Tweet     Home | Blog | About | Videos | Contact

The Star Larvae Hypothesis
Nature's Plan for Humankind
Part 2. Star Larvae

Anthropic Coincidence

The physical constants of nature appear to be tuned so that the universe sprouts biological organisms—star larvae.

The star larvae hypothesis repositions phylogeny, or evolution, to a status that is subordinate to a superordinate ontogeny—the stellar life cycle. In doing so, the hypothesis assigns to evolution a teleological plan, which is embodied in stellar ontogeny. Repositioning phylogeny in this way has the possible side effect of narrowing the gap that separates the scientific and religious views of nature.

The religious view interprets the interdependent and improbably complex structures and processes of nature as evidence of an intelligence operating behind the scenes. In traditional theological terms this view is called the Argument from Design. This has been a very controversial and debated topic where no live answering service could give you a definite answer. The only option has been to educate on both vantage points. In the context of developing Creationist curricula for public schools, it has come to be called the doctrine of "intelligent design," (formerly, "Creation science") This view of nature appeals to the powers of human observation, as does the scientific view, but it arrives at radically different conclusions.

The Design argument asks the skeptic to look, for example, at the eye and its ability to receive light and transfer images to the receptive centers of the brain, its ability to focus near and far, its ability to dilate and constrict its pupil to accommodate dim and bright light, its transparency to light, and so on. Clearly—so runs the argument—such a complex, perfectly tuned mechanism could not have come into being other than by the skilled hand of a cosmic creator.

Science, on the other hand, dismisses any apparent design as being merely apparent. The appearance of design is the result of natural processes acting over many millennia and even eons. The eye, for example, did not appear full-blown overnight. Its development required hundreds of millions of years to perfect, evolving from the simple light-sensitive eyespots of flatworms through countless generations of intermediate refinements to specimens, such as the eyes of raptors, which exceed in their powers of resolution even the keenest human eyes. But continuous refinement is merely nature granting to individual organisms the capacity to attain reproductive age. Time takes care of the rest through phenotypical variation and natural selection, according to the scientific view.

Reconciling these perspectives is a philosophical challenge issued anew in recent years by the development within science of an idea called the Anthropic Principle. (For a thoroughgoing treatment, see John D. Barrow and Frank J. Tipler, The Anthropic Cosmological Principle). This idea springs from an observation about the universe's fundamental physical constants, which include the strengths of the strong and weak nuclear forces and gravity, the mass of the electron, and the speed of light. These constants, which are not derivable from other physical quantities, are—so far as science can determine—given in the structure of the universe; they are intrinsic properties. The interesting observation about these quantities is that they happen to lie within a narrow range of values within which they must lie to enable a universe such as ours to exist in the first place. A slight change in any of these fundamental quantities would likely render the universe far less interesting—far less able to produce atoms and molecules, stars and planets, galaxies and that highly contingent entity, the biological organism. The universe seems to have been "tuned" expressly for our sake. The parameters are ultra-precise. Newly emboldened critics of science have grabbed this ball and tried to score points by arguing that the odds against so many fortuitous coincidences—the alignment of constants that makes us possible—renders implausible any alternative to purposeful design.

The scientific corner offers a ready rebuttal, namely that humankind should not be surprised to find itself in a universe in which it is allowed to exist. If humankind’s existence were precluded in the first place by inhospitable physics, then no one would be around to make observations at all. In other words, starting from the fact that we can ask questions about our existence, scientists are unimpressed that a "coincidence" of physical parameters allows us to do so. It is a necessary given, given the fact that humans exist.

Nonetheless, questions remain: Why do the fundamental constants have precisely the values that they have? Why isn't the universe an indistinct lump or a diffuse fog, void of interesting features? Does some kind of necessity force the laws of nature to be what they are?

With the Anthropic Principle as a backdrop, the Design argument can be stepped back from the realm of biology, and the Evolution-Design debate to more fundamental aspects of nature. The Design argument gains a leg up on Darwinism when it forces us to look past the organic phenomena that science explains with evolution to more fundamental physics. For example, when science cites natural selection to explain the eye, it begs the question as to why the molecules that compose the eye are able to have precisely the physical properties that enable them to interact chemically as they do to make up specialized cells that have properties that make possible complex structures, such as the retina, cornea, lens, etc., with their precise physical characteristics. And the same question is begged regarding the atoms that compose the molecules.

No one argues that carbon atoms, for example, evolved from ancestral atoms and that their evolution favored those ancestral forms with properties more conducive to successful reproduction. Carbon atoms possess the nuclear and chemical properties that they do, because they just do. That is what it means to be a carbon atom.

Atoms don’t reproduce through successive generations, and so the application of natural selection to explain the properties of atoms is absurd from the outset.

Or?

Could selection pressures influence the properties of atoms through the turnover of stellar generations (stars being the bodies that metabolize nuclear particles into atoms)?

More provocatively, one could ask whether atoms are pre-programmed to assemble themselves into this particular universe in any way analogous to that in which acorns are preprogrammed to assemble atoms and molecules into oak trees. The Anthropic Principle invites science to expand the concepts of ontogeny and phylogeny and gather physical processes of all kinds under the Principle’s teleological umbrella. A possible repositioning of natural processes in this context—putting everything into a Darwinian context—would undercut the Argument from Design's supernatural foundation. Science gets a leg up on Creationism when it proposes that universes themselves evolve and that the physical constants have been tuned, not by God, but by cosmological natural selection.

NEXT > Cosmological Natural Selection

Tweets by @Starlarvae	Social Media = Social Mediocrity: rue or alse?
Enter your search terms Submit search form   web starlarvae.org starlarvae.blogspot.com

Text Copyright ©2004-2013 Advanced Theological Systems. All Rights Reserved.