Archive for the Category »Science «

18
Mar
Imagination and the Nature of Science
Joemar

Imagination is both a friend and a foe of science. It is a foe in the sense that it tends to be unrealistic, illogical and anti-scientific. It has a tendency to make something appear appealingly true without evidence. Examples of unbridled imaginations are myths, legends, fictions, and fabrications, among others. What science does is to challenge imagination to be in accord with nature – that is, to conform to that which we can observe and demonstrate through our senses.

At the same time though, imagination helps a scientist to conceive of new ways to interpret a body of data obtained through empirical investigation. The difference is that imagination this time is constrained by what is reasonable, logical and what is amenable to testing.

Therefore, scientists are free to imagine as wild as they can to explain a huge body of findings in a coherent way; but, aside from the fact that it should explain all the findings, it should also make testable predictions. When the predictions are correct, then we have more confidence that the “imagined” explanation is correct. In essence, this is what a scientific theory is. In scientific jargon, it is more than just being a guess or suggestion.

Theories, in fact, make science meaningful and interesting. Without theories, science will just be a boring collection of facts, principles and laws that are not able to explain much, or anything at all. A theory connects all these pieces together and explains their relationships. The most imaginative ones are usually those who come up with the best theories. Think about Darwin and Einstein and the proponents of the Atomic Theory, the Cell Theory of Life, the Germ Theory of Disease, and the Big Bang Theory.

The core of science is actually a collection of interrelated and overlapping theories. Some are already very old and have been continually confirmed by newer findings and these are the ones that we have the highest confidence. It is from this collection of established theories that science draws its power to explain any old or new findings.

Some theories that are new or those that are on the forefront of scientific developments are still waiting for further confirmation; and we are thus less confident of their accuracy (examples are various theories on aging). Oftentimes, as new findings come up, there is a need to revise some aspects of a theory or theories that seek to explain them. It also happens that one of many conflicting theories is favored by recent findings and the others are dropped.

Furthermore, old and established theories can still be challenged and later revised or even discarded in favor of a better one. It is then obvious that with this overall dynamic nature of science, it cannot claim absolute certainty or absolute knowledge of truth. There are only probabilities – that is, the more established theories are those having a very high probability of being right. However, this is in fact the best humanly possible means of knowing the truth. Other means of knowing, like revelation or mystical inner self-enlightenment, offer no rigorous standards and safeguards against error.

Science is never complete and not all questions can be answered through this approach (or at least not yet now). Although it is possible to live life with the bare minimum of science and reason as guiding principles, it is always tempting to go beyond these. After all, our imagination is able to create an unrealistic world that is more dramatic (like, we are saved from the bondage of sin by a loving God), more magical (with the miracles and the angels), more meaningful (everything is an act of worship) and more pleasurable (hmmm…heaven!).

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16
Mar
“Life Could Not Have Come Through Random Mutations”
Joemar

As I survey through different blogs and websites and from conversations with certain friends on the topic of evolution, I can almost always encounter an argument that goes something like, “Life could not have evolved through random mutation”. This is supposed to be a short and crisp evolutionist stumper. Indeed, how could random mutations produce all the biological complexity in nature?

The answer is in fact the major point, if not the whole point, of Charles Darwin’s book, The Origin of Species. He suggested a mechanism that drives the evolution of species to maximum fitness to the environment. Simply put, nature selects the good characteristics or traits from the bad ones in a population of organisms. A portion of the population that that has characteristics that make the species fit for the environment survives and these traits are passed on to the next generation while a fraction of the population that has characteristics or traits that make the species unfit to the environment simply die. This is known as natural selection and is obviously not random at all.

Yes indeed, mutations are random, but this is not the driving force of evolution. It only provides the material for genetic diversity but it is in itself not directed towards any particular purpose. Mutations can be harmful or beneficial. It can even be demonstrated that there are more harmful mutations than beneficial ones. However, natural selection favors the good mutations and perpetuates these more than the bad ones. An accumulation of beneficial mutations can transform a simple organism to a complex one after thousands or millions of generations. Given (1) time, (2) random mutation and (3) non-random natural selection, the seemingly impossible complexity can become possible. With these factors taken together, evolution can never be called random.

There is a huge body of evidence that evolution occurred and that it largely followed the mechanism as described by Darwin, which I don’t intend to enumerate and explain in this short article. It is important that one knows what evolution is and what it is not in order to appreciate the pieces of evidence that will be presented. I personally think, that most people’s ideas about evolution describe what evolution is not. Another example is, “If humans evolved from apes, then monkeys should not be here anymore”, which is rather easily debunked if the concept of common descent is well understood.

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27
Jan
Thoughts on a Universe from Nothing
Joemar

I completed watching a lecture of Dr. Lawrence Kraus on the topic of the universe coming out of nothing. It is indeed a hallmark of success of modern cosmology that all events can be traced back now, from pieces of evidence, at the beginning of the universe up to time zero.

It goes beyond common sense to imagine how things came to be as depicted in the latest best model of cosomological understanding. As ridiculous as it might seem, most modern cosmologists are now convinced that the universe came from nothing – that is, from empty space. However, “empty space” is not really statically empty. It’s an emptiness where matter and energy are created and annihilated in a dynamic balance. This is called quantum fluctuation, which can be logically deduced from Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle. A sustained imbalance of creation/annihilation process resulted to a sudden outburst of matter and energy creation, which we call the Big Bang.

This is not immune to the sticky question of cuasation. What caused the sudden imbalance? Proponents of the god hypothesis can fill an intelligent god in this gap of our knowledge, something that really doesn’t explain anything. If an intelligent designer initiated this imbalance, how can we detect the presence of this designer? Alternatively, is there a non-intelligent/mechanistic cause of the imbalance?

In the end, the question of ultimate cause has to be confronted. Following Occam’s Razor, a simpler explanation is always most likely to be correct than a complex one (e.g. intelligent designer).

A simpler explanation that have been conceived is that the universe simply came from empty space. The imbalance that brought forth our universe is not unique, it could have been happening all the time. Thus, other universes may be lying out there but they’re just very far for us to observe. Universes, like ours, can just pop-out from nothing, due to quantum fluctuations.

If our universe came from nothing then nothing more needs to be explained. Nothing, therefore, could be the ultimate cause. If we should call the ultimate cause with the name “God”, then God is actually nothing.

On how this nothingness brought forth complexity in the universe is a separate question; but one that has been answered quite sufficiently by evolution. I personally think that the initial state of nothingness is actually already complex and that the resulting universe and life forms that happened to evolve later on are just other forms of complexity. In this point of view, evolution should actually be conceived as transformation from one complex form to another complex form and not from simple to complex.

For a graphical summary of the origin of the universe, see the figure below. Source: NASA.

Category: Philosophy, Science  Tags: , ,  View Comments
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