or caressible. The book is written in the tone of the man setting out the sort of hard facts most of us simply won't face up to. And he sets them out with just the sort of obstinate determination not to admit the possibility of a bigger picture that the Neo-Atheists have made themselves notorious for, even managing to present his colleague Dan Dennet as callow and limp wristed on the matter of our apparently non-existent free will. (More on that later...)

In essence Harris's argument is based on the following observation: thanks to modern neuroimaging techniques, we can see that the human mind operates in two separate streams, one objective, one subjective. In the first of these brain events occur, in the second the feeling that the owner of the brain has authorial control over these events. Given the detectable delay between the two streams, our sense of having free will is an illusion, Harris therefore concludes.

There's nothing wrong with the facts in Harris's polemic. Yet its a wonder that he believes them to be so compelling a proof against our ability to shape our own actions. Scanning a human brain from the outside can indeed tell us many new and interesting things about its function, but we are still a long way from a comprehensive scientific understanding of the mind.

But the real weakness of the case Harris is making lies in its assumption that the two streams of activity in the brain are stuck in real time mode (or at least one is in real time and the other thinks it is, but isn't) and entirely disconnected from each other. In other words, there is no kind of feedback loop in place between the personal and the impersonal mind. It doesn't take a great deal of subjective brain scanning to realise that this is unlikely to be the true state of affairs...

TBC

The 10,000 Year Explosion, How Civilisation Accelerated Human Evolution

There is more genetic variation within human groups than between them.

This statement has always struck me as less of a hard scientific truth than a hazard warning, an expedient intellectual Here Be Dragons. Surely it was only a matter of time before the 'controversial' thoughts it was planted to ward off would be being thought again?

Cochran and Harpending appear to give it short shrift. There's a similarly sizeable variation within dog breeds than between them, but does that mean that the differences between a Great Dane and a Chihuahua are 'skin deep' too?

Their book sets out to inform us how, far from arriving on an evolutionary plateau, our first modern ancestors to break out from Africa were about to embark on one of the most accelerated phases of human biological change. Through a process of genetic introgression they began by stealing some genes from the European natives, the Neanderthals, an exchange which the pair believe may have kick-started the sudden leap-forward in artistic and technological capabilities which ensued.

Yet it was the advent of agriculture which heralded a whole new set of selection pressures, such as new diets and disease risks. Cochran and Harpender duly map the spread of lactose tolerance to the ascendency of the Proto-Indo-European language and show how new patterns of social organisation favoured alternative heritable psychologies.

So far so credible. Indeed I have a great deal of sympathy for the book's broad analysis, it's just that some of the detailed explanation is at best flimsy and at worst blood-pressure raising. This is a complex web of may haves and could haves, with the occasional must have thrown in for good measure, and one is never quite sure how the dependencies work. In other words, how long a string of may haves is holding up that must have.

We're told that humans who have been growing stuff for longer have had more time to hard code an understanding of the underlying economics into their wetware. So, it's hardly surprising, we're then informed, that 'Amerindians' find it harder to get their heads around the benefits of neo-liberalism when it comes to wealth generation.

Aside from the gobsmacking political bias behind this little hypothesis, everything we know about the Maya surely gives the lie to any notion that America's indigenes are somehow congenitally soft-headed when it comes to numbers. The Maya might have domesticated corn rather later than Europe's classical cultures had access to wheat, but it was the Romans, ingenious as they were, who had to make do without a zero, wasn't it?

I take no issue with the data showing that Jews of European origin win more Nobel prizes and score higher in IQ tests than any other distinct group of people on the planet. But Cochran and Harpender's explanation for how this state of affairs might have come about is also neither quite good science nor good history.

Yes, the Ashkenazim were a closed community forced by their host culture to specialise in finance and management. But how exactly would the selection pressure have worked in practice? Unless the less brainy Jews were somehow more prone to die off before marriage, or indeed were comparatively less likely to marry, then the whole process would depend on the cleverer sort having more children than both the intellectually-mediocre and outright dumb, something which we know to be generally counter-factual from contemporary research. (It also rather depends on intelligence being something that is passed down the male line only!)

