1. Comment #7952 by goddogit on November 20, 2006 at 2:18 am

Another very good show, but the flattering opening "We may be unique in the Universe!" I could really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really have done without.
As much as I prize life, mundanely beautiful (and safe) as my own is, a corner of my mind resonates with WSB's view, that humanity is a sort of mistake, an evolutionary dead-end. I certainly and vehemently do not want science to resume the particularly horrid, useless, and destructive idea of the "special uniqueness" of homo sapiens. That IS traditionally the job, or confidence trick, of Religion, and one I especially consider a prime reason to abolish it.
Richard doesn't believe this, I believe, and should note how tinny this proclamation sounds at the show's opening.

2. Comment #7962 by Martin on November 20, 2006 at 2:35 am

Actually... I think we are unique.

The thing to keep in mind is that religion says that makes us special.

I think we are unique, but I don't think we are special. We are unique in that there is only one species like us, and it's extremely unlikely that an identical species will evolve anywhere ever again. It might be similar in many respects, but it won't be the same.

Being unique doesn't confer specialness upon you.

3. Comment #8020 by Philo on November 20, 2006 at 7:40 am

Asking "Why am I me" exposes a deep misunderstanding in that it presupposes that what "you" are is something other than your body. If you were Tony Blair, or Beethoveen, you wouldn't be you!

4. Comment #8048 by island on November 20, 2006 at 9:27 am

Some scientists, like; James Kay, Eric Schneider, Dorion Sagan, and Scott Sampson think that this is to satisfy sharp energy gradients per the second law of thermodynamics, but the magnitude of the anthropic physics indicates that this effect would have to be universally affective, so there has to be something else that we do that makes this true, if the hypothesis is correct.

http://www.taipeitimes.com/News/edit/archives/2004/09/30/2003204990
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0226739368/sciencewriter-20?creative=327641&camp=14573&link_code=as1

The assumption that the physics that enables our existence is "unique" to our planet and/or our galaxy... is false, however, as the goldilocks enigma predicts that there is an entire "layer" of similarly evolved systems in the "golden region" of our observed universe, so if we're not here by accident, then there is more likely a "cumulatively" good reason for it.

5. Comment #8074 by Yorker on November 20, 2006 at 10:55 am

I think all Dawkins meant here is that it's entirely possible that we're the only intelligent species in the universe. So not only *might* we be unique, as far as we know, we *are* unique and will remain so until evidence to the contrary is clear.

Incidentally, this show was one of a science series broadcast here in the UK about 3 years ago.

6. Comment #8079 by Kingasaurus on November 20, 2006 at 11:05 am

"I think all Dawkins meant here is that it's entirely possible that we're the only intelligent species in the universe. So not only *might* we be unique, as far as we know, we *are* unique and will remain so until evidence to the contrary is clear."

This was my take on his meaning, also.

Despite the wishes of people (including me) who hope that life and even intelligent life is somewhat commonplace in the galaxy, we don't know and can't be certain. We aren't at a stage where we can't really put a good educated guess on the relative difficulty of life arising in a certain place and an intelligent species emerging thereafter.

It's possible that the answer to the Drake Equation is "1".

I would certainly be very disappointed if that were the case, but it is a possibility that must be considered.

7. Comment #8083 by island on November 20, 2006 at 11:27 am

I think that it is incredibly naive, frankly, to think that carbon-based life might be restricted to one planet in one galaxy.

Restricted, maybe, but not *that* strict:

http://evolutionarydesign.blogspot.com/2006/09/goldilocks-enigma.html

8. Comment #8089 by Yorker on November 20, 2006 at 11:37 am

Comment #8079 by Kingasaurus

Yes and sadly, your solution to the Drake equation may well be correct. I hope it's not, but I must also be mindful that the Universe is the way it is, not the way I might want it to be. As a younger man, I hoped that certain knowledge of extra-terrestrial intelligence would be found before my demise, but (I'm 63) it looks like I'll be disappointed.

I have never felt the need to invent - as some do - false beliefs to serve as a secondary life support system. I don't have time for that, my time is limited and precious, I want to use it wisely on this, the only life I'll ever have.

9. Comment #8090 by Anonymous on November 20, 2006 at 11:45 am

but (I'm 63) it looks like I'll be disappointed.

