Design in Nature

00:00:03 good afternoon everybody welcome I'm Rob Penzer I'm the associate director of the helix Center have an announcement for an upcoming roundtable on Saturday May 20th on complexity and emergence it's the second of our roundtables on the subject called visions of cosmic order from particles to people and our discussants will be William Grassi who's the founder of meta Nexus David Grinspoon senior scientists at the Planetary Science Institute early attempt can profess ER

00:00:34 biology at Northern Virginia Community College and research associate at the National Museum of Natural History and Tyler Volk professor biology and environmental studies at NYU so today's topic designed a nature let me introduce our participants today and when I announce your name if you can raise your hand Elizabeth altar Adrian Bejan Robin Collins mark Norell and Caleb Scharf and

00:01:05 without further ado I turn this over to our participants okay well I guess protect that design in nature and you know design in nature has always been one of these things that people have questions since the origins of modern science especially in Western Europe and things with the origin of that the enlightening and you know design and nature can be boiled down into two different things one is there a

00:01:35 creator is there some intelligent being who figured all this stuff out or are we just the products of physical constraint I mean is it the reason that knees look like hinges is because that's what it works is the reason that we have so many of the same kinds of eyes and everything from giant squids to ourselves is that just because of things that are embedded within our developmental patterns in our DNA and with evolution being an optimizing criteria an optimizing

00:02:07 process that that's just what ends up under different selective regimes so this has always been two different kinds of things which people have looked at myself I'm more on that kind of just I'm just replicating piece of DNA and this is just the way that it works out as far as that the way that we deal with the world either through constraint when I say constraint it's either through physical constraints from the external part or through constraints just in the basis of what that our genetic material is possible to be able to do within

00:02:38 certain kinds of things well along with our developmental channeling but you know some other people have some different opinions so let's open it up I would see that as not you kind of paint those two as contraries but you might ask about the constraints themselves whether there's a design like pattern in those constraints and so you could have it and you have to look at reality physical reality in different levels you've got to know biological level down to the chemical level but and the

00:03:09 biological level seems to be at least a lot of accidents seems to be the one of the governing principles but when you get all the way down to let's say the physical level that's where I think a real big question to what degree does that look random or is that have a design like character and by design in a very general sense I would say that the parts so you can invoke a crater but I think there's even a more general sense in which the parts

00:03:40 are arranged in some intricate way so that they realize some easily recognizable overall property of like I work in the area and you know fine-tuning of the cosmos for life and so they are things seem do seem to be extremely well adjusted so that life can exist this understanding of design as

00:04:15 you stated it but it is a novelty because English is in fact a very very young language design is a very old concept the Council on Latin the world signal means sign it is something that's discernible meaning to ask the observers and this observation the sign conveys a message which if followed it means that it is just useful to us engineering

00:04:48 which is my education comes from that it is about okay making better drawings and so that does design and where the image comes from for example the shape of a leaf or the the bend in the river is is the observation is that nothing to do nothing to do with with who made that it is all about the observer the getting the idea that that

00:05:20 observation is useful so that you observer with it with the observation and with the artifact that comes from doing something acting based on that observation the observer becomes a more empowered the mover of itself or herself himself on the honor landscape so that's designed and so design is one of the most universal phenomena the the most universal phenomena phenomenon of value

00:05:53 to us that exists it's right there with or down there with gravity and with with the irreversibility ii alternates entirely but isn't that a lot because it was just constrained quite the opposite it's about freedom no constraints without freedom on the contrary without freedom there is no there is no no no discernible image knows changing that image no evolution and this better than

00:06:25 anyone because it's like that it's certainly I mean that there is constraint within the physical world stuff of that what you know organisms are capable of doing and not capable of doing classic example of this is the laryngeal nerve in the giraffe which this isn't sort of a case study in evolutionary biology the laryngeal nerve in the giraffe branches off the base on the vagus nerve in the brain travels all the way down through some arteries in the

00:06:55 heart and then back up the neck of the giraffe where it innervates the larynx why would it travel all that way down and all the way back well it's just because it's the constraint from its ancestors so that design if you could call it that evolved in our fish ancestors and that constraint that physiological constraint remains in the giraffe even though it it causes this bizarre morphology but one of the I think when you're speaking about freedom that comes as part of

00:07:26 design in in as an evolutionary genomics as I think of that as variation in the raw variation that is necessary for adaptation and I think one of the interesting aspects to consider when we think about nature and whether it's whether you know as The DaVinci quote that we were that we were provided with suggests that nothing is extra in nature because it's so finely designed for its

00:07:57 environs if we look at the genome say the human genome 3 billion base pairs 50% of that fully 50% of that is is repetitive DNA with no known purpose so you know there's a lot of extra stuff out there in nature and surely it's shaped by constraint but it's that variation that allows freedom to adapts just biding my time well maybe just two

00:08:31 so I'm trying to understand when you talk about freedom so I guess you know I come out of physics and so to me all we're talking about here and what you've talked about what you talked about is you know boils down to well the constraints there are there are constraints of I don't want to use the word design wow that's terrible I don't what is with design there everything is

00:09:01 is finding its way through a complex energy landscape I mean as a physicist we always we always resort to this we always say no it's all about finding free energy to do work so our molecules are doing that all the time our DNA is doing although at that all the time it's the root of biological evolution at some level is these organisms there they're exploring this vast chemical landscape and where there is opportunity to extract free energy and do work it will

00:09:33 happen and why is that because the whole universe is driven towards dissipation of energy right and moving towards a higher entropy state and so I guess is is that the freedom that you see is that this vast camp this vast energy landscape that everything from the river to the molecule is exploring try to make it more readable to everybody the first

00:10:08 of all I like the title of your blog life unbounded here's a comment on the so called constraint it does not exist okay there's the the space is to be to be accessed by these flows that you bring up the floors that are driven by the power that you bring up the so called free energy a much better name for that is fuel or food for those of us who live on this planet is it's converted into

00:10:42 the into the power by engines and most of the engines are natural ok animals are basically engines on on the tracks and of course we are now very likely to be riding on engines made by by smarter humans 200 years ago in Britain and in propelling as much much more cheaply but the question that is not being addressed

00:11:14 until now is what is that power coming from the free energy useful for to attend and the end is for greater is your movement movement into this free space and has available time because obviously here I speak for a biographical I was like I like to live longer and so I could move more easily over all over and bring others along

00:11:45 with me you see so that's the tendency as Niels Bohr said the nature is is is about s it's about its what we say about nature so that's what's interesting so that's the beginning of a more inclusive picture of the topic I read parts of your book and I had a question

00:12:17 for you the constructional laws that thing's dead but constructive check if you can say fractal okay constructor it's been so long is that things systems move towards more easier and easier flow use your greater access I'd like to yeah really just a cup of really everyday examples you know my drain gets plugged up it seems like it's went from less easy flow for easy flow to less easy flow or arteries get clogged so how do

00:12:49 you deal with examples like that your drain gets plugged up because your drain the pipe is not natural it is not a it's not free to morph to morph to live with the with the incidental blockage the pipe is your artifact the the drain is you you the human and machine specimen the river basin is the is the natural

00:13:20 counterpart of your example in the river basin I grew up on the Danube and I've been observing as a kid going fishing the river basin gets the tree log out of the way tree logs do black block the the flow is does the sunken ship by the river because it is free to morph because it is alive as they flow architecture as a sign is the thing that impresses you has the the the natural the intrinsic