And as ever with these retrospective arguments from natural selection, I can all too easily concoct an alternative model of my own: in the middle ages Christian education was controlled by the Church and the most promising pupils would naturally have been siphoned off into a profession which would (mostly) take them out of the procreation business. So instead of the Jews getting smarter, the rest of Europe was steadily becoming thicker!

Anyway, as ever the real problem here is the term Evolution itself. We might be able to move beyond seeing Great Danes and Chihuahuas as only superficially different, but which one is more evolved? While Cochran and Harpender are surely right to question the conventional wisdom of human evolutionary stasis, can we really say that the various detectable adaptations to the multiplicity of different environments that human beings have taken up residence within over the course of the last 10,000 years, are qualitatively the same thing as the series of species transformations which occurred before the emergence from Africa?

Not big, not a bang...

...and now possibly also not the beginning.

Sir Roger Penrose fessing up to Stephen Sackur that he might have found evidence that the Big Bang might not have been such a singular singularity.

Galápagos

One of my best friends is currently spending his honeymoon on the Galápagos Islands, suffering a little, it has to be said, from a lack of broadband access, but otherwise content to be rubbing shoulders with giant turtles and komodo dragons, and still able to tweet about the experience.

This remote archipelago remain evolution's ground zero. 201 years after the publication of Darwin's account of what he learned there, I can only claim to have unearthed one credible argument against the actions of Natural Selection in nature. It's essentially a reasoned quibble, rather than one based on observation or experiment — and it goes like this...

Given the known tendency of certain genes to associate themselves in a relationship known as correlation, genes B and B* can be inherited together, even though only gene B is providing an advantage with respect to the environment. Gene B* is thus along for the ride and not being selected for in quite the same way as its partner, and yet nevertheless spreads through the population in a more or less identical fashion.

Now I'm sure you could murk up this neat little protest against Darwin should you choose to delve deeper into the biological complexities of the matter. (Darwin of course knew next to nothing himself about the mechanism of inheritance: genetics. )

But Jerry Fodor — the philosopher who posits this adjustment to our understanding of evolution — has, in doing so, knowingly re-opened one of the great fault-lines in western thinking: between those who favour external factors and those who favour internal ones. See for instance empricism vs rationalism, nature vs nurture, behaviourism vs well, common sense. Fodor looks at evolution as conceived by Darwin and smells a rat, because the process appears to be almost entirely driven, as he puts it, by an external factor: the environment.

Now, for a rational non-scientist (and historian to boot) such as myself, the notion that internal and external factors nearly always work in combination to produce change is close to sacrosanct. So I have to admit to some sympathy for Fodor's position, even while acknowledging that a simple intellectual prejudice may be at work here.

The LRB recently reviewed What Darwin Got Wrong — the book Fodor has co-authored with Massimo Piattelli-Palmerini — and concluded that they have had to create a caricature of contemporary Dawinian thinking in order to find several non-fatal faults within it. So when the pair state that the theory of Natural Selection "overestimates the contribution the environment makes in shaping the phenotype of a species and correspondingly underestimates the effects of endogenous variables," they themselves are underestimating the extent to which scientists include internal or endogenous variables within their modern conception of the 'environment'.

Still, for the reasons described above, I'd find it rare indeed if the most important process of change within the natural world was driven entirely by a combination of undirected variation and external environmental factors, and my suspicion is that biological science will indeed have to accommodate an increasing number of endogenous factors in the years to come.

Wonders of the Solar System

Watching this series on the Beeb recently we learned that there are essentially only two worlds in our solar system with 'Earth-like' characteristics and that there are essentially only two outfits in Brian Cox's suitcase. (He's wearing the warm weather version here in Arizona/ 'Mars'.)

