Joana Xavier is a rising star in the Origin of Life field. She is a researcher at University College London. She recently authored a paper with Stuart Kauffman on autocatalytic networks which are nature’s version of M.C. Escher’s hand drawing a hand. We discuss the uneasy relationship between professional scientists and Intelligent Design and then go on to discuss conflicts in academia, science funding and publishing.
Joana’s Website: https://jcxavier.org/
Joana’s paper: https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/abs/10.1098/rsta.2021.0244
Podcast: https://evo2.org/podcasts/the-biggest-mystery-in-the-history-of-the-universe/
Download The First 3 Chapters of Evolution 2.0 For Free, Here – https://evo2.org/evolution/Where Did Life And The Genetic Code Come From? Can The Answer Build Superior AI? The #1 Mystery In Science Now Has A $10 Million Prize. Learn More About It, Here – https://www.herox.com/evolution2.0
That’s a good question! I suppose I would put it where our current understanding suggests that it couldn’t have arisen by natural processes. As you said, the origin of life seems to require design. Irreducible complexity comes to mind as a useful criterion. Really, I’d be content to let those working in the area make those decisions, as long as design is treated as a real possibility instead of being ruled out from the start. I just don’t think the default assumption should be that there must be a naturalistic explanation. It would be great if we could get to the point where researchers from different viewpoints worked together to design tests–if we find result A, that suggests a naturalistic answer, but if we find result B, that suggests design. Or can you imagine students being taught, “Our current understanding suggests that x, y, and z developed through natural processes, but a, b, and c seem to require design.” I would love to see that.
Well you can find it all over the place in the creation / ID literature, and I am sympathetic to that perspective up to a point.
But it gets very dicey as soon as you try to decide where to put that line.
ID has drawn a line at biological information, which I have instantiated in the form of the $10M Evolution 2.0 prize. The prize specification was METICULOUSLY drafted over a period of years to precisely demarcate the dotted line between “laws of physics and chemistry” which are fixed, and “laws of information” (coding tables) which are choices.
I believe this does define a very useful dotted line between “naturalism” and “design”; between reductionism and holism. I elaborate even further in my paper “Biology Transcends the Limits of Computation” https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0079610721000365 and I’ll go so far as to say I’ve drawn this line with more precision than anyone else I’m aware of.
In the prize spec I define it in terms of Shannon Communication. In the above paper I define it in terms of Turing’s halting problem. So it’s a rigorously mathematical treatment of the problem. My dotted line is the distinction between deductive reasoning and inductive reasoning. So it is very fundamental.
In a simplistic ID framework, everything on the naturalist / reductionist side of the dotted line is what the laws of physics are capable of, and everything on the choices / holism side is indication of design.
By the way I’ve been working on this specific problem for 21 years. I quickly found I could wield a “god of the gaps” argument very skillfully and I backed all kinds of atheists into a corner with it. To their great embarrassment. See for example https://evo2.org/dna-atheists/
But I think this approach is sophomoric (and I realized that pretty quickly once I got into the debate linked above) because I was only winning the debate *based on a certain arbitrary way of defining the problem* which itself was pretentious and immature.
When you get deep into REAL biology as opposed to the pabulum dispensed by Richard Dawkins and friends, you find that ALL living things not only exhibit signatures of design but actively design and redesign themselves. Living things have machine-like structures, but they are NOT like watches or machines or computer programs. They are not deterministic but possess their own creativity and ability to rewrite their programs.
Barbara McClintock made this very clear in the 1940s and the world is now awash with examples. Almost everything Mike Levin works on illustrates this.
So it turns out the problem is FAR deeper. Almost any example of “design” that a creationist might point to can be executed in real time by a bacterium or a cell or a tissue. Every developing embryo on the planet is designing arms and legs and eyes on the fly, not just executing a rote program.
Obviously origin of life brings the issue to a head. But since we really have NO idea how a cell possesses knowledge of itself, we do not even know how to properly frame what the origin of life exactly is, or which parts of the many chicken and egg problems came first.
So I prefer to think of the Divine as an endpoint or north star that invites us to NEVER underestimate the power of nature. There’s not a dotted line separating two sides. Rather, there is an infinite number line with God at one extreme and simple physical laws at the other.
This is in stark contrast to the reductionist crowd, which has criminally underestimated nature, and done so repeatedly. “Junk DNA” being a prime example. I think the people who fought in favor of that theory should be stripped of their credentials and ejected from the academy. Their crime was vandalizing science and slowing its progress.
My book Evolution 2.0 in 1 sentence: “Darwinists underestimate nature, creationists underestimate God.” I believe one has to hold a high view of both God and Nature and accept that there is a very deep mystery here that firmly resists crisp clear dotted lines.
I insist that nobody gets to use God as a “get out of jail free” card, and that’s exactly what many ID and creationists do.
I insist that nobody gets to say “There is no god, nature is blind and purposeless” and that’s exactly what many secular scientists do.
Both views do a huge disservice to science.
The way both sides have handled this has done incalculable damage to the profession. And this has very real consequences. The next time you see a person whose body is withering from cancer, please remember that we could have been 50 years further ahead if we would acknowledge the intrinsic design CAPABILITY of all cells, especially cancer cells, and recognize that those cells are smarter than any scientist or oncologist. We could be communicating and cooperating with those cells rather than trying to nuke them. We could be listening to what they have to say.
