I attended a great lecture a few days ago at my university. Stony Brook University hosts a yearly Mind/Brain Lecture Series by a prominent neurobiologist or philosopher who has done important work on the relationship between the mind and the brain. There have been some excellent lectures in the past — Patricia Churchland was here a few years ago (I disagree with her perspective, but she is certainly a prominent philosopher involved in the mind/brain issue, and her lecture was very interesting).
This year’s guest was William Bialek, a biophysicist from Princeton who presented a talk titled “Searching for Simplicity: A Physicist’s Quest for Theories of Mind and Brain.” It was a great presentation. Bialek presented research showing the astonishing and elegant precision and sensitivity of the visual system. It is a remarkable example of biological fine-tuning — light receptors in the retina respond to individual photons of light, and have in-built systems to control and even exploit noise in the visual input.
The lecture hall was packed, and at the end of the presentation, Bialek seemed a bit uncomfortable with the obvious implication of his work — that the nervous system shows the unmistakable hallmarks of purpose. The visual system is fit to its job in a way so remarkable that it’s hard to deny design.
Bialek paced as he tried to explain. He said (I paraphrase): “Some here would invoke a Creator to account for this remarkable biological system.” He seemed to dismiss this obvious inference. “But evolution by natural section must be at work — obviously an organism with an elegantly sensitive and tuned visual system would have a survival advantage in the struggle for existence. Perhaps there was strong selective pressure early in evolutionary history to evolve this elegant system.”
There was no laughter from the audience, but I certainly sensed a quiet incredulity. A fine science lecture was marred by a Darwinian just-so story. A superb scientific presentation of the elegant teleology in biology was capped by self-evident junk science.