Maybe not, and I don't want to give us false hope, but there is reason to believe that we might be hearing from our friends sooner than you might think.

If as expected, the evolutionary process of the universe produced a commonly developed "plane", layer, "reefline" of life, (time and "location-wise), then, oddly enough, we will be in reach of similarly developed life on the other side of our galaxy by Christmass day of this year.

http://archives.cbc.ca/IDC-1-75-1535-10258-10/on_this_day/science_technology/twt

10. Comment #8092 by island on November 20, 2006 at 11:52 am

sorry bout the anon posting

11. Comment #8094 by Yorker on November 20, 2006 at 11:52 am

Comment #8083 by island

Are you referring to what Kingasaurus or I said?

If so, it's not a question of naivety, it's simply a matter of fact that we currently have zero evidence of extra-terrestrial intelligence. Personnally, I think it very likely the Universe is brimming with life, but distances are vast, we may simply never know.

If you look at life on Earth, there is no evidence suggesting that intelligence has any survival value, indeed, the evidence seems to point the other way - primitive creatures have been here longest. Perhaps the universal default fate of intelligent life, is to the reach technological stage where it can invent globally destructive weaponry and then use it for self-anihilation.

Of course I hope not, but that's the way things look here on Earth right now.

12. Comment #8102 by island on November 20, 2006 at 12:12 pm

I typically only don't include someone's name when I respond directly under them, or if I qote something that they say, but...

If so, it's not a question of naivety, it's simply a matter of fact that we currently have zero evidence of extra-terrestrial intelligence.

That's like saying that our theories have zero predictive capability, rather than to say that the testable predictions of our theories haven't been confirmed. Your gloom-n-doom scenarios are also not expected for the same reason that it is utterly arrogant to believe that we could possibly ever *truly* violate the ecobalance that we *contributing memebers* arose from, and *belong to*.

Environmental awareness might enable us to make enough "chicken-little-like" noise to curb our behavior enough that we don't get "bitchslapped" back into equilibrium by nature, but I don't pretend to be smart enough to outsmart nature to the point of "self-anihilatiion".

Anthropic balance points are ***FIXED***.

Maybe it is not possible to have religion without God, but couldn't the inverse be possible?


To misquote the master:
We have to have "reliion" or our theories can only predict what we can see right in front of us... so science is "effectively blind" without faith.
-Albert Einstein

13. Comment #8118 by Kingasaurus on November 20, 2006 at 12:57 pm

I was presuming our own civilization would count in any calculation. Then the Drake Equation can't be any lower than 1, because there is at least one technical civilization in the galaxy, and it's us.

I can't say I'm not optimistic that there are other planets with life out there. The evidence we have is suggestive that life may arise relatively easily on planets where the conditions are right. I hope so.

Other species we can talk to?

Again, we don't know. There may be some difficulty in evolving intelligent species that we don't yet know about, in which case an advanced civilization elsewhere may be so unlikely we COULD be the only one in the galaxy. I wouldn't bet money that way, but it can't be ruled out.

We're all just speculating, and the lack of actual data from "ET" means the guesses are all over the place depending on who you ask.

Even if there are a hundred billion advanced civilizations in the known universe, that still means only one per galaxy on average. That means we are effectively alone because the distances are simply too great to manage.

We can't be real confident about our guesses in this area of inquiry. Too many variables.

14. Comment #8128 by Kingasaurus on November 20, 2006 at 1:28 pm

The Drake Equation doesn't have a variable for "willing to communicate". It only tries to guess how many species have attained advanced technology and would be capable of doing so, should they be so inclined.

There's no "right" answer to the Drake Equation. It's just a tool, a systematic way of thinking about the problem and the issues involved. Different people get widely differing answers, because it's just speculative.

The other problem is that even if such civilizations are very numerous. if the closest one to us is very far away, it could be an extremely long time before we are made aware of it, and for all practical purposes it would be no different than being completely alone in the universe. Talk about flying blind!

15. Comment #8137 by Kingasaurus on November 20, 2006 at 1:44 pm

I'm disputing Wikipedia.

I know, it happens. Willing and able are two different variables.