A report from forensics

While I was in the UK in January I had lunch with a geologist who did his best to persuade me that the notion that the dinosaurs were seriously compromised by a meteor strike is one of those paradigms which emerges and quickly ossifies into an orthodoxy which nobody (but him apparently) is willing to challenge. He'd been to the Yucatán on a field trip and reported finding no conclusive evidence of a large crater there either.

Well this week the consensus against his renegade opinion took a firmer hold on the subject when, at 41st Lunar and Planetary Science Conference (LPSC) in the US, a panel of 41 international experts reviewed 20 years' worth of research to determine the cause of the Cretaceous-Tertiary (K-T) mass extinction, and concluded that the prime suspect has to remain a massive asteroid or comet smashing into Earth at Chicxulub on the Yucatán peninsula 65m years ago. You can read the BBC's report here...

TV Viewing Diary: Horizon

This season's Horizon has been top draw — indeed, a full recovery has been made after the tie-up with Discovery had led initially to a downmarket drift.

Perhaps the best programme so far was the one presented by Marcus du Sautoy, who has replaced Richard Dawkins as the Charles Simonyi Professor of the Public Understanding of Science. (And are far more down-to-earth incumbent of that chair he certainly makes.)

— Who, where, what am 'I'? the intrepid Oxford mathmo asked.

And so he takes himself off to Berlin in order to submit himself to an experiment which demonstrates the disconcerting fact that our brain activity indicates which way we are going to go on specific decisions some time before we are consciously aware of 'making a choice'. In the case of Du Sautoy the experimenter knew what he was going to do a full SIX SECONDS before he did. (He'd earlier sat beside the conveyor-belt at a sushi bar just so we knew what he meant by choice.)

As one would expect, he had some sensible things to say about the implications of this finding for our moral being. Although science has discovered that consciousness is in some senses a retroactive story that our minds tell themselves in order to justify a more 'parallel' process of interaction with the world, this kind of 'determination' should not in any way excuse the individual from any blame for the consequences of his or her actions — our consciousness is encoded in the deeper mind and in a sense our ethical biases become encoded in there too.

Therefore, in some ways our "I" is our brain's report on itself. Earlier however, Du Sautoy met up with Professor Henrik Ehrsson who has a trick for demonstrating that one's "I" might be said to be little more than an interpretative illusion.

Du Sautoy was made to put on a VR headset which treated his eyes to the images transmitted from a pair of cameras fixed on a chair directly behind him. "I am three feet behind myself," he observed, feeling somewhat transplanted.

Things got really fun when Ehrsson brought a hammer into the lab and started attacking Du Sautoy's displaced consciousness...and the out of body experience was complete when he wore the cameras himself, tricking Du Sautoy into thinking he'd become the Swede.

Professor Christof Koch also related the bizarre story of 'concept neurons'. One of his patients possesses a single neuron which will only fire whenever he sees either a pic of Jennifer Anniston or her name in print. (It remains obstinately unmoved by Brad Pitt however.)

First Words (5)

"The idea of eternal return is a mysterious one, and Nietzsche has often perplexed other philosophers with it: to think that everything recurs as we once experienced it, and that the recurrence itself recurs ad infinitum! What does this mad myth signify?"

Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being

If matter exists in finite quantities while time is infinite, everything has to occur more than once - this is more or less the modern scientific expression of the 'mad myth' that Nietzsche excavated from its Egyptian tomb.

However, contemporary cosmology has even more perplexing notions up its sleeve. For if space is infinite, the limited number of possible arrangements of protons means that many of these recurrences may actually be ocurring concurrently — your double is repeating your actions for you.

Fanciful? According to science writer Marcus Chown in The Never Ending Days of Being Dead, your nearest double is a long way away, but he or she is fully predicted by our current model of the universe.