00:13:51 property of of evolving to flow more easily so quite a cop Carter's like flourish yeah thank people same thing the artery also does its best until it's old enough to split two to base because an aneurysm to do all sorts of better seems I've gone from you know when you're younger your arteries are there's more free flow so the evolution there seems to be from more free flow okay to less and that's

00:14:21 what no no the life of a human being is not evolution it's called growth many people in science confuse the life of the individual with the evolution of the species no evolution is about really confuse it that's what we think is right it's part and parcel a single organism isn't it's one instance out of a vast evolutionary landscape right and it's plain so I you know I have I here are you suggesting that there's agency in a river or in our arteries I mean that's

00:14:53 the sort of I hear that in the language but I'm not sure that's what you're suggesting I mean really the dictionary definition of agency well you tell no I'm asking you is the river is the river somehow deciding no no agency doesn't mean that agency is is a is essentially power power which is that that makes action possible agency is not about the

00:15:28 direction in which the design change happens because of the power that is used the direction of the change in flow architecture because of that power you brought up the engines earlier that is a that is actually the phenomenon of evolution which is of all physics and which is summarized by the construct the law of physics which is really the statement of everything that is that is finite size not quark or infinitesimally

00:15:59 invisible finite size including the celestial body has the in order to persist which is to that means to live in physics it must evolve freely freely to toward great access we're in your example of the universe for the faster route to equilibrium which means death but why then in a biological evolution contest then I mean that if you take it back to

00:16:30 looking how evolution works why are there then unoccupied ecological spaces because that if you I mean have we justify students we just did something for a exhibit that we want to do and you can look at like a three access graph love it let three access projection of a bird eggs for instance and you can what one axis is size one axis is shape and then the other axis is color okay this is what color color yeah

00:17:01 and if you would look at it that from if you'd say yeah you know that evolution is great optimizing thing you would expect that the whole kind of thing would be filled in universally but it's not there's big empty spaces in a lot of it of where our just unoccupied in ecological spaces and I mean that's just one example I mean people have recognized that for a long time and that then once the loss of major evolutionary event happens I mean previous to about 325 million years ago there was nothing that weighed over 20 25 30 grams that

00:17:34 flew and then all of a sudden is that flag reptiles pterosaurs evolved and then also birds evolved then you know later on and then all of a sudden that was unoccupied ecological space that off that became filled in and because of you know whatever happened but nevertheless is that it's very you know it just doesn't go with this kind of thing that there's always just that this undercard right I can respond to you by speaking a language that the most people know what

00:18:05 you that of looking at the River Basin morphology than map the the wetland the rain keeps falling is is wide open by the river channels all hierarchical happen only in some places there is lots of space there's nothing baited by metered is that you call it design space and were okay for for that matter energy landscape there are lots of most of it is actually not bathed and the reason is that in order to to base would flow an

00:18:37 area or a volume the easiest meaning the greatest access access to the entire space is offered by a vasculature a vasculature this is why all these things that come up are happening you mentioned the repetitive DNA in this theoretical infinite space of DNA combinations and the reason is that all DNA is not equal just like the words in the language most

00:19:08 of us speak basically a hierarchy of words all of them very few it's called it's much smaller than number than the main vocabulary because that is the the way to speak easiest and the way to communicate with everybody else the fastest so you talk about these things that look the same that have two eyes well they had no eyes before the the Cambrian explosion but they're still limited by it like their senior histories it always ended from a common

00:19:40 enemy so we're stuck with that but let me let me just say one more thing which is the punchline so when the the the the I occurred obviously to eyes were better because the world is flat these these beings were perceiving the ambient which is flat okay to ice oriented this way not this way and the that's right and as soon as that happened movement became immensely easier easier safer farther just like

00:20:15 after the invention of radar in in military aviation and so that's why you talked about the nature optimizing things that's why this trait stayed the traits that are in fact inferior to existing alternatives do not stay what works is kept that's that's evolution and it's a random up to a point I mean

00:20:48 we had there was bilateral symmetry in organisms I think before complex eyes evolved I mean there are other whole other reasons for that I'm not an expert information but I mean in terms of the repetitive DNA talking about the you know the reason that exists in the gene I'm certainly not all organisms have the degree of repetitive DNA that mammals have but it's thought that that's the result of viral elements viral DNA that

00:21:19 you know that actually come in inserts genomic elements that will copy DNA over and over and that's what they do for a living so a viral infection into your genome can result in many of those events so you know I think most people consider that to be a random random process yeah I mean like birds for instance have tiny genomes compared to mammals than this their ancestors crocodiles have genomes which are not ancestors but the closest living groups who that have genomes which are far

00:21:50 larger than birds are look the river basin that has no genome yet that looks just like their human leg okay so that's a contest nothing to do with it because it's like that it's it doesn't have a singular history it's not related to every other route every other river basin in the planet I think that's an example of so people who study complex systems always talking I mean I'm sure you know this that talk about scaling laws for example that exists across all sorts of things so there are

00:22:20 scaling laws in biology between body mass and metabolism right and it's across all organisms and it's probably as a result of some approximate optimization process but it's still playing out over billions of years of evolution it's the same scaling rule that exists in language rights thing called the Zipp law right it's the word use frequency for this is you know so you know these are all I think as a

00:22:50 physicist I would say that one of what you're talking about the rivers and so on yes there are similarities to biological systems but therefore there for slightly different reasons they're not because of inherited traits right there because of this it perhaps gets back to the universal idea of design that there are these these emergent scaling laws these emergent relationships because of the underlying nature of systems driven by you know

00:23:22 finding their way through some energy landscape of optimization of efficiency and so on right I mean the same I think these scale rules also apply to circulatory system like this and things like the species area curve how many how many species you find and you know one square meter versus 100 square meters right let me try to clarify the the words we speak these these are scaling laws that you mention are not laws of physics they are compact mathematical or summaries also known as correlations for observation

00:23:55 the law of physics is the purely mental viewing that empowers want to predict such correlations and that is what I do and along the way what I predict is not only the correlation and all these things you bring up including zip I predict why and at what point the so-called correlation should break down because yes there is a scaling war to the many many ramifications in the human lung but with a construction I predict

00:24:25 that the cutoff should be 23 branching levels that is the power of a law of physics so yes most of my colleagues use the word law when in fact they're talking about a an empirical activity which is that of making a more compact huge volume of observations the law of physics does that one better it makes even more compact the huge number of

00:24:56 these correlations just haven't come back to something previous you said you disagree and then well they mean maybe would it be useful if you explained do you want to explain a little bit what okay so these in the night okay so what's been discussed pretty much since the 70s has been what's called anthropic fine-tuning and that the universe is in many ways the fundamental structure

00:25:27 precisely precisely set so that life can exist at least somewhere in the universe okay and I usually like to refer to the kind of life is what I call embodied conscious agents which would be a generalized version of what we are and so you could do this on different levels there's the laws of nature the very general principles like the law of gravity or that unlike charges repel each other and there has to be the right

00:25:58 set of those if you like pulled off the law of gravity there weren't any law of gravity there wouldn't be any masses when clumped together and obviously you wouldn't get highly complex beings like us would also be stars which are the energy sources form and then another the post discussed area of this is on what they call the fundamental parameters of physics so those would be like the mass of the proton or even more fundamental than that that is the mass of the up and down

00:26:29 quarks which composed the proton other examples would be the strength of gravity as not just the strength on any given planet but that constant G in Newton's law that F equals G the mass first mass times the second mass divided by the distance between us m square that that's all there's a number for that and you can express that for those who have physics training you can express that in what's called dimensionless units you

