Thoughts on the environment

Tout commence en mystique et finit en politique.

- Charles Peguy

Thinking about pollution as a public health problem and selective conservation of the natural world, for the sake of present and future generations, are in no way new endeavors. They arose toward the end of the 19th century, led by a variety of people who never dreamed of reading humanity out of nature or expressing hostility toward scientific understanding of nature, then emerging from its infancy. One of the best-known representatives of this movement - which predates the modern environmentalist movement by almost a century - was Teddy Roosevelt, who experienced raw nature first-hand, exploited it by hunting, wrote about it - and then created parks so others could taste the same experience. He was our first, and so far only, "environmental" president. There was nothing coffee-table-ish or armchair about his views, and he made his forays in the wilderness before cell phones, waterproof matches and tents, and other hi-tech paraphernalia were available. Today's environmentalist movement has moved far that orientation, representing a very different and basically mistaken view of nature and of humanity's relation to it. Environmentalism is a movement, not a science. The science is ecology, as practiced by ecologists. That hasn't prevented a long-standing and pervasive confusion between the two.

Born during the period that saw the breakdown of liberalism and its turn towards punitive and backward-looking guilt, the environmentalist movement started as a piece of counterculture and absorbed the older conservation and public health movements, usurping popular acceptance of the latter for its own ends. These ends are motivated by a hatred of technology, science, and modern civilization and bring in train all the classical fallacies of Romanticism: pre-existent "natural harmony," "noble savages," and the evil corruption of civilized humanity. Only once American civilization had reached a certain level of material development could such thinking take hold among more than a tiny number of the unbalanced. It's had a longer run in Europe, where it arose in the late 18th century in reaction to the rise of modern science, industry, and commercial society. The Germans gave a special twist to this thinking, one that merged nature-mysticism with reverence for the Volk and pre-industrial life.

The environmentalist movement has raided non-Western cultures and creatively invented bogus quotes about their attitudes toward the natural world. As shown by Dan Botkin and others, almost all of the supposed wisdom the movement peddles about natural "harmony" and "balance" comes from pre-modern and pre-scientific thinking within Western history, precisely the thinking that has been abandoned by modern science. (It wouldn't be modern or scientific otherwise.) The "pre-existent harmony" or "balance of nature" metaphor is the most common of these fallacies. Such discoveries as organic evolution and chaos (in the technical sense of the word) have forced ecologists to give up "equilibrium" pictures of ecosystems and face the reality of their ceaseless and usually messy change. Ecosystems come and go, start from a little, grow into a lot, mature into a period of glory - then fall apart and are replaced by something else. For example, it's precisely because the chaotic atmosphere and oceans have only a limited "invariant" structure that pinning down what "climate" means is so hard. So it has been throughout the 3.5 billion-year history of life on Earth; human activity just adds some more twists to the mix of permanent chaos.

But the "harmony," "balance," and "equilibrium" metaphors have, since the scientific revolution of the 17th and 18th centuries, taken on a life of their own, now divorced from scientific thought and philosophical criticism. They continued to be sustained by religious feeling and the rise of counter-Enlightenment Romanticism. It helps that the core of Western religious thought since the rise of Christianity has been the template of Paradise-Fall-Redemption, with perhaps an apocalypse in there somewhere. The relationship of environmentalism to this paradigm and the related concept of Original Sin is too obvious to require comment. So is the environmentalist hope that humanity's supposed trashing of the planet demonstrates that humans are still at the center of things, if only in a negative way. High German Romantic thought of the 19th century (with echoes and variations from the American Transcendentalists) recommended withdrawal from both human society and the five senses as a preliminary to communing inwardly with Nature - not the thing you can perceive, but a "telephone from the beyond," as Nietzsche wittily once put it.*

This is the paradigm of Thoreau's time living alone at Walden Pond, a Romantic exercise if there ever was one. He wasn't scientifically studying the ecosystem at Walden, getting his hands dirty. Not to put too fine a point on it, he was staring at his navel.** The root of environmentalism lies in a restless search for a new religion to replace older faiths no longer believable or relevant.

After the fallacy of pre-existent balance, the most powerful bad metaphor reigning over environmentalist thinking is its misplaced and often childish anthropomorphism and zoomorphism. Wild animals are not pets or farm animals, which are selectively plucked out of "wild" nature and bred by us to heighten characteristics that fit into human domestic and food needs. (After all, the wild ancestors of dogs could have been selectively bred to heighten other characteristics and turned into mean predators with no socially redeeming features.) Ecosystems and, indeed, the whole planet lack the integrated purposive and functional unity of individual animals and humans. It's a gross mistake to take metaphors like "Gaia" as more than fanciful poetic usages; the Earth doesn't think, feel, remember, or command anything.

But environmentalist literature and discourse are thoroughly polluted with such language and the concepts behind it. "Charismatic megafauna" (such as polar bears and baby seals) are projected as quasi-pets (instead of, respectively, hungry predators and their tasty, blubbery lunch). Gorgeous nature photography (itself a selective and superposed human art) is twisted into a "picture-window" or "don't-spoil-my-view" environmentalism that is really little more than middle- and upper-class kitsch. Debate about the human and non-human environments is mired in superstition and dishonesty if it assumes that nature would remain frozen were it not for our interference. It becomes enlightened and honest when the question shifts to, "Well, what do we want it to look like?" Not that we always get our wishes - but they're our wishes, not nature's. Nature has none.