Anyway, I remember Sagan always discussing these issues. Even if you are incredibly optimistic and there are several million technical civilizations in the galaxy right now, the closest one will still be about 200 light years away, on average. There would then be hundreds of thousands of stars between us. Even if this potential contact species were curious, spacefaring and technologically ahead of us, from their perspective there will be nothing special about our particular star, and no reason to come here. As far as they are concerned, there are countless stars in a 200 light year radius, all equally interesting for potential exploration. They would have to stumble upon us, or at least be close enough that they would have a realistic shot of listening in to our long history of radio broadcasts. A tall order.

If you are slightly less optimistic, the distance to the nearest potential contact species increases quickly, and the difficulty in finding them increases also.

16. Comment #8164 by island on November 20, 2006 at 2:45 pm

Then there's the Fermi Paradox, which notes that 200 years is nothing if life could pop-up at any old "tme" in the history of the universe, so space should be filled with radio signals from other civilizations that were too primitive at some point to care whether others might pick them up.

And lest we forget the cosmic coincidences, which note that carbon-based life only occurs in locations that are similarly balanced between relevant opposing runaway extreme tendencies that are individually guraranteed to preclude life.

Bringing us to the testable prediction that we will not find life on Venus or Mars for this reason, and this is a means for falsifying the drake equation WITH the observed goldilocks feature in place.

All of which support what I say.

17. Comment #8166 by Anonymous on November 20, 2006 at 2:52 pm

All Hail Wikipedia, the source of all knowledge...of motivated parties who can shout louder and longer than anyone else... ;)

18. Comment #8169 by Yorker on November 20, 2006 at 2:57 pm

Comment #8102 by island

>>I typically only don't include someone's name when I respond directly under them<<

In this posting format you can't know which post your post will be directly under, it's a matter of timing over which you have no control, better to use a reference I think.

I said:

>>If so, it's not a question of naivety, it's simply a matter of fact that we currently have zero evidence of extra-terrestrial intelligence<<

This is a simple statement, which, unless you have contrary evidence, is undeniably true. After a lifetime of science-based work, I know that the predictions made by a theory must be verfied by observation. Unverifiable predictions will cause that faulty theory to be revised or discarded. How you can say my simple comment above is like saying our theories lack predictive power, therefore mystifies me.

While it's certainly doubtful that global nuclear war would entirely wipe out humanity, it's nonetheless plausible that it could set us back hundreds of years. If that situation pertains to intelligent life universally, then inter species communication won't be possible - ever.

I spent about twenty years of my life involved in the generation and propagation of electromagnetic radiation, I never found any means of signalling that violated old Abe's relativity laws or Maxwells equations. Bear in mind when you quote Einstein, that great man though he undoubtedly was, he was also human and dead wrong about a few things.

Your earlier comment about possible ET communication by christmas also mystifies me, how is that going to happen? Our galaxy is 100K LY across, has space warping and stable worm hole creation been achieved since I retired?

19. Comment #8179 by island on November 20, 2006 at 3:11 pm

Oh my... now there's an example that I'll never use again.

I guess that there is only 14 or 15 thousand star sytems in our reach...

MY bad.

20. Comment #8181 by island on November 20, 2006 at 3:14 pm

he was also human and dead wrong about a few things.

It's easily proven that he was wrong to divide by zero, but you cannot prove that he was wrong about much else, and I can provide an extremely strong argument that supports that he was not.

21. Comment #8195 by Yorker on November 20, 2006 at 3:39 pm

Comment #8181 by island

It's evident that you haven't studied Einstein's work in depth, rather than get into a tiresome refutation hassle with you, I suggest you do some Googling about him but be careful to avoid the crackpot sites. Don't misunderstand me, I'm not decrying Einstein, I'd say he was probably the second or third best scientist who ever lived.

22. Comment #8197 by island on November 20, 2006 at 3:45 pm

It's evident that you haven't studied Einstein's work in depth

lol

23. Comment #8230 by island on November 20, 2006 at 5:09 pm

To clarify and redirect this off-topic stuff:

Einstein didn't know about the real particle potential of the quantum vacuum, or he never would have abandoned his finite, closed, spherical, deterministic cosmological model, because matter generation in this background **causes** expansion by increasing negative pressure, while the newly created particle couterbalances the "antigravitational" effect.

He abanodoned it because he thought that an expanding universe would runaway in that direction, but the increase in the matter density offsets the effect, so he had no reason to do so... he just didn't know everything that we now know.

Einstein was right, all along.