00:27:00 don't actually have to refer to units there but anyhow it's a number that gives the strength of gravity there's a number that gives the strength of the electromagnetic force strong nuclear force etc and those have to be precisely adjusted over vast ranges of possibilities in order to have a universe that allows for what I would say would be state life more generally stable reproducible complexity and I can

00:27:31 give more examples there's lots of examples you can give but that's the general idea right and I think yeah what is so and I'll get to why I sort of made my squeak about objective what's so interesting about that is that's part of this topic of design in nature is that it does it could be construed to mean that everything was set up as you say to be just so in order to enable the production of things like stars in the

00:28:02 cosmos which in turn produce heavy elements in just the right abundance ease to ultimate we make planets with chemical compositions that allow for the sort of complexity that life can emerge from and you know and I've been interested in that for a while and what's so interesting to me actually is that now we come back and look at it with a little more scrutiny and I'll explain this as well that you know that fine-tuning is probably not so fine at

00:28:35 all which negates some of this idea that the universe is perfect for life for all just appears to be perfect for that one instance of you know cognizant life that you talk about so so I have two things to say and one is to do with people's investigations of that quite recently that seem to suggest the universe is not fine-tuned particularly well and the other piece of it is I think you can flip it around and and you know it's

00:29:08 predicated on the notion of life being a very particular thing right carbon-based organisms somewhat like us and the truth is we don't know whether you can build life out of other building blocks or not suppose you can suppose life can be more general as a phenomena can be it can come together out of any set of building blocks that allow for sufficient complexity right maybe that's I'm you know everybody always says silicon but

00:29:39 silicon probably isn't a very good element to be involved in in this but it could be you know then that could conceivably change the perception of the universe being particularly well fine-tuned but I just wanted to say this is why I sort of you know got excited when you mentioned it that you know so there has been recent work on this from the physics and I you may well be aware of it the for example you mentioned the relative strength or the strength of

00:30:09 gravity right right and so one of those dimensionless quantities is the the strength of t-too the strength of electromagnetic forces that that ratio has been deemed in the past as something that if that was changed just a little bit you couldn't make things like stars right because a star is essentially a competition between gravity and electromagnetic forces it's in a that's of a dynamic equilibrium as matter comes together and so the argument is being

00:30:40 well if you change gravity a little bit or you change H magnet magnetism a tiny bit you just wouldn't make stars and all that then follows but recent investigation of that suggests that in fact you could still make stars even if you change the strength of electromagnetism by maybe a factor of a thousand and if you change the strength of gravity the GE constant by up to a million or baby even ten million that that space that parameter space still

00:31:11 allows for stars to form in the universe now there might be different than the stars were used to they might be much bigger but they would still go through the same cycle of nuclear fusion and and element production and to me that's really interesting if that's true because it means that at least one piece of these the fine-tuning argument I know there are other factors to their other fundamental properties that if you tweak them a little bit would be seemingly

00:31:42 problematic but but that suggests to me that it's it's first of all maybe the universe isn't particularly well tuned for life as we know it I mean we don't actually know because we've only got the one instance that we know about right here on the earth so we don't know whether this is a fertile universe or not a fer to the whole universe and that to me would change suppose suppose five hundred years ago or four hundred years ago first telescopes you know we just

00:32:12 saw life everywhere and everybody had big neon signs out but across the universe saying we are here you know what are you up to oh yeah we're Nissan's lovely we had that you know a thousand years earlier then we'd have lived with the universe replete with living organisms and I'm not even sure we the question would come up that the universe was fine-tuned for life scenario suppose suppose the universe we knew we had known that the universe was

00:32:43 packed with life but the planets everywhere and all of them had life and it was all sophisticated technological it had evolved in many different ways and so on I just wonder whether we'd even ask the question and the thing is we don't know whether or how fertile the universe is so sorry I'm loading this with one thing I want to say okay start with response to a second point you made about assuming carbon-based life mostly arguments actually don't for example the fine-tuning of the cosmological constant which governs the

00:33:14 expansion rate of state space that's simply if it wasn't within a very small range Hooke typically estimate as one part in ten to them under 20th power a very very small number that the universe would expand to rapidly four galaxies and stars to form so there just wouldn't be planets there win B stars and then you're not even going to get any kind of complexity or if you looked at the level of laws if you didn't have like the strong nuclear force was long-range force wasn't just right you wouldn't

00:33:45 have atoms and concerning your case so first of all I'd say the the more general if somebody's correctly formulating this most cases won't involve are not simply focused on carbon-based life there's that case with Fred Hoyle initially with the carbon and oxygen but most of them aren't and the second thing in the example you mentioned of the star I don't I don't think that in that it's just whether

00:34:15 stars could exist or not was with the gravitational constant of fine-structure constant it wasn't just a matter of whether stars could exist but whether they would have you know right temperature lasts long enough for life to exist and there's also if you change those there's planetary effects like the ability to retain an atmosphere if you increase the strength of gravity can fairly easy to show that you're forced into increasing the surface force on a

00:34:46 planet to retain an atmosphere and so you know gravity is very weak as a force it sits in if you did in dimensionless units about one and 10 to the 38th power of the strong nuclear force and if you increase gravity by let's say thousandfold then only planets were up 30 times the surface force strength of experience it would be less a lot less I think ideal for our kind of life so I

00:35:19 think you can the argument actually can when you start talking about the conditions being even optimal you get you might even be able to get life but it's gonna be as you increase the surface force it's going to be a lot harder to do much of anything yeah I would agree that figuring out all these secondary revocations is tough right and it may be that you would eliminate regions of this expanded parameter space but no I mean the example I gave that

00:35:49 that range and I'm sorry this is getting into sort of horribly specific so we should beer off from this again that that range I gave for strength of gravity strength and electromagnetism is the range from which you would derive sufficiently long-lived stars with the right sort of properties to produce as far as we can tell I mean you'd have to run a lot of my physics simulations a an abundance of heavy elements not so

00:36:22 dissimilar that what we have at the moment no I mean I raised it not not really just to sort of attack nice idea but it's interesting to me that you know and maybe this almost relates to what you were saying I mean it we impose design on things right that's us the universe may have nothing to do with that right we we tend to impose design more than anything else Adam this is would be you just look at the range of physically possible values and then you look at those values that are allow for complexity and some of

00:36:54 them are very straight much more straightforward you don't have to run the kind of simulations which would be like the car I mean I think the cosmological constant it would much more straightforward right and the planetary effects of changing gravity are pretty straight back to this idea just how messy all this stuff is basically I mean the the best example of that is I mean even if you've bought into the creator kind of stuff that Adam and Eve everything I mean it's looking around we all look different we wouldn't because DNF DNA replication is incredibly messy and that there's a

00:37:24 that you know all of these things whether it's you know talking about things within the aspect of that the beginning of the universe to like you know things that like you know ecoli mutating and petri dishes around the city and different labs i mean that there's there's a lot of messiness and a lot of stochastic kind of things that just happen to all of these things and if it would mess you wouldn't be exactly saying are predisposed to see the design

00:37:57 and everything even if it's even if it's created by random processes with you know additional constraints on top and that's that's part of not just our brains but animal brains in general that are designed to look for pattern that itself is adaptive because the the brain or any other sexual organ is the finite size and I can only do this little in order to enable the moving vehicle I've been listening I don't use