If we're interested in a scientifically-informed view of nature and our relationship to it, we must abandon any notion of pre-existent "harmony" or "balance" that we are violating, restoring, or revering as an authoritative command. Nature commands nothing and speaks nothing. Or - better - it speaks many contradictory things: it's prodigious, wasteful, and hidden; beneficent and poisonous; abundant and barren; peaceful, aggressive, and indifferent - all at once. It is relentless change, on all scales of space and time, with incessant destruction, creation, and overturning. Any harmony or balance we bring to our relationship with nature is a balance or harmony strictly of our own devising. We're not even "managing" nature, except in a limited way. In limiting and modifying how we use nature, we really managing nothing but ourselves.

That is why environmentalism is not science, but a political and religious movement. It is why this movement so frequently turns tyrannical: there's nothing so satisfying to a fanatic than "managing" other people as a vehicle of righteousness.† Perhaps this is the unwittingly ironic sense in which Job urges his friends to "speak with the Earth, and she will teach you." She will teach you all right: she'll teach you that she has no trite moral lessons to offer. Equilibrium, balance, and harmony are not the norm, but temporary and local. Indeed, at the center of Job's encounter with the divine is, not a garden or a zoo, but a whirlwind.

In absorbing and condescending to the older public health and conservation movements, the nearly forty years of modern environmentalism have done our society a large disservice. It is the most potent social force today in attracting the general public away from science. Scientists involved in ecology themselves often lead mentally conflicted lives, caught between knowing and believing. People now routinely use meaningless or wrongheaded concepts to misunderstand the world around them and how human activity affects it. Recycling is often more harmful than just throwing things out. No one has a "carbon footprint," unless they've rubbed graphite on the bottom of their shoes. The Earth's climate is not a greenhouse. Nuclear power plants are not bombs, any more than a coal-fired power plant is a firearm. Runaway metaphors and bad policies motivated by them are the fallacies of the Boomers - history's first mass over- and miseducated generation - and now constitute the brainwashing of the next generation. Led by their delusional gurus, currently starting with Al Gore, they have injected a potent revulsion against modern technological and progressive civilization into our politics.†† But that passion proves nothing about the rightness of their cause, which is essentially romantic, pessimistic, and reactionary.‡

POSTSCRIPT: For an example of what I'm talking about, consider M. Night Shyamalan's embarrassing new movie, The Happening, "the most morally abhorrent film ever made" - but still, important for laying bare the logic, which pervades conventional environmental politics in a watered-down form. Or just read this New Republic blog posting and skip the film itself :)

POST-POSTSCRIPT: Everyone interested in this problem, whatever their opinions, should read Wallace Kaufman's No Turning Back: Dismantling the Fantasies of Environmental Thinking. Published 14 years ago, it is more relevant than ever, and a blog posting cannot do it justice. In related vein, consider as well the two books by Alston Chase, In a Dark Wood and Playing God in Yellowstone.
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* While not able to speak English, Nietzsche could read it and counted an edition of Emerson's works as one of his prized possessions; he annotated it, heavily in places. His famous Übermensch, or Overman, probably owes something to Emerson's Oversoul. I don't know if Nietzsche read any Thoreau.

** That said, I like Walden Pond as it is now and try to swim it at least once every summer. There's been no attempt to "freeze" it in some mythical past, and it is accessible by car. It was pretty accessible in Thoreau's day, and he was never more than an hour walk from the center of Concord and medical and food supplies. Thoreau even took his laundry home to his mother for washing periodically. The old railroad line, already in existence when Thoreau spent his two years there, still runs right past the pond, behind some trees. Even more than in Thoreau's day, the setting now is as much a product of human artifice as it is of nature and a perfect example of the older conservation movement - but not of modern environmentalism.

† Thoreau himself said it: a man feels a disturbance in his bowels - and he sets off on a crusade to save humanity.

†† Using "progressive" again in the right sense.

‡ The absolute weirdness of our political vocabulary strikes me more and more. Opponents of environmentalism are usually called "conservative" - are they, really? And is environmentalism really "liberal" and "progressive"?

Galison on science and objectivity

Virginia Postrel, of Dynamist Blog and former editor of Reason, comments on an interesting new book, Objectivity, by Harvard philosopher of science Peter Galison and co-author Lorraine Daston of Berlin's Max Planck Institute for the History of Science. The book explains the different connotations of objectivity by examining its history in science and philosophy.

