What is the Cause of Evolution?

A friend sent me a copy of a review (apparently from the February 2009 issue of a publication called Choice) of a book written by Susan Jacoby, entitled The age of American unreason. The reviewer wrote:

But [the book] ... offers a sharply argued defense of reason, logic, science, ... If the anti-evolution fervor of religious fundamentalism is the US's most glaring example of irrationalism, ...

Strictly speaking, neither anti-evolution fervor nor anti-anti-evolution fervor are in the scientific tradition, which never quite believes any theory. Personally, I find the idea of progressive evolution to be in conflict with the idea of natural selection, and the latter seems more reasonable to me than the former. Namely, the idea that life was destined to progress from simple organisms to ever more complex organisms, culminating in homo intelligenticus, might appeal to some religious and social thinkers, but it seems irrational in the absence of an observed cause of this particular effect.

Natural selection, as I understand it, is the idea that different kinds of organisms may happen to be better equipped to cope with hostile new environments than other kinds of organisms. Those that are sufficiently well equipped will survive, while those that are not so well equipped will not survive. There is no guarantee that any organism will be sufficiently well equipped to survive. It may be, I might add, that those organisms that can cope marginally in a hostile new environment might eventually experience mutations that would permit them to cope more (or less) favorably.

These are mere ideas that I certainly have never tested or even investigated because I have no emotional motive to do so. Fortunately, there and countless anti-evolutionists and perhaps a few anti-natural selectionists who are motivated to find fatal flaws in the theories. Bravo!

Eugene Paul

Lord Russell's Amœbæ

Yesterday a recently retired philosopher friend quoted Bertrand Russell on the subject of evolution:

"Evolution from amoeba to man is generally considered to be progress, but whether the amoeba agrees with this opinion is not known."

One day Lord Russell placed his hand under the objective lens of a powerful microscope and discovered to his delight that his own body consisted of trillions of amœbæ.

I used to hear the blighter talk on the radio, and I was always amused by his halting, stammering pattern of speech, which I attributed to the profundity of his thought. Now I know that his difficulty lay in arriving at an amœbic consensus.

Eugene Paul

Academic Mysticism

In thinking about evolution the other day, it occurred to me that I do not actually understand causality. Accordingly, I looked in at the Wikipedia monograph on Causality to see how much was already understood about that subject, and in so doing I came upon yet another infernal 'paradox':

The Paradox of the Grand Hotel

Consider a hypothetical hotel with countably infinitely many rooms, all of which are occupied – that is to say every room contains a guest. One might be tempted to think that the hotel would not be able to accommodate any newly arriving guests, as would be the case with a finite number of rooms. Etc., etc., etc.

Anticipated amusement turned to anger which soon became outrage. Why do academic mystics tie themselves into knots by making absurd assumptions and then marvelling at the paradoxical results?

The paradox is summarized in the monograph on Infinity as follows:

The paradoxical nature of infinity is illustrated by the idea of a grand hotel, with infinitely many rooms—all of which are occupied by guests—but can nevertheless manage to accommodate a new guest by moving each existing guest over, one by one, to other rooms.

A hotel with an infinitely large number of rooms, each large enough to contain a guest, would have to be infinitely large. But the only universe that we have ever experienced appears to be finite in size. It appears, therefore, that the paradoxical Grand Hotel could not exist because it could not fit inside the universe.

Infinity is a concept encountered in mathematical theory (1/0 = ∞) and in science fiction, but not in reality, or I'm very much mistaken.

Eugene Paul