Creationism's lack of Wonders

When I watched the first episode of Brian Cox's new TV series Wonders of Life I was struck by the uncompromisingly naturalistic assumptions behind his explanation of how life began on Earth. Never before have I heard such a godless approach on prime-time mainstream TV in Britain. Maybe, I thought, the tide is turning and the BBC is forsaking — albeit temporarily — its habit of "balancing" anything remotely atheistic with something necessarily faith-based. Well, maybe. But nevertheless I expected protests, especially from creationists, and I was relishing the prospect.

So I was more than a little disappointed with this lack-lustre response from my local creationist organisation, the Creation Science Movement.

On Sunday 27th January, the BBC TV aired the first of a new series called Wonders of Life, presented by Professor Brian Cox. In this first episode he wondered what life was and how it began. Like all science writers for the Beeb, Cox is a fully paid up atheist, and he set out to establish a sequence from inanimate matter to simple living cells, and so on to ourselves. He informed us that at the beginning there was energy. The First Law of Thermodynamics says that energy can neither be created nor destroyed, though it can change from one form to another. He demonstrated this with a waterfall where potential energy at the top of the fall is changed into kinetic energy of movement, heat and noise as the water descends. But the total amount of energy remains unchanged. All correct! He then argued that if energy cannot be added to or lost, then energy is eternal! He does not conclude that if energy has always existed, so too must matter be everlasting. Thus he dodges the problem of how matter and energy could have been created from nothing in the first place.

But Einstein showed that matter and energy are equivalent (E=mc²). And of course we have the old chestnut about creating something from nothing. Who says there was nothing in the first place? If the current spacetime continuum came into existence at the Big Bang, so too did cause and effect — because cause and effect have no meaning in any atemporal or aspacial sense. We can have no concept of existence in the absence of time and space, so to talk about "something" and "nothing" in a realm that lacks a coherent concept of existence is mere speculation.

He continued by saying that all processes involve a change whereby the energy becomes less able to do work, this being the Second Law. He doesn’t draw the obvious conclusion that if the universe has always existed, all the energy would have lost its potential to do work long ago and would have degenerated into heat at a very low temperature. Our universe is brimming over with energy at a high potential, so it isn’t eternal at all, but had a beginning. How could it have started at a high potential, that is, a highly ordered state? Well, not on its own!

Despite this unidentified blogger's exclamation mark, the idea that the universe came into existence spontaneously as a necessary result of a random event seems to me entirely plausible. Also I don't think many cosmologists believe that the universe as we know it has existed eternally, so I'm not sure what point is being made here.

Dr Cox told us that all living things that have ever been derive their energy from a flow of hydrogen ions in their mitochondria. Quite true! He demonstrated a simple battery made from two bottles of water with different acidities. He then wired them up to a miniature fan, which sprang into life, while gases bubbled from the electrodes. So, he argued, a flow of hydrogen ions creates life – QED. He didn’t take into account the glaring fact that the current needed a motor to make use of this energy as a fan. In the same way, in every living thing, the hydrogen ion potential in the mitochondrion requires a miniature protein motor called ATP Synthase to produce usable energy for the living cell. Someone must have designed and manufactured the fan. How much more is a Creator required for the ATP Synthase with its 31 precise components?

The reason why someone had to design and manufacture the electric fan is that electric fans don't reproduce by themselves. Why creationists appear to overlook this obvious distinction baffles me.

From then on, the professor told us, living things progressed from simple to more complex living things by mistakes in copying genes that are then selected by the environment – Darwinian evolution. Yet we know that mutations scramble the information in those genes. Moreover, how can precise genetic information come about by chance?

Anyone who seriously asks this question obviously hasn't grasped the implications of natural selection.

Now that he has told us how life began, the series should become more credible as he celebrates the wonders of life. It could hardly get less believable! 

An odd, muted conclusion — exclamation mark notwithstanding. We get the first thorough explication of current thinking on abiogenesis on mainstream TV — something of a landmark, in my opinion — but of course creationists are going to dismiss it, as this one has. That it's such a half-hearted dismissal may indicate (let's hope so) the creationist bandwagon is running out of steam.

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Shame. I had hoped for something more meaty to celebrate my 700th blogpost!

Uncaged Monkeys at the Anvil, Basingstoke

"So what's this Uncaged Monkeys thing you're going to see then? Is it a band?"

"No, it's not a band."

"A play?"

"No, it's ... science. And comedy."

"Oh. That sounds —"

"By the people in Radio Four's The Infinite Monkey Cage. You heard of that?"

"Er, no."

"Well, they just got a Sony Award."