Our modern notion of objectivity presupposes the modern division of subject and object, which itself is the latest transformation of the older body-soul dualism. Post-medieval science has seen three different meanings to the term "objectivity":

• "Truth-to-nature" (representing an underlying type or species of, say, a plant)
• "Mechanical objectivity" (all-seeing, all-knowing)
  
• "Trained judgment" (finding patterns and "family resemblances" in samples)

The oldest form, from the time of Galileo and Newton in the seventeenth century and the century following, mainly encompassed the first type, with a little of the third. Our concept of objectivity today is distorted by the intervening mid- to late-nineteenth century form, which was mainly the second. Being "mechanical" meant "no wandering attention," "no falling asleep," "ever-attentive," etc., the machine equivalent of a god. The trouble is that this conception of objectivity is not human. It sets up a false ideal, the starting point for something called "scientism," which inverts the relationship between rational-thought-in-general and scientific method. The best-known type of scientism is positivism - the "just-the-facts" school of philosophy. This mistake is one of the causes of our present division of the Two Cultures and the collapse of the humanities since the 1960s. It gave rise to the Romantic reaction against the Enlightenment, in turn the basis of the reactionary and utopian movements of modern times.

The hopeless naiveté of this approach was known before the rise of the false nineteenth century ideal. The trouble started with Descartes' mind-machine dualism, his universal skepticism, and Kant's attempted solution. Kant postulated "real objectivity" as the "thing-in-itself" free of space, time, mind, and the conditioning of the senses - by definition unattainable and meaningless. A generation later, Hegel had a better solution, because he grasped the key condition implicit in the Enlightenment ideal of "disinterestedness": objectivity is a relationship between subject and object and not about one or the other separately.* Unfortunately, both Hegel and Kant were poor stylistic examples and often very hard to understand. A major opportunity was missed to catch the division of art, philosophy, and science before it became what it is now, apparently irreparable.

In the last century, a more social conception on objectivity, "trained judgment," has replaced the nineteenth century's ascetic and sacrificial conception. While it's fine as far as it goes, it doesn't go far enough. Taking it seriously leads back to number one. Students today typically never get to it, except by accident. But it's wrong to view objectivity as a given finished product. The point made by Hegel and the early Pragmatist philosophers (like Charles Peirce) is that objectivity is the endpoint of a process, even a struggle. Considered in its fuller sense, objectivity is a process. And it's not about you or it; it's about you and it.

POSTSCRIPT: And Virginia Postrel is back! She is struggling with breast cancer - head over to her Web site and wish her well!

And consider her comments on journalistic objectivity: think of a better formulation of "objectivity" than the "mechanical C-SPAN camera" metaphor.
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* This process is Hegel's famous "dialectic," but not the cookie cutter presented to generations of students or its misappropriation and misuse later promoted by Marxism.

Welcome to the club

They haven't discovered an Earth-like planet yet, but astronomers are getting closer every year. 55 Cancri A, the larger member of a nearby binary star in Cancer (41 light-years away), now has a confirmed five planets, including a large outer giant, as well as four inner medium-sized giants. The system might have Earth-like (rocky) planets with thin atmospheres, but those still lie below the threshold of detectability. It's also possible that these planets have Earth-like moons (bigger versions of Saturn's Titan) with atmospheres. OTOH, keep warm oceans in mind too, if you're looking for life.

The parent star is 0.61 as luminous as our Sun. Thus the distance for Earth-equivalent light flux from 55 Cancri A is (0.61)^1/2 AU = 0.78 AU, roughly the Sun-Venus distance (0.72 AU). (One astronomical unit, or AU, is the Sun-Earth distance, 93 million miles = 150 million km.) One of the 55 Cancri A planets is about that close to the star, so a rocky moon is a contender for Earth-like conditions.

Thoughts for Elul

It's Elul, that last month in the Jewish year before Tishrei and Rosh Hashanah and time for introspection.

There's a grain of truth in the observation that Judaism is more about practice than belief, but it's no more than a half-truth. World Jewish Digest recently sponsored a forum with four authors on the question, "What Do Jews Believe?" All four responses are worth reading, but the response of Niles Elliot Goldstein is the best, getting right to the center of the issue and clearing away a lot of confusion. He coins a phrase, "skeptical theism," that captures Judaism perfectly. He also the only one of the four respondents to get the all-important distinction between faith and belief right. And he doesn't sidestep the question with that cliché about "Judaism is practice, not faith." As they say, read the whole thing.

L'shanah tovah!

Beyond belief

Successful science requires imagination, not just a piling up of facts. What keeps science from being no more than imagination is its critical aspect, a willingness to place one's own theories on the line and put them to the test of evidence and logic.

In 1644, at the time modern science was born, the poet John Milton penned his Areopagitica, one of the first and still one of the finest defenses of freedom of thought and publishing in the English language. Rejecting the Platonic view of knowledge as an infallible super-rational, super-sensible intuition, Milton saw the partiality of each person, each idea, each point of view, and the inescapable necessity of debate and criticism in the search for truth:

Where there is much desire to learn, there of necessity will be much arguing, much writing, many opinions; for opinion in good men is but knowledge in the making ....

I cannot praise a fugitive and cloistered virtue, unexercised and unbreathed, that never sallies out and sees her adversary, but slinks out of the race, where that immortal garland is to be run for, not without dust and heat. Assuredly we bring not innocence into the world, we bring impurity much rather; that which purifies us is trial, and trial is by what is contrary.