"All that is really necessary is an assemblage of matter identical to you. Roughly speaking that means about 10˄28 particles. So how far would we have to travel to find another identical assemblage? Well, if there are 10˄28 possible locations for protons, there are 10˄10˄28 possible arrangements of those protons. And this means your nearest double is just 10˄10˄28 metres away."

This is of course a lot further than we can currently see. This spatial horizon 'is 13.7bn light years, a limit set by the age of our local universe. But we have grounds for considering that it goes on forever — technically at least —- because of what we have been able to deduce about its earliest moments.

It is often said of the Big Bang that it was neither big nor indeed a bang (it not being an explosion as such). It is also the case that it was probably neither the beginning nor indeed a singular event, according to our current standard model of cosmology.

Central to the latter is the idea of Inflation. This was the moment -—literally a fraction of a second — before what we call the Big Bang, when our universe doubled and redoubled its volume as many as eighty times over.

How did this happen? Well, one of the consequences of quantum theory is that there is no such thing as nothing. The vacuum isn't empty, in fact by default it contains energy which is constantly flicking into and out of existence, but in sum, comes to more than zero.

In a process still only partially understood, this initial 'void' acquired the propensity to inflate through the repulsive gravity which emerges when the pressure of a material is large and negative enough to cancel out the energy density which Einstein revealed as the 'cause' of gravity. Chown has a rather handy metaphor that can help lay persons, such as myself, grasp the implications of this:

"Imagine holding a stack of bank notes between your hands, pulling your hands apart and discovering that ever more bank notes fountain out of nothing to fill the gap. That was how the vacuum at the beginning of time was. As the universe grew, energy was literally conjured out of nothing. Inflation, as many physicists have remarked, was the 'ultimate free lunch'"

Big Bangs have been going off like a rastro of cohetes (without the bangs of course) whenever and wherever the inflation came to an end, dumping energy into local 'bubble' universes in the form of superheated matter.

But the false vacuum that drives inflation expands far faster than it can decay into a normal vacuum, so 'outside' the region of matter that we can see — the consequences, if you like, of our own Big Bang — the process continues. And this is why our own space is technically infinite — because the boundary between it and the continually inflating false vacuum — the pregnant void — is receding faster than light and is therefore unreachable; a technicality which allows us to speak of our own material universe as infinite to all intents and purposes.

And this is why there must be many other versions of me doing the same or similar things I'm doing right now, somewhere out there in spacetime.

And if that weren't enough, there are all those parallel universes predicted by the Many Worlds interpretation of quantum phenomena — knowing that a fundamental property of particles is the ability to be in more than one place at the same time, yet unable (barring one much-debated exception) to observe this in our own universe, a school of thought exists which holds to the notion that every time one of these tiny quantum 'choices' is made, a splitting or bifurcation of the universe into a pair of alternative streams occurs, resulting in a vast structure known as the Multiverse.

Oxford's David Deutsch has a great hypothesis covering how time travel works in the Multiverse — you can go back in time, but it's never the same quantum track you came from, so in a sense time-travel is a special form of space travel, only one moves between parallel realities. More on that another day...

I long wanted to write a novel that fictionally explored the framework of multiple universes, but it seems that bastard Iain Banks has beaten me to it.

Actually, the idea has been bouncing around serious science fiction for quite a while. In Larry Niven's All The Myriad Ways people able to jump between the various versions of reality have been topping themselves, unable to cope with the knowledge that nothing we ever do really matters, because every time we succede another version of us fails.

And this brings us back to The Unbearable Lightness of Being and the existential confusion served up by the idea of eternal recurrence. In practical terms even suicide is pointless because one of your not-so-hypothetical doubles in time, space or even quantum reality, is bound to choose life over death.

Neural decoding. Scary?

"In the last few years, patterns in brain activity have been used to successfully predict what pictures people are looking at, their location in a virtual environment or a decision they are poised to make. The most recent results show that researchers can now recreate moving images that volunteers are viewing - and even make educated guesses at which event they are remembering.