00:38:27 a lot of our brain well so if you say it's too small why don't we use more of it now the point I'm making is that from one generation to the next we were exposed to more information more observations reams and reams of this and of course we absorb it in the forms of principles and the correlations but not number by number in the immense volumes of tables of data we we become more

00:38:58 knowledgeable through through hierarchical the compression not through mindless accumulation of volume that was the point I was making I want to contribute this discussion because several points were made here the first of all I was learning from the exchange between the two of you which is basically about physics the topic today is design in nature which is something that is familiar to everyone it's something for us mortals here somewhere

00:39:30 halfway between the Stars and the protons and the quarks now many people as you implied the equate the the quark the proton and the in 50 infinitesimal with quote even more fundamental smaller does not mean more fundamental fundamental fundis in Latin means at the bottom look at the Statue of Liberty the pedestal is a bigger than the Statue the

00:40:00 the the thing that were the fired brick in in Roman architecture is its finite size you can kill a man with it and it is fundamental because before that the the buildings are really really miserable and crumbling earthquakes and so forth destroy most of them but not after the fire break you have these vaults you have architecture of a different kind after the fire break came the the steel reinforced concrete all over this country skyscrapers and iron bridges

00:40:32 okay so that's fundamental a finite size elemental construct this thing that will break the steel in the instrument these are fundamental because they are literally at the bottom of the lots of things not if everything so in science unfortunately language basically has a life of its own

00:41:03 some words are so useful that they end up being used actually misused in in other places the life carbon-based of course that's the view if you equate the design nature only with with with animals with the with the biosphere you see but design of nature is is general it's not about that and so there's a famous question what is life and I think the answer is very easy if

00:41:36 you know thermodynamics because in turn Amex this is the part of physics that had to be born after the the steam engine of the the heat engine 200 years ago dynamics actually Maxwell and in Cambridge one of the key concepts in in physics is that of the dead state death is resolved as a as an answer to a question in physics that means in a system which means this that you're

00:42:07 discussing that system is in the death state if in it nothing moves that also means nothing morphs nothing changes well the antonym of that is is the live state of a system it is a system in a in a state occupied by by flow meaning movement and that change changing configuration I mentioned earlier change cannot happen with our freedom to change that's another basic

00:42:38 concept in in physics process means change change of state from this being of say the pot of water to this other being of the pot of water and so all these things together taking us from what everybody understands and accepts which is dead state in physics life state the anthem an antonym of the first and then change in state which happens because of freedom that changes evolution and the direction of that

00:43:10 change is not the haphazard it is in one direction which is that of okay changes that the facilitate the occurrence of configurations that offer greater access or all the way to more efficiency to smart economics to faster speech or cheaper communicating between entities that want to communicate or the fact that it is called economies of scale the

00:43:41 fact that is easier to move as a group not in as individuals and on anonymous is the river water the - - people enter in the stadium it's it's this is physics it's everything showing the same tendency to morph and to surprise the observer with surprisingly the same kind of pattern pattern is not is not designed design is a flow configuration with

00:44:12 with with freedom but also with a message I get the impression the way you talk is that all of these questions that are being raised and all of the debates that are happening that you seem to present it as if you already have all the answers and I'm a little bit puzzled by that because obviously these are unsettled issues well look since you put

00:44:43 it that way I have to respond that goes without saying the contrary I am the ignorant who came to this very old and the big table of discussion I'm talking about in physics in the biology I'm from engineering I'm I'm a person who basically was not supposed to be here but it so happens you are you know I'm

00:45:14 talking about it is only now that I publish meaning 20 years ago I published in physics and biology previously I was preaching to the choir my my peers in engineering get that get it they are simply not invited to discussions on design even though the the word meaning designers is what people do incidentally the this thing with the Signum in latin then it became the Zen you know in

00:45:45 Italian we the West got the science that we cherish today from the Renaissance that's how we really got it and then through the French their son so it means the sign it doesn't mean the act of designing something and making it that's something totally different design happens and but to finish your point when I started to talk about the the physics of evolution in this

00:46:16 most general sense not as chemistry of carbon okay in a more general sense I am I was surprised to hear from our peers those who came to the constructor look from physics and biology that that what I'm telling them from my direction or is in fact not only familiar to them but it covers what the contemporary scientists regard as known in their various compartments like departments on campus

00:46:48 they do not talk to each other so that's the questions I want to go back to a previous you made about that the brain is program to see design in nature now one could take that as the brain is programmed to mislead us because there's not near as much design as in nature as the brain seems to want to think and in certain areas that's certainly true but

00:47:20 I would want to point out that the whole from the time of the Scientific Revolution you can I could fight Morris Klein on this who said the assumption everybody was making was that nature since the time of the Pythagorean said nature was mathematically designed meaning Natha and particular mathematically put together to realize elegant elegance map mathematics and that during the last century ever since

00:47:50 then has been just enormous ly fruitful you have people like Paul Dirac one of the major founders of quantum mechanics says you know the equation must be noon if beautiful it's more important than even match experiment because sometimes when they perceive beauty in the equations and they seem to conflict with the experiment later it turned out to be correct that was einstein's approach it was look he would actually as major biographer said he would think of even though he didn't believe in a theistic

00:48:20 God he would think to himself if I were God what would I do in other words how would be the most beautiful mathematics to put this together and that was a guide for him and has been a continual guide and a very successful one so I wouldn't want to make the inference that of rain being I think we have to resist the inference that means it's going to mislead us it's actually amazing that that kind of idea has been so successful at an area we wouldn't

00:48:50 expect it because if if it was programmed to for reproductive success to see design and everything and to see these elegant patterns we went initially expected to work at the underlying level when the mathematics is like it's far removed from what we see don't misunderstand you that some of the mathematical beauty may not be as well I

00:49:23 mean I know I think there's this enormous beauty in this context for mathematics and I yeah I think it's very interesting point that you raise and that as you were talking I was thinking about this thing's okay so so why do we do this why do I breath let's do this is it because you're again we've evolved presumably like other species and are so that our brains brains are part of a data processing system right and we're

00:49:55 bombarded by millions of pieces of information all the time for every nerve ending everything we see everything we hear smell you know pheromones that are floating around in this room that trigger all sorts of thing and it's a lot to handle right but you know there's a tiger waiting to eat me over there so I'd better make some good judgment decisions and and I just I you know this is a very naive way of thinking about it I suspect but is there

00:50:26 did that seem like a plausible reason why we we see patterns we see beauty in certain equations there was that there was some report very recently talking about the study of people doing math and I think even looking at fMRI scans why they were solving mathematical puzzles and getting that that pleasure I don't know if it was dopamine or whatever does that make sense and I just mentioned it's a quick example from fish obviously

00:50:59 where our brains are more complex and understanding our predispositions is more complicated but there's a very lovely long-term study of Guppies in Trinidad and these Guppies I'm sure a lot of you have had Guppies as pets they have these beautiful tails very colorful and the tails are the the males have the colorful tails and it's thought that these are to attract females the females choose the males based on the color of the tails which are kind of this bright

00:51:29 orange color in this particular area and so for a long time the research was completely focused on why the you know the females prefer these beautiful colorful tails it's lovely you know they look designs right and then some smart team came along and fought to examine what the Guppies were eating and it turned out that the these Guppies prefer these orange berries that fall into the river that have a very similar color and pattern to the male's