Neither can our understanding of good be separated from our knowledge of evil. It is pointless to preach the former with no awareness of the latter:

Good and evil we know in the field of this world grow up together almost inseparably; and the knowledge of good is so involved and interwoven with the knowledge of evil, and in so many cunning resemblances hardly to be discerned, that those confused seeds which were imposed upon Psyche [the soul] as an incessant labour to cull out and sort asunder, were not more intermixed. It was from out the rind of one apple tasted that the knowledge of good and evil, as two twins cleaving together, leaped forth into the world .... When God gave [Adam] reason, he gave him freedom to choose, for reason is but choosing.

Religious strictures against idolatry remind us of the impossibility of objectifying the divine or the totality of creation. But what religions have never adequately appreciated is that belief itself is problematic. Belief tends to objectify what resists objectification; it wants to turn the divine into an object of worship, not realizing that the divine isn't an object at all. Belief systems have always been Achilles' heel of religion. Belief, like false representations of gods, imposes a preconceived box on a realm that cannot be boxed.

This conflict has been variously characterized as a war between science and religion, between matter and spirit, between body and soul, or between mind and senses. Confronted with this history, we come to terms with humanity’s true original sin, the sin of shoe-horning, of Procrustes and his bed, of forcing round pegs into square holes.

Rationalist criticism of religion can be obtuse, blind to the truth a religious belief or practice points toward. But then again, religious belief can all too easily blind itself and become credulity and cruel superstition.

Forced to choose, we face a choice between the flight of the spirit and the ready-made boxes too small to contain it. Religion has often been turned into such a container, but self-imposed prisons have been made of anti-religion as well, of science, philosophy, art, and ideology. All are impairments of the spirit.

Like great art, science doesn’t preach; it shows. It leaves observers, critics, and later generations to draw their own, sometimes unexpected, conclusions.

If the heart of science is its quest for precision, consistency, and cutting away the false, skepticism - without cynicism - is its soul. The skepticism of science extends to beliefs, prejudices, unwarranted assumptions, and its own dearest theories - Milton's trial by what is contrary. Belief can delay this critical examination and pollute the uninhabited dimensions of thought, cluttering up the view. Belief speaks from narrow intellectualizing. A probing skepticism acknowledges the limitations of our minds and instead addresses us existentially, faced with an open and never-complete knowledge of our world.

Alienation and the growth of knowledge

... for he said: "I have been a stranger in a strange land." - Exodus 18

It's usually true in life that we never really know something or someone if we're merely familiar with it. An acquaintance, a familiar locale near home, a piece of road we drive over daily - how many of us really know these, as opposed to just nodding and barely registering what our senses take in? Really knowing something takes first not knowing it, and if we're already familiar with it, we need to first de-familiarize ourselves with it.

Alienation, which is usually viewed as a simply negative thing, is crucial to our developing any real understanding of the world around us. It has to seem alien to us, or we to it, for some period if we're ever really going to look at it hard and really understand it. This is also why it's easier to be objective about electrons, planets, and cars - and develop sciences and engineering based on that objectivity - than it is to be objective about other people and, all the more so, about ourselves.

Before Copernicus, the Earth seemed like a familiar place to people - yet almost everything about it was unknown. Copernicus proposed a strange idea that many balked at, because it violated "common sense" - that the Earth is a heavenly body, as Galileo put it. Explorers sailing the then-new ocean-going ships discovered that a lot of what the inherited culture of Europe and the Near East thought it "knew" about the Earth, its peoples, and their habitats and civilizations was wrong or radically inadequate. The shock of seeing this gap in authoritative received wisdom set off mental shock waves in civilization that still affect us to this day.

Much of what we take for granted about the Earth - the intertwined climate and biogeosphere - is certainly unique in our planetary system and probably unusual in our Galaxy. In the old days of science fiction, before about 1950, writers could project on to other planets circumstances that were a little weird and yet familiarly enough like Earth to not seem really strange. Then we got to know other planets for real and thus really know the Earth for the first time. (Now we're learning a lot more about other stars and extrasolar planets.) Obviously, such knowledge should make us appreciate the Earth in a way we couldn't before. But these cuddly feelings are not the whole story. The history of the Earth coming to seem strange to us as a prelude to real understanding doesn't just culminate in warm fuzziness - it's a scientific and philosophical triumph. To my mind, that's the fundamental significance of the Gaia notion.

You'd think philosophers, at least in modern times, would have picked up on the interplay of familiarity, alienation, and knowledge and not, unlike the ancients, taken alienation as a simple positive or negative. There is one philosopher who made this drama of naiveté, conflict, and enlightenment a key to his thinking - that would be Hegel, the great German Enlightenment thinker who was a friend of Schiller and Goethe and contemporary with Beethoven. (Hegel died in 1831.) His achievement was obscured by later popular legends spread by his students and critics - for example, Marx and his followers - that falsely portrayed Hegel's system as a cookie-cutter "dialectical" game of Thesis, Antithesis, and Synthesis and (worse) as the workings of "pure ideas."* While Hegel's system can be criticized - for its perhaps too-easy optimism or its Eurocentrism - such caricatures have often hidden what he achieved.

