As I have pointed out previously in this series on the Science of Purpose, there has been a dramatic shift in the core argument from materialists over the past 10 or 15 years. This is because they now are forced to acknowledge the power of the intelligent design framework. So much so that what they proclaimed as inviolable dogma at the turn of the millennium, they must abandon if they wish to have any hope of remaining credible.
And what is it that they are now — thanks to the case presented by a range of ID proponents — reluctantly required to concede? In a word: it is purpose. (For more on my own take on that subject, see my previous posts here, for example, or here.)
It’s a “self-evident truth,” as Thomas Jefferson, an early ID proponent himself, might have put it: organisms necessarily exist by virtue of purpose. This was vigorously denied by our adversaries until not long ago. But now, many high-prestige biologists are scrambling to rewrite the materialist narrative, because that truth is now wholly undeniable. And watering it down with phrases like “goal-directed behavior” doesn’t change this fundamental reality.
I have described, here and here, examples of attempts to alter the materialist agenda to accommodate purpose. Now along comes the latest attempt to rescue a false narrative. It is in a recently published book, Time’s Second Arrow: Evolution, Order, and a New Law of Nature, by geoscientist Robert Hazen and astrobiologist Michael Wong. They claim to have finally fulfilled Erwin Schrödinger’s 1947 call for “a new law of nature.” The new law is needed in order to explain that which physics and chemistry can’t explain: as Robert Rosen put it in the title of his book, Life Itself.
What Came Before
Although Charles Darwin is credited with the “theory of evolution,” it was Jean-Baptiste Lamarck who had described the “fact” of evolution fifty years earlier. Lamarck attempted to provide the mechanistic framework for how evolution occurred, erroneously attributing it to “inheritance of acquired characteristics.” It was only when Darwin came up with what at the time seemed like a viable mechanism, that of natural selection, that the concept of evolution gained scientific credibility.
Astoundingly, Hazen and Wong base their claim on nothing more than a slightly expanded appropriation of Darwin’s concept of “selection.” They write:
We have proposed that evolving systems … are formed from numerous interacting building blocks… which generate many possible configurations [which] … are subjected to selection.
The problem for naturalism is specified irreducible complexity, which can’t occur randomly due to its utter improbability. At the core of this issue is emergence, a term defined by G. H. Lewes more than 150 years ago. Emergence was an attempt to reconcile the explanatory gaps between physical science and life, explicitly acknowledging the irreducibility of life to physics and chemistry, as later more deeply explicated by Schrödinger, Polanyi, Michael Behe, and others. Emergence was then a mysterium. But by the second half of the 20th century, the term was largely co-opted by naturalists as providing explanatory content, when all along it was the very thing that required explanation.
“Explaining” Emergence
What the authors of Time’s Second Arrow purport to give us is the long elusive explanation of the evolution of complexity via emergence. Channeling Darwin, they claim that complexity emerges on the basis of nature’s inexorable tendency to select for “functional information.”
If evolution obeys a law of increasing functional information, that increase would represent a second arrow of time — an arrow of increasing complexity.
Their argument is framed around what they describe as the inexorable, unidirectional arrow of time. According to the second law of thermodynamics, entropy in the universe must always increase over time. If so, how could complexity ever emerge amidst the unavoidably increasing chaos? How could flowers and machines and language come about? That is the fundamental question that Hazen and Wong endeavor to answer: what is the agency of emergence?
Decades of research have tackled the difficult problem of emergent complexity … Emergence, therefore, is an important variant on the theme of a single cosmic arrow of time….
The ideas expounded by proponents of emergence morph onto [sic] ours in several respects… What is missing is understanding the role of information. We see information as playing a central role in cosmic evolution — as fundamental as energy.
At the core of their thesis is “functional information.” That concept, recently posited by Nobel laureate Jack Szostak, is defined as “a measure of the probability that a sequence of RNA will achieve a desired degree of function.”
Hazen and Wong write:
Some configurations have greater functional information and [thus] will be preferentially selected. This selection process is most assuredly context dependent. That is the way nature works, and the inexorable drive to increase functional information is the key to explaining the selection process.
In this way, they claim that they’ve solved the great mysterium of emergence. Yet they make a crucial error, fatally undermining their entire project. In their own words, they first concede that function equals purpose, but then subsequently disavow that equivalence! By doing so, they reveal the fundamental conundrum of materialism.
They correctly observe that function must be context dependent, which itself is a huge departure from canonical physical science. But then they make the same mistake that Darwin did, separating function from purpose. They do this because even though they are close to true understanding, they back away in order to adhere to the sanctioned materialism of their peers:
The most basic definition of “function” is the purpose for which something is designed. Yet for many scientists, “purpose” is a word that must be avoided in serious scientific discourse.
Also,
The functional information of an object is contextual…functional information requires the observer to choose which function is of interest. The task is subjective. And that is a real problem for scientists.
Salvaging Materialism
Although they correctly identify the problem, and they appreciate how hard it is to advocate for the reality of purpose among scientists who reject the concept outright, they attempt to salvage their materialistic standing as follows:
If the law of increasing functional information…provides an explanation of how evolving systems emerge…the law says absolutely nothing about the purpose of evolving systems.
When scientists get into the tricky territory of function and purpose, they move ever closer to what I have described, in my own explanation of emergence in my book Telos, as systems being predetermined by design. Hazen and Wong write:
On the one hand, evolving systems rely on random sampling…on the other hand, the outcomes of some evolving systems appear to be predetermined — deterministic.
And,
Invoking selection for function…raises the uncomfortable question of teleology — the possibly misguided tendency to explain phenomena in terms of perceived purpose, rather than the natural cause by which they arise.
In Telos, I explain that emergence must arise as an irreducible primary metaphysic, not a reductively derived material “law.” The fact that two prominent scientists are very close to endorsing Aristotle’s concept of telos demonstrates just how far the “other side” has come, just to maintain credibility.
And they almost go there, admitting that what they describe sounds a lot like teleology … but… that’s not acceptable to scientific naturalism. Staying within the confines of their own framework, they try to pull function and purpose back into materialist science.
Can meaning and value be a part of our scientific description of the natural world? The law of increasing functional information suggests that the answer might be yes — that function and purpose could be emergent properties.
A New Frontier
With this conclusion, the authors establish a new frontier in the debate between ID and naturalism, encroaching on our territory in an attempt to recover from their past failures by co-opting our successes.
But fear not: all that Hazen and Wong really offer is a reprise of the circular logic of Darwinian natural selection couched in the truism of “functional logic.” Emergence, however, by definition is not reducible to “entailing law.” And separating function from purpose is just the oxymoronic attempt to reduce the irreducible. The metaphysics of design theory must always reside beyond the realm of mere physics. The once extolled “god of the gaps” derision has now become the impasse of physics and life.