"Last week at the Society for Neuroscience meeting in Chicago, Jack Gallant, a leading "neural decoder" at the University of California, Berkeley, presented one of the field's most impressive results yet. He and colleague Shinji Nishimoto showed that they could create a crude reproduction of a movie clip that someone was watching just by viewing their brain activity. Others at the same meeting claimed that such neural decoding could be used to read memories and future plans - and even to diagnose eating disorders."

Fron the New Scientist.

TV Viewing Diary - Darwin's Dangerous Idea

Andrew Marr was recently described by Ed West in Spiked! as a "libertine". Unless I'm missing something, I think he meant libertarian!

Anyway, this three-parter was the take on the legacy of On the Origin of Species from the walking embodiment of the BBC's cultural-liberal bias, and in my view it was the best of the multiplicity of programmes the Beeb has put out to mark the anniversary of Darwin's birth 150 years ago. (Though I did really enjoy Armand Marie Leroi's film on BBC4 too.)

I've sent off for my free tree of life poster.

Marr lifted the title for his series from Dan Dennett's more intellectual (and more polemical) book of the same name. Whilst he does seem to broadly agree with Dennett's assertion that...

"If I were to give an award for the single best idea anyone has ever had, I'd give it to Darwin, ahead of Newton and Einstein and everyone else."

...he apparently reckons that the 'dangerousness' of Darwin's idea stems not from its inevitable tendency to redefine what we mean by the meaning of life, but rather the way it leant itself to combinations of bad science and bad politics during the twentieth century, and in the manner that it clearly points to the very alarming ecological circumstances of the present time.

It was indeed unnerving to think that the Nazis had founded heir 'final solution' on the bizarre Darwinian logic that any Jews that had survived the work camps would be stronger and more ready to 'rebound' after the war unless drastic measures were taken.

I liked the way Marr dallied on lesser-known aspects of the subject, such as Darwin's cheerless experience of the native 'Fuegans' of Chile on his Beagle voyage, and Dr Vernon Kellogg's run in with the beserk darwinistic attitudes of the WWI German high command.

Marr had himself DNA tested only to discover that he has the ancestral (and more African) variant of the gene currently being associated with higher intelligence .

The series had its silly moments, such as the extended footage of Marr circling around the Bosphorus in a speed boat (why exactly?) and his attempts to pass off the botanical garden in St Lucia as a bona fide rain forest. For these jungle scenes he had however carelessly neglected to change out of the kind of clothes one might wear to lunch at a Notting Hill organic diner.

Quote of the Day

"In an election that has been fought on an astoundingly low cultural and intellectual level, with both candidates pretending that tax cuts can go like peaches and cream with the staggering new levels of federal deficit, and paltry charges being traded in petty ways, and with Joe the Plumber becoming the emblematic stupidity of the campaign, it didn't seem possible that things could go any lower or get any dumber. But they did last Friday, when, at a speech in Pittsburgh, Gov. Sarah Palin denounced wasteful expenditure on fruit-fly research, adding for good xenophobic and anti-elitist measure that some of this research took place "in Paris, France" and winding up with a folksy 'I kid you not.' "
Christopher Hitchens, in Slate

Humans still evolving?

This pretty shameless story was covered by a number of leading UK broadsheets yesterday. So called 'journalists' at each of these publications had clearly all received the same press-release (or wire feed) and none apparently felt the need to question the agenda behind this research from the University of Wisconsin. You don't have to be a genius to figure it out though:

If human evolution is speeding up thanks to "the tendency to start families later in life" then you would have to presume that people in the small number of well-off nations where this is generally the case will somehow become more evolved than all those darkies in Africa.

Which should of course come as a surprise to anyone that knows the first thing about human evolution because a) Africa is and has always been the main factory of human evolution b) it has the most genetically-diverse human populations on Earth and c) there needs to be some fundamental agent of selection for evolution to work at all. Where in the world are you most likely to die before getting the chance to pass on your genes? Not in countries where women have children through artificial insemination at the age of 45 methinks.