Hegel's notion, thoroughly explored in his Science of Logic and Phenomenology of Spirit (or Mind**), is a drama of "stages of consciousness," not "pure ideas." His is a biography of the individual and collective spirit (Zeitgeist, or "spirit of the times" - a Hegel coinage). All of our notions of developmental psychology ultimately trace their way back to him - as we say of someone, "he's just going through a phase." Behind that thought is Hegel's biographical, developmental, and historical - in our post-Darwin world, we should say, genetic - approach. In this, like anyone under the spell of the German Enlightenment, Hegel was in turn profoundly indebted to Goethe, an almost incomprehensible colossus himself.

Of course, stuck in alienation, we experience disorientation and pain, and all of us just want that to stop. But our spiritual enlargement hangs on how it stops - do we get stuck - or regress - or do we get to the other side and expand our understanding? It marks the real difference between being merely familiar with something and really knowing it.
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* Hegel did himself no favor in his major works by writing in a deliberately difficult and obscure style, a trend started in the late 18th century by Kant in his major works. Interestingly, both Kant and Hegel wrote shorter summaries for students and a general audience far more readable than their hefty opera magna. (The same dichotomy appears in Marx.) Later philosophers such as Schopenhauer and Nietzsche both criticized Hegel and ended up owing him a deep debt, but proving also that literary German need not lead to the intellectual equivalent of indigestion.

** The German is Geist, which has no exact equivalent in English. Our word ghost is a cognate.

Meet the mother

... or speak with the Earth, and she will teach you. - Job 12

By now, it must be clear that something special is happening on the Earth that keeps its climate within certain bounds. This "something special" clearly involves more than weather per se; it also involves plant life as well as oceans, soil, and other geophysical processes, plus certain basic gross features of the Earth. Certainly compared with its terrestrial planet siblings in the inner Solar System - we looked at Venus and Mars, but didn't bother with Mercury or the Moon, because neither has an atmosphere - the Earth's configuration of geo- and biophysics seems unusual, if not unique.

In the 1980s, when scientists first began to think about other planets and life in a systematic way based on comparisons with other planets in our system (later, with planets orbiting other stars as well), this striking fact became so obvious that it cried out for a name. So biologists James Lovelock and Lynn Margulis coined one: they called it Gaia, an archaic form of the Greek goddess of the Earth, spelled that way, I suppose, to get people to pronounce it correctly - not Gea or even the Latinized Gaea. Perhaps they were being humorous, although they must have known that using such terminology would bring the New Age weirdos out the woodwork. Maybe they were looking to cash in, living as we do in a media- and celebrity-saturated society with many spiritual seekers dissatisfied by traditional religions.

Gaia is sometimes and misleadingly called a hypothesis, which it certainly is not: everything you know about the biogeosphere tells you it's real now. But it's when you consider the Earth's history that Gaia really hits you over the head. Consider the striking fact that the Earth is a little over 4 billion years (4 Gyr) old, and life appeared on it at least as far back as 3.5 Gyr and liquid water at least as far back as 3.8 Gyr. Now consider that the Sun was much fainter earlier in its 5-Gyr history back then, growing steadily brighter with time. Life on Earth required liquid water, which must have kept from freezing by a temperature-enhancing mechanism like those we know today - or perhaps a different one no longer operative, such as large amounts of other infrared-active gases like methane (CH4) and ammonia (NH3).

We've exhaustively examined the "Goldilocks" climate regime (which is really a range of possible climates), which runs from Ice Ages to mildly tropical. (And don't be deluded by the "global warming" hysteria into thinking that the Ice Ages have ended - they haven't.) Two other, quite different possible Earth climate regimes (ranges) are known. One was touched on briefly months ago: the humid but almost cloud-free supertropical Earth of about 304 ^oK = 31 ^oC = 89 ^oF. The other, so far unmentioned, is the "snowball Earth": mostly covered in ice, which reflects incoming solar radiation as effectively as do clouds, an Earth of less than about 245 ^oK = -28 ^oC = -18 ^oF. Earth has avoided both fates.*

A lot of what goes under the name of Gaia has already been covered - in some sense, we're just slapping a label on a collection of mechanisms and features of the Earth. Where the real Gaian controversy comes is when the role of life and consciousness comes in. I should make it emphatically clear right away that the "life" that mainly matters for Gaia is simple but ubiquitous plant life - nothing so sophisticated as an insect, not to speak of mammals or humans. "Ubiquitous" beats "sophisticated" on most days. So don't get any ideas :-)

Clearly, a complex web of feedbacks are operating on the Earth. We've seen some of them, but by no means all. When you hear "feedback," you sometimes think "alive" or even "conscious" - but Gaia doesn't mean that the Earth as a whole is conscious or even living. That's really getting off into the mystical and well beyond what the science justifies. Some people have tried to do that, including scientists who should know better. The feedbacks here are not all-powerful or mystical and don't by themselves imply consciousness or life. "Feedback" is a more primitive and general concept. But that doesn't stop some people from trying to turn the Gaia thing into a religion - which it isn't.