You can go http://www.lepp.cornell.edu/spr/1998-11/msg0013558.html>here and shoot this down in the following article if you want to, but it turns out that this is the same mechanism that is used for inflationary models, so good luck... ;)

http://www.lns.cornell.edu/spr/2006-02/msg0073320.html

24. Comment #8263 by David M on November 20, 2006 at 7:10 pm

The quicktime is broken, perhaps because the server is sending the wrong MIME type, or munging linefeeds, or something. This is on safari on macintosh.

25. Comment #8786 by Anat on November 22, 2006 at 9:14 am

Part of the problem is ignoring the graduality of the change (on both sides of the arms race). The majority of new mutations are failures and get weeded out, but the rare one that provides even a tiny advantage gets selected, is retained and eventually is likely to take over the population. In most cases of quantitative traits you don't get abrupt improvements in a single generation. The phenotype of the mutants will vary in a distribution around that of the wildtype, and if selective pressure is consistent over generations the average of the distribution gets pushed slowly in one direction. In 'The Ancestor's Tale' Dawkins describes a study by Peter and Rosemary Grant of selective survival of finches on one of the Galapagos islands at a time of severe draught. After the draught the average beak length had increased by 0.5 mm relative to average beak length prior to the drought. This was related to changes in availability of edible seeds as a result of the drought.

26. Comment #8854 by seals on November 22, 2006 at 1:12 pm

At the risk of sounding patronising - hmm maybe this is relevant?

http://home.nycap.rr.com/useless/kammerer/

I dunno of course, it just seems that not everyone since Darwin has always been convinced evolution is all due to blind chance, even among scientists. (Kammerer also had a theory about coincidences, and Einstein called it "interesting and by no means absurd" if I recall. Or maybe I've got it mixed up with something else entirely!)

27. Comment #8893 by island on November 22, 2006 at 5:44 pm

...it just seems that not everyone since Darwin has always been convinced evolution is all due to blind chance, even among scientists.

Lynn Margulis would be one very respectable example, but these people are few and far between, because creationists have most people ***erroneously*** convinced that an admission that evidence indicating that we're not here by accident, constitutes evidence for a greater intelligent agent. So they automatically react in devil's advocate fashion with whatever rationale that they can come up with to lose any apparent significance to evidence.

There can actually be no such inferrence without direct proof, because *natural bias* would be the default scientific approach if, for example, there is some good physical reason why intelligent life is *needed* into existence. Necessity being the applicable "mother" of invention, in this case.

You will get nothing but denial from neodarwinians, and as a result, you will hear people like, Paul Davies making similar statements about the predispositioned over-reaction that quickly becomes VERY APPARENT to anyone that bucks the system.

Lynn Margulis went as far as to call them "neodarwinian bullies" as the honered guest speaker at the 2005 evolution conference.

That's more than a simple disagreement among peers, she is making a statement about anti-extremism.

It has been my own personal observation that Lynn and Paul are dead-on the money, but I don't see any hope for overcoming it with reason.

Paul Davies said:
'Biologists have a particular problem with the crazy Intelligent Design people [the 'American Taliban' as Dawkins has it, who persist in believing that nature is the work of a Creator] because the argument goes to the core of their subject, and it has become so politicised that it has to be constantly shot down.'

Frank Close, professor of theoretical physics at Oxford, said:
Then there's the viewpoint of Richard Dawkins, the ardent Darwinist and recent author of The God Delusion, who holds that life is essentially pointless and came about by chance before natural selection took over. Close compares Dawkins to religious fundamentalists, "who know they are right in their position, just as Richard knows he is right in his position".

Paul Davies:
Davies wants to rise above such bickering. "I want to get away from this notion that something has to be accepted on faith," he says. "That just becomes a sterile argument. These people can argue all night, but you're never going to prove or disprove the other person's position."

I disagree, they can be disproven, but unfortunately, it never trumps willful ignorance.

28. Comment #8972 by magetoo on November 23, 2006 at 3:40 am

David M:
Quicktime is broken here too, using wget on Unix. Unless there is a problem playing partially downloaded files; but then it does work with DivX/Xvid, so...

And the file is sent as text/plain. Other videos have worked, though.