"The study also suggests that human races in different parts of the world are becoming more genetically distinct", Ian Sample, scientific correspondent of the Guardian reports. Now this is a tricky one, because the consensus, like it or not, is that race is "biologically meaningless". (You'd have thought Sample might have mentioned this.)

To quote Wikipedia: "The 0.1% genetic difference that differentiates any two random humans is still the subject of much debate. The discovery that only 8% of this difference separates the major races led some scientists to proclaim that race is biologically meaningless. They argue that since genetic distance increases in a continuous manner any threshold or definitions would be arbitrary. Any two neighboring villages or towns will show some genetic differentiation from each other and thus could be defined as a race. Thus any attempt to classify races would be imposing an artificial discontinuity on what is otherwise a naturally occurring continuous phenomenon."

So at the very least the scientists at Wisconsin are 'bravely' trying to re-open this issue.

Having said all this, one thing I would add is that I have often paused on the platform of Leicester Square tube station to consider the near perfect colour match between the little mice that scurry around the tracks and the grimy concrete of their environment. What might the selection pressure be? Surely they don't have a substantial predator population down there?

Bangs for your buck

Marcus Chown (many thanks for your comment on my earlier post!) references Douglas Adams's remark about parallel universes being neither parallel nor universes, which reminded me that there's a similar quote out there about the Big Bang being neither big nor indeed a bang.

Indeed it seems it wasn't so much an explosion of stuff into space as a rapid expansion of space and time, which just happened to have stuff it it. If we could take an escalator up to the next dimension in order to watch the expansion of our 3D universe, it would appear like the inflating 2D surface of a balloon. It's no doubt a very important event in the history of our local universe, but it may just be that, a local event, and it almost certainly wasn't the first thing that ever happened.

Scientists used to argue about whether gravity would eventually regain the upper hand and our universe would reach the end of the tape and start rewinding all the way back to a Big Crunch. There's a chapter in The Never-ending Days of Being Dead entitled Yo Yo Universe (the Spanish translation is interesting) that explores the ideas of Paul Steinhardt and Neil Turok, whose cyclic model of how the universe swells, shows how Big Bangs might be able to keep on repeating like Groundhog Day, without the need for a radical contraction of all the matter the universe contains.

I've just finished the chapter after that, Keeping it Real, in which Marus Chown points out that although most scientists habitually only fret about reconciling General Relativity and Quantum Theory in the long past cosmological era when things could be both tiny and massive, the truth is that all the atoms in our bodies (and all other macroscopic objects) are at this very moment behaving weirdly, regardless of our own constant efforts to appear normal.

Which means that Quantum Theory is truly not just a description of the properties of really titchy stuff like elementary particles, but instead a fundamental description of the 'reality' that we ourselves really only experience as a result of an effect of an effect of whatever ultimate reality there might be out there.

We can never directly experience the indeterminate world, because there are simply too many atoms in our immediate vicinity; conditions in which the wave function, which we can witness only as an interference pattern, decoheres within around a ten millionth trillionth of a second. But a being able to somehow isolate itself from all the particles around it, could be in two places at once, no trouble.

Doppelgängers

The question of whether there is intelligent life out there in the universe would seem to boil down to whether or not you consider yourself to be intelligent.

Based on a plug from the Professor I picked up Marcus Chown's The Never Ending Days of Being Dead in Foyles and read the first chapter: Elvis Lives.

In it Chown argues that if you accept the premises of quantum theory and inflation (a key part of the standard cosmological model), then you must accept that there is a being identical to you at a fairly predictable distance from your current location. Additionally, there may also be another identical you at an altogether unpredictable distance, the doppelgänger resulting from the many worlds interpretation of quantum theory.

And this is what is interesting to me about the current state of such parallel universe hypotheses, that there can be two absolutely identical individuals doing identical things, differing only in the theoretical reason for their being there in the first place.