There are also some gross physical factors involved in Earth's unique biogeosphere that don't involve feedbacks. Its orbital position (close to the Sun, but not too close), its surface gravity, and the continuation of plate tectonics through its whole history are also essential. Additional factors that enhance stable long-term evolution of life include the presence of a large moon and a nearby giant (Jupiter) that sweeps up dangerous comets and asteroids.**

Gaia also has a long but finite life. In a few billion years, the Sun, continuing to brighten, will become so strong that the liquid surface oceans unique to Earth will boil away. That's probably what happened to any liquid water on Venus. We can only hope that our descendants will have terraformed Mars - which will be quite balmy by that point - or left the Solar System altogether for a better spot.

Is the Earth unusual? Almost certainly. Is it unique in the Galaxy or in the Universe? No one has the faintest idea for sure, but probably not. Is such a collection of stabilizing feedbacks a sign of purposive causality, or teleology? Maybe. But if it is, it's like Aristotle's teleology: completely naturalistic - there's nothing supernatural about it, in the literal meaning of that word: something intruding from another reality that suspends natural laws. It's about how those natural laws and the peculiar conditions on Earth fit together to produce a wonderful and unexpected result.
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* Or maybe not. There's strong evidence that about 600 Myr ago, the Earth did go through a "snowball" phase. But even then, the magical properties of water saved the day (or saved the epoch). Solid water (ice) is less dense than liquid, an unusual material property. So ice floats on top of liquid water, and the surface of an ocean or lake can freeze while life continues in the liquid below - amazing. That's enough for me to believe in a just and benevolent G-d on alternate Tuesdays and Thursdays.

** Our moon is the largest relative to its primary parent planet in the Solar System. There other moons that are larger in absolute size, like Titan - but their parent primaries are much, much larger (Saturn in Titan's case).

Cool books 3

Here are some more cool books read here chez Kavanna in the last year.

Israel has many fine writers and novelists, probably none more famous than Amos Oz. A few years ago he published his most remarkable book, a memoir in novelistic form called A Tale of Love and Darkness. It's available in English from Harcourt in a graceful translation by Nicholas de Lange. Oz's life from his earliest Jerusalem childhood in the 1930s through the Second World War and Israel's War of Independence and into the 1950s is recalled in an almost Chekhovian manner, each short chapter something like a fine etching or ink drawing. The American reviews were very positive, but tended to emphasize the centrality of his mother's suicide overly much, to the detriment of other parts of the story.

The cure for the existential head cold is Yi-Fu Tuan's Escapism, which starts as a meditation on the relation between culture and animality and ends by exploring heaven and hell. Read it to see what I mean. I was reminded of a beautiful classic, Walter Kaufmann's Critique of Religion and Philosophy, which covers some of the same ground albeit from a very different direction. Tuan is a geographer and historian at the University of Wisconsin. Born in China in 1930, he came to Great Britain and then the United States after the 1949 Revolution.

Teleology: The afterparty

Maybe this posting was the real point of my earlier musings on teleology and the anthropic principle ... :=)

A friend asked why "intelligent design" - what has that got to do with purpose? I mentioned that Spinoza believed in a universe with design but no purpose. A better phrase than "intelligent design" would thus be "purposive design" - that captures the nature of the controversy better.

BTW, you might wonder what happened to Aristotle's four-fold causality after that Scientific Revolution thingie 300 years ago or so. Scientists have mostly come to rely on Aristotle's second and third categories. The material or efficient cause is the physical entity in the objective world. The formal cause is the abstract law, the ghost of Plato's Ideas, but grasped in our minds. Formal causes are the mind's form of comprehension; they're in the mind, but not just in the mind. First causes have been reduced to "initial conditions." Final causes have been rendered suspect, although for any living entity, especially conscious ones with intentionality, they're unavoidable. Locke has a sensible discussion of these issues, in somewhat different and slighty archaic language, that hasn't really been improved upon in the last three centuries.

Locke was also the first to state the basic duality of Western thought in a clearly modern form. From Plato to Descartes, it was the duality of mind and body, or body and soul. Locke was the first to recast this as a duality of subject and object. Again, the issue hasn't really moved since then, although Hume and Kant did a lot to reformulate the issue in terms familiar today.

Afterthoughts: Teleology and the anthropic principle

First, an apology: I've written before on the anthropic principle (AP), but the AP is used in widely varying senses, and my earlier postings didn't meet this issue directly. Nowadays, you see the AP popping up in two very different ways in two very different contexts - in the evolution/intelligent design controversy and in string theory. I've mainly posted about the latter case, but the former is better-known and more interesting.

There is a sense of the AP (the strong form) which implies teleology or final (purposive) causation. Stated in modern language, teleology or purposive causality is a generalization of the intentionality inherent in living and especially consciousness entities. It need not involve human-like consciousness. The key difference between final causation and reductionism is that reductionism posits a fundamental causality that is purely past-conditioned and purely forward-looking; it contains no feedback. Purposive causality requires "feedback loops" and implies some kind of circularity in the causal sequence. That living and conscious entities exhibit such circular feedback in their purposive behavior is not in dispute; the question is whether such causality is secondary, or if non-living entities and possibly the universe as a whole exhibit such feedback. If the latter, then teleology is fundamental to the universe; if not, it is a secondary phenomenon piggy-backing on a fundamentally causal but "blind" non-purposive universe.