00:52:01 tails so it turned out the females it's some neurological level had a preference for orange for this bright orange color of the male's tails and that on an evolutionary timescale got translated into a preference for males with these bright orange tails so something that looks completely you know unrelated how it turns out so blood through humans yes good maybe somebody with a yeah not a fact connect up with our friends being programmed to see elegance and beauty

00:52:32 just that there may be at an evolutionary timescale some some predisposition due to you know selective forces that we don't see around us anymore but that may have been part of our our evolutionary history it still would be the case that why would we expect that to work when in areas that are so far removed from what helps us you know in our long evolutionary past survived namely at this fundamental mathematical

00:53:03 level which is actually very abstract that's why people have a lot of difficulty learning quantum mechanics or general relativity because in mathematics is far different from even it's a difficulty explaining how we can even do mathematics in the normal you know from an evolutionary perspective people have worked on that but that's the ordinary counting fractions this sort of mathematics is very far removed and as Eugene Vigna wrote a famous essay on this as you pointed out it's chosen

00:53:35 the mathematics is chosen for its elegance and fruitfulness mathematically in being able to let's say solve equations and so why would it work so well there that's that's the puzzle I'm pointing to I guess I mean you know quantum mechanics right I mean it's do quantum mechanics you have to know sister I mean mathematics as we have it as I'm just so it now looks yeah

00:54:06 mechanics mathematics but that beauty wasn't arrived at like that no it wasn't but but the mathematics using that mathematics into complex numbers was developed before the arrival of quantum mechanics and its essentials either that or something like a war vote to it is essential for quantum mechanics and that was developed because it was enormous ly fruitful and complex numbers or a real number plus an imaginary number which you can think of as the square root of negative 1 and so they

00:54:38 were developed because it was enormous that one reason you can solve like third order or more or any polynomial using the imaginary numbers but you can't using the real numbers no and so the tree normal them enormous ly fruitful algebraically and in other ways and it was developed all independently yet just for aesthetic reasons because of its mathematical fruitfulness and yet that's just the system that nature is the

00:55:10 mathematics that suits nature you didn't finish your point about the fish it was pretty much finished Lucien brain could you know take it a bit further the conclusion being that in terms of what was making the female fish choose that that that was so it was not really a design it was more something

00:55:44 else right there was a predisposition that looked to us to be sort of design related at first glance but turned out to have a deeper evolutionary history the that shapes shape this preference based on food alright so yeah so the ability maybe the you know the thrill of adding two numbers together related somewhere in our deep evolutionary history to the ability to think if I go over there I get two berries instead of one berry you

00:56:16 know one of our colleagues at Columbia Merrick and Alan stuff is like that you know he's made his career wasn't Nobel Prize is just in the basis of how that every single interaction you ever have everything you ever look at not just changes your brain chemically it changes it physically is that new synapses become you know larger and hotter and that you know there's been a huge amount I mean basically you know about the brains of three things kind of we know some about human we don't know some about Mouse we know a little bit about C

00:56:48 elegans if you want to have a brain or not and then a little bit about zebrafish but certainly I mean they've been known to demonstrate that and some experimental organisms as well so like that you know we can talk about this comp with this set of complex mathematics but these are relatively new things that are basically the things that have come since Newton's time and that so our brains when we look at mathematics today look fundamentally different than somebody who would have thought about those same sorts of problems before those mathematics were different and not just in a chemical way

00:57:19 of just studying and understanding it but in a physical way as well bring the discussion back to design in nature and respond to two things you brought up for actually both of you why why is the brain programmed you as well to to detect pattern you see that by the way right now when in the famous story but the NSA using big data in order to

00:57:50 discern ok patterns that are useful and as the answer to your second point about beauty okay why is the pattern useful to the NSA so that the government could act faster in direction of protecting all of us the same with the animal obviously 1 million years after another million learning and that what is good for it is actually a pleasure because to live is

00:58:22 is the option that we all like as opposed to becoming the victim and so beauty in physics is the is a part of this evolutionary design meaning changes that we make every day and how we move in order to get going to go through life easier we like a simpler equation because we get it and we move on my best example is why statistic has been proven that most

00:58:52 people like to look at the images shaped like this like the business card were like the computer screen were like the screen of the cinema this shape happens to have a length to height ratio approximately the same as the golden ratio that's a coincidence but why do people like this shape right because this is the area that's the easiest the fastest to scan with two eyes okay this is the animal in the business of

00:59:23 surviving and out of the way of the printer and looking at the the world which is flat this is why the animal has two eyes on a horizontal and by the way the area the ocular area of the two eyes is a an area approximated by this shape and that is then the beauty which goes hand-in-hand with locomotion and with with greater access and with with the survival so you have the intangibles like beauty as of course all the way to economics that

00:59:54 actually belongs in physics belong in physics sorry I was just wondering it's anybody comment on evolutionary biologist on Simon Conway Morris is thesis I'm just wondering which because that's I think very relevant to the discussion here of debt that built-in constraints already there from physics chemistry etc makes certain almost

01:00:24 inevitable certain kinds of organisms so he's bucking the idea of particularly pop popularized by Stephen Jay Gould that if you ran the evolutionary tape over again you've yet very very different types of life forms and that it would be a miracle to get a miracle in the sense of being very very very improbable occurrence to get beings like us with our level of intelligence but he thinks that the evidence of convergence of things like the compound I occur and

01:00:57 independently many different times in evolutionary history indicate that these sorts of things are much more inevitable than we once thought so there is a sort of inevitable set of patterns that are going to occur in nature despite a lot of the the accidental character of mutations and I'm wondering what you think about thesis and in the comments you have on I would certainly agree with Simon on that one because I mean I think that the evidence of convergence is so

01:01:27 great that we can see that the same kinds of teeth of occurring in different kinds of vertebrates who eat similar kinds of things that are totally unrelated from one another we see that the same kinds of you know what I was alluding to before up these empty ecological spaces that occurring and lots of different groups be they insects be they bats me they Birds which that occur over and over and over again I mean there's something which is just some physical constraint which is keeping it you know out of that you know

01:01:58 so like that you know that we see things like that the sizes and shapes of eggs something that you know there are lab is study the things that you see that different groups which have you know lots of different sizes lots of kinds of things that they come up with the same shapes all the time so like and if they don't go way out of bounds you know I mean so it's really uh I mean I think that if you ran the evolutionary tape over again we might not be mammals would not be related to things maybe we

01:02:28 wouldn't exist that the kinds of biodiversity you see on the planet would be partitioned pretty much the same way just like what was partitioned with totally different animals during the Paleozoic period 200 million years ago and then when the the the big extinction at the end of the Paleozoic it came back during the Cretaceous period with the same kinds of reefs and then it came back again in the Cenozoic as well with the same kinds of reefs the animals to a non biologist would look pretty much the same but they're totally unrelated to one another so

01:02:59 I contribute the the addendum that it's this thing that you're describing is actually predictable and it's not only about the population of these beings but actually the movement of these beings the locomotion is in fact the physics the shape of the egg is physics is predictable the frequency of the egg-laying is four is physics and is predictable and yes the configuration of animal mass movement on the globe is no

01:03:29 different than the vascular configuration of the movement of all the other water which is much older which is the water in the river basin or the movement of air currents on the on the surface of the globe it's hierarchical and with design I I did some reading about my colleagues here and I developed the questions and one is for to you if you'd like to address it because time is running short will you comment on two

01:04:00 things one I hear my colleagues in academia wringing their hands about the conflict between science and religion that's one and second about your own interests and specialty and a theory of atonement I think I mean the theory of atonement is gonna be somewhat off topic but if you want me to comment on I can but in terms of the is there conflict between science and religion I would say