It may have been different, geeky, at times hilarious and at other times intensely moving. It may not be the usual fare at the Basingstoke Anvil, but it filled pretty well all of the hall's 1400 seats.

Robin Ince started the show off, casting some aspersions on Professor Brian Cox — whom he claimed never listened to the introductions so he could say what he liked. Then it was time for TV's Professor Wonder Boy to wow us with potted particle physics. He hit us with the Higgs boson, and claimed that particle accelerators were always built near airports in order to give them a sense of perspective. In a generally reassuring manner he touched on the likelihood of the Large Hadron Collider destroying the Earth, using a technical term that I forget — though I remember it was four letters beginning and ending in "t". (There was also a "w" and an asterisk in it somewhere). He showed us a graphic of government funding, challenging us to locate the spend on scientific research. He pointed out the bill for the bank bail-out, and that it was greater than the amount spent on science ... since Jesus. And he did the Big Bang.

Ben Goldacre chased his wild hair and oscillating eyebrows around the stage, with tales of placebos, big pharma and fish oil pills, and he showed us a picture of his cat Henrietta, plus a certificate of her medical qualifications — the same qualifications claimed by nutritionist Gillian McKeith. Great mirth ensued, but the stuff about big pharma was actually quite worrying.

Steve Jones talked about evolution, illustrating natural selection with something from his own early career as an engineer. His example was a process of converting a liquid to a powder by forcing it at high pressure through metal nozzles. Apparently these nozzles used to corrode and become ineffective very quickly. Rather than try to work out the best shape for these nozzles, the designers used a form of random mutation, making ten copies, each slightly — but randomly — different from the original. These copies then were tested, and best one was then randomly mutated ten times and then those copies were tested. After several cycles of such random mutation and selection, they ended up with a nozzle that lasted 100 times longer than the original, but no-one knew why.

Simon Singh electrocuted a gherkin on stage, which was highly illuminating (literally, though what it would taste like after that, he didn't say). Of such insights is the scientific knowledge regarding the size and the age of the universe derived. And he too did the Big Bang. He ended with the story of his somewhat pedantic insistence on the accuracy of song lyrics, which is appropriate because we were also entertained by Helen Arney, who sang to us while playing the ukele.

There was a session during which Robin Ince passed on tweeted questions to Ben Goldacre, Brian Cox and Simon Singh. (There is also a podcast — Free Primates — in which the Uncaged Monkeys answer questions they didn't have time to deal with on stage.)

Naturally the show could not pass without several mentions of Carl Sagan, of whom both Robin Ince and Brian Cox are declared fans. Sagan's Pale Blue Dot brought the proceedings to a moving close.

Altogether it was a splendidly enjoyable evening, and I saw the whole thing close up as I was on the front row. What I should have realised is that the Anvil is the nearest venue for many of those people who attend Winchester Skeptics in the Pub, as well as the fledgling Portsmouth Skeptics in the Pub. Several were indeed attending, and I was pleased to be able to join some of them for a curry after the show.

My part ownership

Watching Brian Cox's inspiring Wonders of the Universe episode "Stardust" I was once again struck by the thought that though this arrangement of parts that I call me is, in the grand scheme of things, ephemeral, the parts themselves — the atoms that make up the molecules that make up the chemicals of which I am temporarily composed — are as near immortal as anything is likely to get. Forged in the nuclear furnaces of dying stars, my fundamental particles have been around a lot longer than I have, and before I was here they were probably doing sterling service elsewhere. And after I'm gone, these particles will be recycled for other purposes — I will, in a sense, live again as reincarnated diaspora.

There is a hierarchy in this compositional framework that I call me: though at bottom I am the quarks, I am also the complex functioning organs that comprise my body — which are themselves composed of simpler parts right down to those atoms and the quarks that comprise them. Such a view gives me pause, to consider my ownership of the parts of which I currently comprise.

This clip from Lawrence Krauss's superb lecture at the 2009 AAI Convention makes a related point:

https://youtu.be/7ImvlS8PLIo

(Ironically this clip was linked by Ken Ham of Answers in Genesis!)

The universe is so vast, let's all just kill ourselves

Over at Telegraph Blogs Brendan O'Neill has got himself into a tizzy about how important he may or may not be in the grand scheme of things. Not that he says such in so many words, but his misapprehension of one of TV's current popular science hits betrays his discomfiture with reality:

I think I have solved one of the great mysteries of the universe: the question of why mop-topped stargazer Professor Brian Cox is so popular. It isn’t because of his looks, or his soft Mancunian voice, or his pop past in Blair-boosting band D:Ream. No, it’s because his wide-eyed cosmology is based on a view of mankind as insignificant, as a mere speck of dust in the post-Big Bang scheme of things, and that chimes brilliantly with today’s rather downbeat view of humanity. The floppy-fringed professor massages the fashionable prejudice that humanity isn’t all that special; no, we’re just a cosmological accident, which will exist only fleetingly before being wiped out by the explosion of our Sun or some other cataclysmic event.