A popular example of teleological reasoning is the "argument from design" or Intelligent Design (ID). But the AP is simpler and more general than that, and it doesn't have to be supernatural or theistic. The classic example in Western philosophy is Aristotle's four-fold causality (first, material or efficient, formal, and final); his system is neither theistic nor supernatural. Modern science started in the 17th century, attended by a philosophical revolution brought off by Descartes, Spinoza, and Locke. The agnostic or negative position of these early modern thinkers on final causality was crucial in the birth of modern scientific thinking. Spinoza's position was the most radical and consistent: he believed in a universe with design but without purpose. His militant monism (one Substance with many Modes) and unqualified belief in blind determinism have the appeal of consistency, but beg the question: purposive causality is inescapable for understanding living entities, and even more so, conscious ones. Descartes' solution was an extreme dualism: human consciousness (res cogitans = thinking stuff) is a supernatural soul; everything else (including our bodies and other animals) is a blind machine (res extensa = matter-energy in spacetime). Unfortunately, this solution, still very much with us as a pratical rule of thumb, has gradually been knocked down by modern biology, psychology, and medicine. Aristotle's unified treatment of all forms of biological teleology is theoretically superior. At the end of the 17th century, Locke had what, for modern science, has amounted to the final word on this question, which has seen no real improvement since. Agnostic on the role of teleology in the universe at large, Locke admitted that final causes are inescapable for understanding any kind of life. However, Locke also believed that "G-d could make matter think" and held out the hope that Descartes' dualism could ultimately be overcome. Hume in the 18th century attacked intelligent design and purposive causality, but from a quite different direction, casting doubt on causality and objective knowledge altogether. Such skepticism leads, not to modern science, but in a nihilistic direction first explored by Nietzsche in the late 19th century; it needn't detain us here.

What's the bottom line? The rejection or suspicious treatment of final causes is not a result of modern science, but an assumption. Modern science has made far more progress on "what" and "how" questions than on "why?". That fact alone justifies this approach, but it leaves unanswered the "why" questions that everyone ever born has thought of. The status of final causality remains elusive: is it a fundamental metaphysical category or a secondary of non-purposive causality?

This type of AP makes no sense in a Newtonian world, which is just such a world of blind determinism, driven by causal laws and conditioned only by past events. In modern physics, with quantum mechanics, non-equilibrium thermodynamics, and modern cosmology, such questions can be asked again, but we still lack definitive answers. Obviously, a teleology acceptable today would be very different from Aristotle's, since our knowledge of physical and biological mechanisms is broader and deeper than his was. It would be more abstract and simpler, and would hinge essentially on information or entropy, treated as a co-equal to spacetime and matter-energy. Information is inherently selective; it selects some of the world as "signal" and rejects the rest as "noise." Such selectivity is visible everywhere in the living world, from nutrition and waste elimination (eat this, flush that), to consciousness (attention to this, ignoring of that), to evolution by selectional mechanisms (this fits, that doesn't).

Philosopher Thomas Nagel recently penned a penetrating treatment of final causation in the form of a review of Richard Dawkins' new book, The God Delusion (requires subscription). By way of talking about Darwinist-selectional theories of biological evolution, Nagel takes Dawkins and others to task for overstating their case: Darwin's theory explains the origin of species, but not the origin of life - it doesn't and can't answer such a question. (Amusingly, Dawkins has to fall back on the hand-waving of the weak AP, invoking billions and billions of planets, instead of billions and billions of universes - explaining nothing - see below.) And Darwin's theory is a non-teleological (although not deterministic) theory - all modern scientific theories are: by assumption, not because they prove final causes invalid.

Since the 17th century, purposive causality has lived in a limbo of "parascience"; if it involves super- or "extra"-naturalism, it falls outside science altogether. The best-known case in recent years is the ID movement, which is attempting to re-introduce strong teleology into biology, a purposive causality set up by a human-like designer. In practice, many invocations of final causes are scientifically redundant, unfalsifiable, or empty. That fact is the (generally sound) basis for attacking the ID movement as pseudo-science. And many attempts to import ID theory into biology teaching are much cruder than that, just thinly veiled forms of creation "science," an obvious anti-science, as it rejects not just Darwinian selectional theories, but the whole framework of modern cosmology, geology, biochemistry, and genetics.