01:04:31 no I think science and religion at a deeper level there's the superficial conte conflicts for example young earth creationists with their literal interpretation of Genesis is in conflict with what we know from science that human beings apes and other creatures are genetically related so there's a continent common ancestry thesis but at a deeper level I think the kind of let's say the belief in God in particular and

01:05:02 if you want to go more particularly Christian the belief and logos the reason that the world is an intelligible hole an order in an intelligible way is a deeply consonant with science in fact most people in fact all the people who began the Scientific Revolution believed that and thought that Galileo thought that the universe was written in the language of mathematics and likewise

01:05:33 Kepler but what you have to be careful of is what level you're looking for this in what level you attribute to chance and what level you attribute to a more fundamental kind of design for example Kepler in he spent the early years trying to figure out a mathematical order to the actual distance the planets were away from the Suns we look for the

01:06:05 five platonic solids and that never worked out because the distance of planets are that's a matter of chance not necessity but there are actual elliptical orbits and the speed in which they go that's a matter of physical necessity so he finally eventually found the three Kepler's three laws of motion which led to Newton at that point so I would say no there's no in fact at a deep level that are consonant there's only this superficial

01:06:35 conflict I'm sorry would you say that so I don't think the conflict but I mean what we get from the popular image is this conflict and it was also a thesis promoted by which the historian friends of mine say and people are history um in the history of the science of religion whether or not they're believers are in God or not by tanderson

01:07:07 Dickson Wyatt I think he's a prep first president of Cornell University promoted this perpetual conflict thesis and his history was really really bad history the footnotes didn't go anywhere and that from the historians perspective it's way more complex than that there's been skirmishes but there's also been a lot of support for science from the religious community so it's it's it's that would be my religion I mean well I

01:07:41 would agree with all of this history absolutely I mean someone like Kepler who was deeply religious that's my understanding but he also felt that that was perfectly compatible with this this empirically studied quantitative universe but I mean even and it he was even capable of taking quite risky steps because my understanding is before Kepler people assume that the movement of planets was

01:08:11 all in perfect circles right I mean Kepler took this leap to say well maybe they're ellipses which is pretty shocking for someone what was motivated by the idea the underlying idea of elegance the heavens were elegantly ordered would give me the perfect circle's the most symmetrical but he was willing to break that but it was still that underlying idea of an elegant order to the universe it's just you can't be you can't get too fixated on a certain

01:08:42 version of that I mean Einstein got fixated on a certain version of that and never could really accept quantum mechanics so and sometimes a religious motivation can be very helpful I mean the developer LaMotte Frey who developed he developed a Big Bang Theory even was religious and it was people like Fred Hoyle who opposed it strongly until the evidence came in in the 1960s even then

01:09:13 he opposed I think he never did accept that he couldn't imagine universe having a beginning but somebody from a kind of theistic perspective that was much easier to imagine Einstein couldn't imagine the universe having a beginning and that's why he introduced originally the Cosmo chuckle constant to make to get an eternal universe so in that particular case you can see that actually the religious belief actually helped the acceptability of that the Big Bang Theory so you are saying that on this on

01:09:46 surface level religion and science may seem not compatible but on a deeper level they are compatible right how are they compatible there I mean the idea of theism that's why the saying idea that there's a God who created the universe and intelligence behind it would lead you to expect that there'd be in the structure of the universe would be intelligible who would lead you to

01:10:16 expect it would be an elegant elegantly structured had a fundamental level so and that we could understand and that's been a mainstay of science is that we can actually understand the universe which wasn't given to us that we most cultures didn't assume we could really understand the underlying nature of things but how are you I mean how would you ever like as a scientist me work into two domains you work in from mathematics for your you work with mathematical proofs then you work within the construct of an observational especially test hypotheses how is the

01:10:47 idea of God a testable hypothesis I mean how would you test that well I mean the thing is you're demanding that everything all your what you're assuming is all knowledge is scientific knowledge and all the hypotheses you have about the world can be gained by science I mean a simple refutation of that is your own consciousness you'll never get to your own consciousness by a scientific study you know you're conscious because you're aware a pester I know my gut is probably there Todd okay so or moral I'm if you all tomorrow

01:11:19 cruise you're not getting them by means of scientific investigation so I wouldn't subscribe to God as a scientific hypothesis I think that's a big mistake to do that so you can't test God to test the god hypothesis isn't that a slippery slope when it comes onto other things then and say well this isn't really scientific well they're there to be evidence for things without being scientific evidence I mean I think you have evidence in mathematics which is not strictly speaking empirical evidence there's

01:11:50 evidence I mentioned for but as a formality to it at least ooh yeah proof so there's a difference between evidence and scientific evidence scientific evidence is a narrow one particular area that's been very successful kinds of evidence but there's other kinds of evidence or reasons people could have let me let me clarify why I asked you about science and religion both both in the evolution of Homo sapiens are add-ons there are human constructs things we attached to

01:12:21 ourselves and the vice-versa obviously in order to live more easily science is obviously that why do you think now in your own specialty and domain why do you think a religion was was obviously invented they discovered and adopted by humans a long time ago not not the monotheism to which you are referring

01:12:51 why is religion complex question but I don't think it has to but I would say two things I think people do have a sense of the transcendent and so in a sense of so on one side the philosophical side they have a sense of the transcendent they have a sense of moral moral value and once you have the sense of moral value if you see let's say evil in the world people that commit

01:13:23 evil often live better lives than those that do good then it seems morality and many people's minds require that you know the good I'll ultimately are not worse off at least than the evil better there's a sort of what happens to a person and but their moral character is eventually must coincide so then you either get him just on naturalistic basis from those kind of things you either get a van a hail or reincarnation system and then

01:13:56 there's a sense of transcendent reality I mean that accounting for maybe the order you see in the world that the world exists at all but then on the there's a whole bunch more to religion than that and there's a lot of in sociological explanations religion helps group cohesiveness and we see that throughout the world so then there's a whole bunch of sociological issues that arise dashes which is which is another

01:14:27 big factor in religion and then if you believe in Revelation then there can be you know the revelatory syverud we just give a naturalistic or merely philosophical account I think those are the two two big ones and group cohesiveness from an evolutionary perspective is going to help the survival of the gorilla but there you go are these things these good things that you're eliminating it could be contributed by a lover of science all the way to wonderful mathematics very engineering how to build the city how to to stay

01:15:02 away from danger you name the place okay so the urge the human urge to live more easily save for longer is in the very beginning and the earliest version in my view at least were knowledge of the history of man the earliest way to to put that urge to use meaning to use nature to live with nature to live with the environment was

01:15:32 to wish was to religion so I I was curious to know whether I like my many of my colleagues you regard that you think that the people of religion should fear science and vice versa people in science should fear religion to me they're all in fact human religion being older and a religion with science is definitely a much better add-on than

01:16:03 religion without science right why would we position but science is much better [Laughter] questions please come up to the microphone and things pitch in for the questions and keep your comments in the form of a question [Music] how you doing

01:16:36 so the question that I have is I just pretty much kind of like going off the last thing given the fact that okay so the question being couldn't mathematics itself be quote-unquote God's right I'm putting in air quotes for a reason or couldn't the NOC could knowledge itself be quote unquote God or couldn't sort of the idea of like like what you were