Torrent please. :-)

29. Comment #8979 by Anat on November 23, 2006 at 4:04 am

Richard O'Hagan: "I ask again. How does a gene randomly and by pure chance, no matter how small the mutation, get the link between the host and its surroundings? Please, don't repeat again that it does not mimic the environment, it is a chance mutation. That is my WHOLE problem. How could it ever manage to randomly replicate, in no matter how small a way to allow for graduality, the hosts environment?"

But what was the original mutation? How much protection did it provide? Well, for this you must consider what the insect or whatever looked like, it's new environment as well as the visual capacity of its predator. Even a small change in shading or texture - if it is in the right direction - can provide some protection, especially if the visual acuity of the predator isn't that great. So among the mutant offspring of an animal whose environment had changed or who had moved to a new environment, some would be just a little darker or lighter, or have a texture just a bit reminiscent of the pattern of bark, or leaves or whatever the animal rests upon. And that would be some advantage. But then the vision of the predator becomes better at seeing through the camoflage, so there is additional pressure to improve it, etc. The point is, even if the mutation provides lousy camoflage, under some circumstances it would be better than no camoflage whatsoever. Maybe it only offers protection when the animal is in the shade, or maybe only when the sun is low or on cloudy days. It is still better than nothing, so selection has a chance to work.

30. Comment #9963 by Mike on November 26, 2006 at 7:28 pm

r.e. Comment #9013 by Richard O'Hagan

The analogy between seahorses growing small appendages that look 1% like seaweed and humans growing small appendages that look 1% like twigs may be valid, or it may not. I'll be honest: I don't have the knowledge of embryogenesis to be able to answer that question.

However, the words in your post that caught my attention were "by miraculous chance". How low does a probability have to be before you consider it miraculous? This is a serious question. The fact is that very tiny probabilities indeed can be involved in this process, where individual mutations are concerned, and yet the probability of the overall process occurring can be so high that it is nearly certain.

It seems to me as if that is your "sticking point" that makes the whole thing seem ludicrous to you.

One thing that helped me to come to terms with these enormous figures was the analogy of the age of the Earth to the length of an outstretched arm. In this analogy, "all of recorded human history would be gone in one stroke of a nail file". When I read that, I began to grasp just how MUCH time life has had to evolve. And even in the example of the sea horses, we are talking about thousands of generations, and we then have to multiply that by the population size involved (millions, perhaps?) in order to get the actual number of opportunities for that first mutation to arise. Those are pretty big numbers.

One final point: I believe that large physical changes to the organism can arise from the modification of a single DNA base pair, so if you were arguing that the sudden appearance of something physically large is relatively improbable (and I'm not saying you were), then I would disagree.

By the way, I hope I haven't sounded patronising to you, as I have genuinely tried to answer your question.

31. Comment #10551 by Mike on November 28, 2006 at 11:13 am

All I can say is that if you really want to believe it based on evidence, not just authority, then you have no option but to keep researching.

Read about evolutionary biology: genetics, epigenetics, epigenesis, studies with fruit flies - and keep thinking about the implications of everything you read.
Read about maths: probability theory, statistics, emergent properties of dynamical systems.

Eventually, you will believe it. It takes more than common sense. Some things are just unintuitive, and yet powerful in their simplicity once you grasp them.


I've just re-read that, and this time it DOES sound patronising: but I don't know how else to put it. I'm personally a long way from knowing all of that stuff, but all I'm doing is telling you that I kept studying it, and that there was a point when it all came together and made sense. Prior to that point, my thinking had been too much common sense and not enough science...

32. Comment #10673 by Randy Ping on November 28, 2006 at 9:25 pm

I believe that life is its' own purpose.

33. Comment #10675 by Anat on November 28, 2006 at 9:43 pm

Dawkins makes the argument in the essay 'Darwin Triumphant' in 'A Devil's Chaplain' that if a mutation is small enough in its phenotypic effect it has some 50% chance to be an improvement of sorts. And elsewhere, it has been calculated that very small but consistent selective pressure can cause dramatic changes in phenotype over the course of several tens of thousands of years in a mammal (and much faster in an animal with a shorter generation time, such as an insect) - a geological eyeblink.

34. Comment #10680 by Randy Ping on November 28, 2006 at 10:38 pm

Do you believe that? ;)

35. Comment #10972 by beepbeepitsme on December 2, 2006 at 6:01 am

The Answer Is X
http://beepbeepitsme.blogspot.com/2006/12/answer-is-x_02.html