Sorry Brendan but that's just how it is. Get used to it.

The point is, Brendan, that we are special — just not in the way you think we are. The universe was not designed with us in mind (actually it wasn't designed at all, as far as we can tell — but that's probably another blogpost or two ... or a thousand). Nevertheless we are here, and that is one awesome fact.

And what have you got against Carl Sagan?

Like Sagan, Cox and his rationalistic acolytes in the media are attracted to the cosmos primarily because they believe its vastness reveals our smallness, that its 14 billion-year history puts our pathetic 250,000 years of inventing fire and skyscrapers and iPads into perspective. They see in the never-ending chasm of space, not worlds we should aspire to know and possibly conquer and colonise, but a big black challenge to the idea of human historic purpose.

There you go again: purpose. Imputing teleology is for those who can't cope with the way things actually are. As for conquering, that's a bit presumptuous isn't it? Maybe that's the human historic purpose you're talking about — humanity's cosmic crusade: to seek out new life and new civilizations; to boldly go where no crusader has gone before, and subjugate the alien masses.

Copernicus’s challenge to the idea that the Earth was the centre of the universe was frequently cited by Sagan and his fans as a challenge to the idea that human beings are the centre of the universe – but it was no such thing. Rather, Copernicus wanted to increase human authority over the unknowns of the universe, not teach mankind a lesson about our “insignificance in the great loneliness of space”. In contrast, today’s cod-Copernicans in the Cox lobby are drawn to the cosmos because its weirdness and bigness feeds their drab, down-to-earth belief that there isn’t much point to life.

You've got it upside-down and backwards. As for "their drab, down-to-earth belief that there isn’t much point to life" — I'll let you into a little secret: life is what you make it. The point of life is life itself.

Brian Cox at TAM London

Last weekend I attended The Amaz!ng Meeting, London, put on by the James Randi Educational Foundation. This was the first TAM to be held beyond the shores of North America. It more than fulfilled my expectations and I had a great time. I'll post some of my impressions here, beginning with the first presentation.

It was a scheduling masterstroke to kick off TAM London with a lavishly illustrated presentation by Professor Brian Cox, who explained the purpose behind the Large Hadron Collider (and, incidentally, behind scientific research in general). He outlined the LHC's current state, and by way of a compressed but lucid lecture on cosmology and leading-edge particle physics he showed why this huge accelerator beneath the Swiss-French border is important. His elaboration of the problem that caused the LHC to be shut down shortly after it was commissioned was the clearest I've heard.

His main point was that while it's possible to theorise about scientific subjects, ultimately such theories have to be tested, and when it comes to particle physics, the only way of testing them is with something like the LHC. He also covered the media's misguided panic over the possibility of the LHC producing miniature black holes, listing some media quotes from a number of scientists - including himself: "Anyone who thinks the LHC will destroy the world is a twat."

In Brian Cox we are fortunate to have someone who not only knows his subject inside out, but is also able to communicate abstruse ideas with clarity, wit and passion. (It's no surprise that one of his scientific heroes is Carl Sagan.)

Professor Brian Cox on the Large Hadron Collider, Moon Hoaxers and Intelligent Design

Next week's Radio Times has an interview with Professor Brian Cox, who has no patience with conspiracy theorists:

Radio Times:

"Cern is being sued in the US over the possible dangers of turning on the LHC, such as creating a mini black hole that might swallow the planet. Could it be the end of everything?"

Brian Cox:

"The nonsense you find on the web about 'doomsday scenarios' is conspiracy theory rubbish generated by a small group of nutters, primarily on the other side of the Atlantic. These people also think that the Theory of Relativity is a Jewish conspiracy and that America didn't land on the Moon. Both are more likely, by the way, than the LHC destroying the world. I'm slightly irritated, because this non-story is symptomatic of a larger mistrust in science, particularly in the US, which includes things like intelligent design."

Radio Times:

"One final question: how can you be certain? We've heard of the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle - does it mean you can't be sure of anything?"

Brian Cox:

"The Uncertainty Principle is part of quantum mechanics, and the whole subject is based on that. So it affects every result at LHC, but it doesn't affect the conclusion that anyone who thinks the LHC will destroy the world is a t**t."