01:17:07 saying before in terms of like that transmute ativ nature of things in and of itself or pattern itself that we sort of assign understanding to couldn't that in and of itself be godlike does God necessarily have to be personification or an appointment anthropomorphic ation of what we see like couldn't the intelligence itself be God I think in I

01:17:44 mean the kind of popular image you get of God as a god out there that's in a very anthropomorphic image and molding things etc I mean when I think of God I think of it just as that an underlying intelligence that grounds everything so that the idea is is that if you ask the question what is and I know you've got comments about fundamental what's when you go all the way back to reality what you find is reality ultimately impersonal is that the ultimate story so

01:18:16 it's just matter in motion for instance is for so and then consciousness arises out of matter so consciousness is sort of an epiphenomena of the material or is that consciousness is the most fundamental and then when you get consciousness you get mind usually goes along with it and will and intelligence and mathematics has been the conceptualizations of that intelligence

01:18:46 it's one view of mathematics and so in that conception of God then it's really thinking that it's not an alpha morphic conception of God out there but a reality a conscious reality that's underlying and sustaining everything and so that it's it's a question of which route do you go at the very beginning of what's most fundamental which leads you in these two different directions also

01:19:18 trace your points first of all mathematics is not physics physics is nature physics is what happens I like the Latin version of it nature or not Torah which is the personification of into a lady who gives birth to everything so that is physics now in the history of science the description and the reasoning of these things that we see in nature came first meaning was born out of this Natura as as geometry

01:19:51 and that was a very cumbersome argument to to teach all the way to the school of Plato which said he who cannot do geometry is not allowed to enter very difficult so then it was simplified algebra trigonometry or calculus so in the beginning geometric arguments from Newton and so mathematics is a is a

01:20:23 evolutionary process of simplifying the book of physics that's what it is so no English is a much simpler language than my say French and Latin that's why English now has taken the world taken over the world so I read disagree just like I didn't make a discrete I I think in many cases actually the mathematics preceded the physics like I mentioned the complex numbers so wasn't

01:20:53 actually useful in physics to quantum mechanics in the 1930s but complex numbers fact I think it goes back to the 17 imaginary numbers in the development of the complex number system in 18th and 19th century counties okay clarified just a second the name for the discipline is new it comes from the the second half of the 1800s before that it was called mechanics and it is as always

01:21:23 the Greeks and mechanics is the science of figures bodies well the ones that statically were described as geometry now these things the pulleys the ropes the the building's the making of the buildings was mechanics the building of the the ditches and the trenches and the roads so mechanics is the original name for what I was talking about what the question was good mathematics be God so if you say physics proceeded mathematics are you saying physics could be good

01:21:55 well Einstein said that they're all God's laws okay as the answer there okay next good consider these difficult questions whether the panelists are really so sure themselves as it appears why is it so difficult people say I don't really know it seems obvious to me given the dispute amongst you all that no one really knows but do you do you have doubts or do you really think

01:22:26 you're right did you do know about what about why things are the way they are scientists say the beginning of the question because they don't hear well would you speak to this one you how people can be so sure themselves about why things are the way they are opening arguments in the disputes and why people can't say I all know since our hobbies

01:22:56 questions people they really don't know but very few people the very share with him a secret yes yeah before this meeting started that we're having a roundtable in a in a back room there and dr. Narcisse en you brought up the fact that most people think they know more than they know I wanted to add to that that most professors think they know more than accepting okay and very few

01:23:34 very few except those who are in a hurry to go home after a lecture or a conference to say gee I go to excellent question but I i I don't know so it's a useful answer to many of these questions by the urge the urge to to pursue the question especially when it arrives unexpectedly although very honest the audience that courage is actually very valuable and from it to my students

01:24:06 so they're very important to teach because most people do not get it that they are actually free to question authority can't propose some experiment that would prove you're wrong or right make some prediction I'd say we're gonna do some experiment to show it comes out the way I think it does or it doesn't do the work and if his experience is full of these examples my oh sure here's the story of I

01:24:37 predicted the evolution of the speed in sports I predicted it that was in the spring of nineteen of the 2008 that was a months before the Beijing Olympics I predicted that the the next winners in sprint n swim will be bigger okay and with a mathematical formula a very simple a equals B kind of formula and I as submitted as a as a later a letter to nature with a cover letter which I said the dear editors my colleagues please

01:25:09 publish this immediately because in just two months from now this will be shown to be correct and they of course because I'm from engineering decided not even to review my my my my contribution my contribution was on the rebound published a few months later in the Journal of Experimental Biology in Cambridge not a lightweight journal meaning a here are the facts comparative biology journal but in Beijing in July

01:25:42 my prediction turn out to be correct I did not predict the names of the winners but I predicted their sizes and their speeds you see but that's not well it's not proving a fundamental Issac Laurel it is as it is it is as the proving in retrospect meaning a hindsight that everything that you brought up earlier with the insects and the so-called convergent evolution should be happening this way that the the bigger should be faster not just you know a waving your

01:26:15 hands but in a long history in accord with this precise formula that is to predict that it was not questioned in the past is the the proof that you are waiting your question how many predictions that you make that didn't come true that we never heard about the doctor already comes in in fact that has not happened yet okay thank you you wanted to say something oh no I do

01:26:45 do you have time I I just have a couple of comments I really enjoyed this it's wonderful I haven't thought this much about these issues since college and until the last election of course and I wanted to make a couple of comments and they would raise questions regarding the existence of God I think the gentleman I was here late so I don't really have all your names mentioned that you can't test the existence of God unless I got that wrong and if that is if that is

01:27:16 true then how can you describe God that's one question you might want to reference a show that Stephen Colbert had a few weeks ago or a few months ago where Ricky Gervais swooz there and he proposed a following thought experiment which is that if humanity were wiped out or all civilization were wiped out what would we recreate the same religions or would we recreate the same physics and mathematics which is more likely and Colbert was I think stunned by that which is impressive considering

01:27:49 his deep religious beliefs and his mind I also wanted to comment on what you mentioned about what I think is synchronicity which is kind of parallel well I guess parallel evolutionary appearances due to different processes and I think that's an important thing to keep in mind and the last thing I want to say is I did some research when I was a resident I'm a pathologist by training that did describe symmetries in biology

01:28:19 which I could discuss with you privately if you're interested that speak to some very basic primal mathematical principles I don't think it ever saw the light of day but it was fascinating sorry cute a lot so the two of you I think other questions well I could I think about I've heard you write you said if you can't test whether God exists how can you describe God well I mean we don't haven't I can describe God how an idea what consciousness is

01:28:50 because unconscious and I have an idea but it being an agent is and knowledge is so I don't see where you'd have to test something to be able to describe it I could describe on a very very distant planet yep is with physicists would say is outside our light tone which means we'll never be able to determine whether it's there or not I can describe there's a certain kind of being on the planet let's say a unicorn give you a description of the unicorn so I can describe but without

01:29:21 ever being able to test whether that's the case or that there's extraterrestrial intelligence outside our light cone so I don't see how the two are connected together I think you'd have to have some sort of access to the properties you're using to describe the thing but that doesn't require an ability to be able to test whether it exists or not would you like to come in yeah I like to think of God as a Flying Spaghetti Monster Sheri biologists to

01:29:55 recast uh yeah religion of Flying Spaghetti Monster but with regard to its synchronicity and convergence I mean one of interesting topic that's come up in evolutionary biology recently is trying to understand convergence not just from the framework of a common natural selective force which is always how since Darwin it's been interpreted when you see two things that look the same you say AHA they're under similar