That is why I started http://www.reversingcancer.org and http://www.cancerevolution.org.
Hi Perry,
I hope you are well. I continue to be impressed that you are willing to take the time to discuss these matters with someone who is not a famous expert in this area. Thank you for that. I think I’m not seeing your point about creationists and ID advocates using God as a get out of jail free card. It seems to me that many would be perfectly happy with the idea that God designed cells with all kinds of amazing abilities and potential. I just don’t want people to see these amazing qualities and assume that they arose through some as yet unknown natural process. It seems that so many scientists say (or feel that they are required to say), “Look at this amazing thing that shows every indication of being designed–isn’t it remarkable that this arose through purely natural processes.” I would be quite happy if more and more scientists stood up and said that God was involved and we’re going to do our work with that in mind. That’s why I view most ID theorists as allies, even if I disagree with them in various ways. I’m hoping that EV2 theorists will also stand up and say that God was involved at some level, but, except for you, I haven’t seen that yet. However, I am just learning about EV2 so perhaps I will. Again, I appreciate your willingness to talk and I plan to follow the discussion on these topics.
On an unrelated note, might you be willing to have a brief discussion about Christianity? I would be interested to hear about your views and have the chance to share some of mine. If so, please feel free to email me at [email protected]
Best wishes,
Doug
I am a member of ASA (www.asa3.org), the largest professional association of scientists who are Christians, and everyone of them will be happy to say “God created the world,” “God created earth,” “God created life” etc.
But if you draw a line (somewhere) and say “This aspect of life is from a natural process, but this other one is not” how is that useful to science?
Many ID and creationist people are vehemently opposed to the idea that natural processes could create life.
But what else is a scientist supposed to do? Do you really expect a scientist to say “God did it, that settles it” and get that published in a paper?
If you are an eye surgeon and you assume that the structure of an eye is a divine miracle, then you are operating with the notion that there is a perfect way that it is supposed to work, and that is fine, and it is pro science and pro medicine.
However if you are a scientist in the origins field and you say “God made the eye,” I don’t see any escaping the obligation to pinpoint how, where and when, and to draw a line between what God miraculously did and where nature is able to take over.
I would encourage you to spend some more time carefully considering where you would draw the line between the miraculous and the natural.
Sorry I can’t engage in a private discussion about Christianity at the moment, but if you search you will find LOTS of blog posts, videos, interviews and discussions I’ve done about Christian theology etc etc.
PS- In my mind this is not only about what’s good for science. There’s a spiritual element as well. I would like our culture to see that science and faith are not at odds; rather, science supports faith. Will EV2 scientists support this or continue to support naturalism?
Many “EV2 scientists” aka “third way” or “agential evolution” “cognitive evolution” scientists have some sort of spiritual bent. Buddhists, Christians, Hindus, “New Age”. Their metaphysical views absolutely do influence their scientific practices and hypotheses. A few are atheists.
None of the ones I work closely with are using the divine as a “get out of jail free card” – they don’t regard biological features as God-programmed “zap” miracles. Rather I would loosely characterize them as extremely resistant to ideas like “junk DNA” “vestigial organs” “degenerate code” “pseudogenes” “evolutionary leftovers”.
Because whereas materialistic scientists are prone to say “If we don’t know what it does, it probably does nothing.”
Or worse:
“If it doesn’t fit the current model, it must be waste, noise, or accident.”
(Which violates Information theory, Engineering design logic, systems resilience principles, and frankly, intellectual humility)
….they try as hard as possible to NOT underestimate nature. They expect that behind every mystery is an answer, and behind every answer is 3 more mysteries, so the dance of mysteries and answers may run infinitely deep. Science might literally be bottomless.
Again I’m painting with a very broad brush, but quite a few appear to think of consciousness as being a portal to the divine, and there may be no hard limits on the innate creativity of organisms; and that cognition, consciousness, purpose, and biological creativity is a kind of transcendent gift. I certainly see it that way.
Most of these people do not see science and faith as being at odds with each other. Most are fairly quiet publicly about their metaphysical views, but those views do come up when we’re at the pub.
I would say add if you get to know most of these people well, you find that like most people, many have had undeniable “metaphysical experiences” which quietly inform their scientific views. Those experiences could be almost anything – divine encounters with nature, meditation practices, personal revelations, psychic phenomena, worship experiences, near death and out-of-body experiences, psychedelic trips, spiritual retreats, miraculous healings. Again I say “like most people” because when people have the opportunity to be honest and vulnerable and are not afraid of being judged, a great many have remarkable experiences that cannot be explained in a purely material frame.
In science, where freedom of speech does not exist, one must be circumspect about discussing such things.
It puzzles me that Christians and ID people have been slow to pick up on this. I do not frequently get invited to speak to Christian audiences.
Finally I think EV2 scientists are much more cautious than the average scientists of intellectual hubris and are more aware of the hidden presumptions that all of us bring to the table.
This talk by Michael Levin at Denis Noble’s Oxford Evolution conference 2 weeks ago is a stellar example of harnessing the very best of material viewpoints AND metaphysical perspectives in a synergistic way to drive science forward:
https://thoughtforms.life/a-talk-on-evolution-from-the-perspective-of-diverse-intelligence-implemented-in-morphogenesis/