But in a final irony, the "other" AP controversy raging right now - about the weak form of anthropic reasoning invoked by string theorists - shows the AP in a much worse and far more objectionable light than the ID controversy. This non-teleological form of the AP proposes an infinity of unobservable universes, with no method to enumerate them, and offers no explanatory power whatever. It gives up on the project of modern science, seeking unity among observable phenomena: matter and energy, space and time, living species as descended from a common ancestor and sharing the same biochemistry, etc. The weak AP is a flight from scientific reason, driven by blind clinging to string theory. That theory isn't a real theory anyway, only an unlikely conjecture, and its solutions are more conjecture. As astrophysicists devise thought-universes with slightly different physical laws that can also support life as we know it, the reasoning behind this form of the AP falls apart. Its sole appeal is to people who believe in string theory for other reasons anyway (and bad reasons at that). This weak, multiverse AP is truly "millennial madness." It widens the already large chasm between string theorists and the rest of science and pushes string theory even further down the road of becoming a self-validating cult. And it makes creationism and ID look good by comparison - almost like real science.

The anthropic principle and why it's not science

The anthropic principle (AP) has a number of forms and variants, but in essence, it connects the overall form and evolution of the universe with the existence of life, the existence of intelligent life, and/or with the existence of us. Stated as an empirical fact, we are here, and all the preconditions for our existence obviously place a constraint on theories we might invent to explain the universe. This version of the AP seems like an empty truism, but, like all truisms, it is true. The critical point is that such a meaningful principle is a statement about theories or explanations, not about universes. Then at least, the principle is applied in a way that be verified or falsified. Falsifiability is critical: only if your theory can be proven wrong, can you really be sure that it's right.

Starting in the 1970s, a different and nonscientific form of the AP gained popularity in some quarters as a statement about possible universes, rather than theories. One form, vaguely theistic or at least teleological, states that the universe takes on the form it does so that we can be here. Another form, recently popular among string theorists unable to sort through the apparently very large or even infinite number of possible string theories, states that every string theory is realized in some (unobservable) universe, a small piece of a multiverse. Yet another form posits the existence of new universes evolving from old ones and "selected" by the presence of life.

A number of well-known scientists have tried to claim successfully using anthropic reasoning to arrive at nontrivial conclusions, but none of the examples presented really do that. They use some general property of the cosmos (the presence of carbon, the age of the universe, etc.) to arrive at these conclusions, and none of them require life, much less intelligent life, as a necessary assumption. The originators of the anthropic principle had more explicitly teleological or theological goals in mind, and they were at least honest about the role that religious faith or teleology played in their thinking. (Teleology might prove correct, after all - we don't know enough now to say.) The most recent version is driven by another faith, faith in string theory. The requirement that string theory "must" be right, combined with the failure to produce any complete, consistent, and predictive string theories, has led theoretical physicists to this impasse.

Some have even claimed that we must accept anthropic reasoning or be doomed to accepting Intelligent Design (ID) theory. This is strictly a tempest in a teapot: ID is a type of AP reasoning and, like all such anthropic thinking, has no place in science. We have no alternative universes to compare ours to, so the endeavor is futile.

Besides the lack of observability, a more subtle problem invalidates the AP. Lacking a complete theory that could specify and enumerate possible universes, we have no way of identifying and counting what these universes could be. As mathematicians say, we lack a "measure on the space" of possibilities. Our universe could be one of a large number of random possibilities. ("Random" means: all possibilities are equally likely.) But we don't know the possibilities - we have no non-repetitive and exhaustive list, and no way to assign probabilities. No one knows whether our universe is "likely," or even what that would mean.

It's a sign of how misguided AP advocates are when you consider that, in various forms, it's used by religious fundamentalists, teleological types, and secular academic physicists, all to rescue their respective pet theories from being "not even wrong." The fact of our existence tells you that the Universe has to have a certain age, a certain structure, and the presence of life on one planet that we know of. Any theory not compatible with these facts is ruled out - that's it. No multiverses, no alternate realities, and so on. Whether it proves the existence of G-d is not something rationally decidable. That's why religion involves faith.

(I'm not arguing here against religious faith - humans couldn't live without faith in something: faith in G-d, faith in the future, faith in reason, and so on. I'm just saying it's not definitive and precise knowledge based on experience, which is, after all, what science is about.)

In brief, appeal to the AP and multiverses is not science. We know for sure what we know about the world based on the evidence of the senses and the reasoning based on that evidence. Although scientists use technical and specialized concepts and instruments to pursue knowledge, at the end of the day, they're operating with the same framework as everyone else. If the anthropic principle is about possible universes, we've left the realm of science for speculative metaphyiscs, theology, or science fiction.

Why is this happening?

The current invocation of the anthropic principle is a desperate fad among string theorists to evade the fact that no unique string theory has turned up, and there are no mathematical demonstrations of a unique or even set of realistic solutions to these non-existent "theories." Of all possible theories, they say, all are real, "somewhere". This is nonsense. Any outsider would have to rub his eyes in astonishment to see respected and talented scientific figures playing such games.

POSTSCRIPT: The deadend failure of string theory, what most theorists have devoted the last generation of theoretical physics to, drives this latest outbreak of anthropic lunacy. Theorists want to continue believing in it, even though it's obviously going nowhere. A crisp and illuminating new book by Lee Smolin (himself a quantum gravity theorist) politely but decisively dismantles string theory claims and explains not only what's gone wrong in physics, but why classical scientific self-correction mechanisms have been short-circuited in the postmodern university. I'll discuss Smolin's book in an upcoming posting.