01:30:26 adaptive pressure but now I think with with new new tools genomics new tools and developmental biology and cell biology we can start to understand the kind of canalization that is the molecular constraints the molecular level that that drive convergence in ways that may not be as related to adaptive pressure as we think thank you any other questions it seems

01:31:04 to me that all of the members of the panel with the exception of Professor de Jong may be successfully avoided the topic at hand and I think the topic at hand is it says design in nature this really is their design in nature and what I heard from Professor de Jan was that nature designs itself and it does it through the mechanism of evolution which is underpinned by the law of physics and that means and that really

01:31:39 is something which is in its own way post creation or post development in some way so it still leaves open the question as to whether or not there was design or a designer how did evolution how did the law of physics come about thank you who wants to tackle that in my latest book the physics of life the answer to your point is I agree with

01:32:11 what you bring up is that is that evolution which really means changing design with a perceivable discernable direction over time was corners and everything from the beginning [Music] besides hmm

01:32:44 right the water and it keeps trying various and detox the notes pretty Jess did you destroy that would read this right I never it's it's it it's an evolution of the flow architecture and the river basin is just one part of it it's the circuit

01:33:14 executed by water in nature first there is the the rain the rain the falls on the ground in the form of droplets the droplets while the flow falling down acquire a shape that tends to minimize drag you know okay there we go so that's the first that that's the quality of the embryo that gives birth to the river basin the river basin is the wet mud in the beginning then you have the rivulets and then they the the the hill slopes and in the rivers and so on all the way

01:33:46 to the Delta I forgot to mention Delta which is the river basin in Reverse just like the breathing in and breathing out and then there is what happens to the water from the river basin either evaporation from the ocean or from the Kalahari Desert in the caves over the Okavango Delta so and then the the evaporated the humid air is lighter it rises with the undulating rivers you see meandering rivers of plumes which then circulate on the on the same world map

01:34:18 as the winds more easily so this in fact so this one actually has to be about the atonement it's about not only the the thing that that you bring up which is the river basin it's about the river basin flowing together with everything else with the so called the environment or with the nature itself so the the physics is holistic the laws of physics are obeyed by anything everywhere in any

01:34:49 time and that's why this discussion that this topic I commend you for putting it together as a title is is extremely timely and there's another bar biology it was not about the technology evolution either it's in fact it's apart they read everything that has evolving design ok so it might be ok looks so ok so I'll just say you know design for me is such a loaded word there's a scientist because the last thing I want to say is that anything is

01:35:21 designed because I don't believe that I don't think anything is designed design is something we impose after the fact on what we see around us because of our squirmy little mammalian brains doing the things but it doesn't mean that there aren't some really extraordinary questions and big questions so for example 13.8 billion years ago the Big Bang the universe was not the way it is now it was extremely uniform it was hot

01:35:52 it had almost no structure to it somehow 13.8 billion years later it's made structures out of itself capable of recognizing that fact that's a big question right I mean that then it's a big scientific question for me and I think that's you know that's the more interesting thing how did it happen I agree it's physics but I don't know how to connect all the dots from 13.8 billion years ago to today and I feel

01:36:25 that sometimes I look you know we the fact that we impose this notion of design and form and shape and elegance and beauty on the world around us has been useful in some respects but we don't know if that's the best thing to do for unearthing the deeper truths I don't know I really don't so I just wanted to put that out I just and I just wanted to say I design say design to me and I kind of go into a quivering and as I want to out of the door just just just to say

01:36:57 that let's see what do you want to say something well not really I mean to me like it's like you know being a scientist for me it's not about like figuring out the big questions and all this other kind of stuff is just I'm visible I just do it cause it's fun it's creative like you know like I mean it's like that uh when we discovered like it's like you know I'm known for studying dinosaurs and I can't stand dinosaurs but you know it's just a way it would be like you know when we figured out what color dinosaurs worth

01:37:27 it's not like we cared we just wanted to see if we were clever enough to do it and to figure out a way that we could using fun radiation is that to be all like you know do it and that you know so I could mean a lot of it is just it was just that because it gives us a you know I've used Sciences of mechanism to for us to be able to you know understand all the way from the most fundamental questions in the world to like the Lindt and figuring out what color one kind of dinosaur was 130 million years ago so like that it's just it allows us to be able to do that in a repeatable and

01:37:58 fundamental way by you know using mathematics they using technology and by asking the right questions and it's just a way to approach the world and now hey so anybody else yes you can ask another question [Music] it's they're just no it's fine I might teach so I

01:38:30 in terms of like answering this question what is really the question require like some sort of multi field understanding that for the most part like well there's two questions so when they require some sort of multi fuel understanding that we're just not really capable of in

01:39:00 anyone's particularly 90 year lifetime it's probably intractable I mean there's nothing wrong with that everything Sciences there's nothing wrong with saying we can't do that and I don't know that yeah because like one of the things I was thinking of was like in terms of even just for example I was watching a documentary on a nine Stein and it was a situation where like he ran into mathematics problems and so it was a situation where like there was a race between him and honest another mathematician who was older than he was and you know any he's trying to figure

01:39:33 figure things out you know and and a lot of situations where I think you know where you know yeah like physics and science and psychology and all these other things I was I teach other with just this gentleman on the fact that Carl Jung for example knew a lot and consulted with people outside of his field you know to answer a lot of different questions and even as myself as an English teacher I often I often bring up things in terms of science and

01:40:06 atoms of and constantly trying to say that I mean in terms of that understanding of like convergence I think that would be necessary for understanding the underlying sort of intelligence that there is to creation and then the second thing is going back to with you guys were in addition talking about you know the dynamic is always changeable that

01:40:40 you know and going into your question which is you know don't we is there always isn't there always a situation where we don't know you know like some I was reading something when they were saying at the edge of the chaos in the world there's always formation so isn't there always a situation where and if we if we ever if we were ever saying this is Dawne then wouldn't that be the end of learning

01:41:10 okay but that's your question okay right direction the first of all the basically a movie but they sketch in their zoology book okay that's the first thing the second there is no end to evolution the speaks of the of the equal

01:41:44 of the edge of chaos I don't use the word chaos because it means I don't know anything meaning I give up it's like turbulence so but anyway there is that's the good news that that there is always a a flow architecture in the future that will be serving us better and and what you call it is really not only up to you but depends on your upbringing some of us

01:42:16 have have gotten both the religion and science others have gotten only the first the mothers say we only got in a second but but every single one of us has the urge to live and talk about including my cat the urge to to live more easily say for longer and all the rest but in question what your question was if there's a God should we just stop questioning anything is that living

01:42:50 under Trump you know I guess right it's gonna mean right depends but if if you don't believe in God right then you're gonna keep questioning and if you do believe in God you have a choice right and historically many people who believe in God were also scientists and kept questioning the world around them and unveiling the majesty of whatever I mean it's just different motivation you know someone like me is not motivated that way and even if you told me there is a

01:43:21 God I go yeah no not really no I'm just not gonna go I say one last comment and we are just going to say I think natural like something a theory thing and those who want to talk about the quantum creation of

01:43:52 reality end up needing to hypothesize like the mathematics of quantum mechanics that is not instantiated anywhere it's with just mathematics and that somehow something that mathematics is given being so I'm just trying to clarify think that was your and if you've got to that final theory whether it's a personal God or not would questioning cease well you might not be searching for the ultimate explanation anymore but there'd be a lot of other things to explore okay thank you very

01:44:29 much [Music]