I have a couple of issues with Chown's logic, which maybe someone better versed in such matters can help clear up for me:

1) Is "to all intents and purposes infinite" really the same thing as infinite? This seems quite crucial because the relative nature of the first type of infinity might prevent it from driving the rest of Chown's argument.

2) If there is a finite number of ways of arranging matter in an "infinite" bubble-universe, will all possible instances inevitably occur?

I had a similar quibble with Richard Dawkins's assertion in The God Delusion that there must be a version of me with green hair somewhere 'out there'. Maybe I'm wrong, but I think the number of possible events that are realised in practice will be constrained by the number of possible histories that follow from the starting conditions.

Retrocausality

Have been thinking about this for a few days now. I am particularly fond of new ideas that appear to confirm my intuitive prejudices!

The behaviour of entangled photons has long seemed to present some difficulties for Einsteinian relativity. But this alternative, retrocausal explanation would suggest that the spooky action occurs across temporal rather than spatial distances.

I found especially intriguing the idea voiced by Australian researcher Paul Davies: that there might be a literally loopy explanation for the way that the structural set-up of universe appears to be optimised for the existence of conscious life.

"The universe might actually be able to fine-tune itself. If you assume the laws of physics do not reside outside the physical universe, but rather are part of it, they can only be as precise as can be calculated from the total information content of the universe. The universe's information content is limited by its size, so just after the Big Bang, while the universe was still infinitesimally small, there may have been wiggle room, or imprecision, in the laws of nature. And room for retrocausality. If it exists, the presence of conscious observers later in history could exert an influence on those first moments, shaping the laws of physics to be favorable for life."

This is clearly more satisfactory than the more familiar 'there must be an infinite number of less fine-tuned universes out there too' explanation.

Anyway, I'm far more comfortable thinking of 'God' as the end product of our cosmos than as some sort of sentient creator person outside of it, who somehow still manages to behave as if He were possessed of a consciousness moving in one direction along the fourth dimension much like our own.

The death of an assumption

One of modern biology's most 'common' assumptions was left looking a little exposed this week as evidence emerged that seems to suggest that new species form more easily in temperate rather than equatorial climes. The expansive natural diversity that exists between the tropics had always seemed to suggest the opposite conclusion, but it turns out that the abundance of life down there reflects a reduced rate of extinction, and not as previously thought, an enhanced rate of speciation.

Sectarian meltdown

Michio Kaku has been trying to calm nerves of fellow scientists as the entrenched sentiments surrounding the increasingly unravelled String Theory lurch towards an all-out cosmological civil war. I have amused myself below by replacing the word physics with Iraq, a ploy which demonstrates that Kaku's optimism is in need of further qualification:

"Both have a legitimate point of view. But far from signalling a collapse in
Iraq, this debate is actually rather healthy. It’s a sign of the vitality of
Iraq that people are so passionate about the outcome."

I never really warmed to String Theory myself. It struck me as more of a solution than an explanation.

Human evolution, the next step?

Another superb bit of speculation from Scott Adams on which subset of humans is starting to split off from the species in evolutionary terms:

"My guess is that the next human species will differ primarily in the brain. Thanks to the Internet and our ability to travel, the smartest humans are starting to meet and congregate at places like Stanford and Google. Over time, the smartest people will start breeding primarily with other geniuses....

"We already see a big difference in how people perceive reality. Some people perceive only the natural world that can be measured. Other people (the vast majority) perceive the supernatural world to be equally real, including souls and spirits and angels and ghosts and God. I think the two groups might go their separate ways.

"In the old days, atheists were killed before they could breed. Now they move to Europe where all they do is eat cheese and hump. Result: more atheists. Meanwhile, Omar the disbeliever in Saudi Arabia is having his junk removed by sword so he won’t father any new infidels. I might be exaggerating that last part, but I’m sure Omar isn’t getting six wives."