Randomness is fundamental; fundamentalists, not so much

At Doc's Home, Doc ("an evangelical Christian by faith and a physicist by education") nails the Intelligent Design/ Creationist faction to the wall again with this post from yesterday. If you remember my ID essay from the soon-to-expire Open Source Politics, ID is not actually science; it's much more about phiosophy and statistics. One of its central legs is the idea of specified complexity: This is the idea, formulated by mathematician William A. Dembski, using probability and the general public's misunderstanding of probability, to argue that random chance is not enough to explain how changes in organisms can develop over time. Dembski believes that while "[j]ust about anything that happens is highly improbable, [. . .] when a highly improbable event is also specified (i.e., conforms to an independently given pattern) undirected natural causes lose their explanatory power."

Anyway, Doc tears that notion apart:

[T]he basic issue is randomness. Evolution suggests life evolved through a series of random mutations in simpler organisms. Randomness suggests, well, randomness, whereas creation suggests order and method. Hence, the two are inexorably opposed, right?

I am glad these anti-evolutionists have not apparently studied modern physics. Randomness is the cornerstone of quantum mechanics, which is founded on the assumption that nature works through probabilism, not determinism. Here's the idea. In classical physics, all the way back to the Greeks, nature was assumed deterministic. That means if I repeat an experiment 1000 times under the same conditions, the exact same result will emerge 1000 times. If I know the initial conditions and the forces involved, I know exactly what will happen. Probabilism, on the other hand, says I have no idea what will happen each time I run the experiment. There are any number of possible outcomes, each with a certain probability of happening. The best I can say is how often I would expect to see some given outcome.

This is necessarily abstract and hard to understand if you haven't studied physics. I will try to illustrate. If I pick up a pencil and let it go, it will fall due to gravity. In a deterministic universe, all I need to know is the height of the pencil to determine exactly what will happen. I can calculate exactly how long it will take to hit the ground, and the speed at which it will be moving when it does hit. More importantly, I can calculate the exactly trajectory of that pencil, marking its exact position at every moment during the fall. And if I do the experiment 1000 times, I will get the exact same results.

In the quantum realm, it is much more complex. I have to consider the straight line path, yes. But I have to consider a trajectory with a single loop, one with two loops, one where it makes a 90 turn, etc. (This sounds weird, I know. At the size scale we are talking about, the probability of each of these paths is 0, except the straight line path, which is why we don't worry about quantum effects in our everyday world. But a proper quantum solution would have to consider all these. The example illustrates the process involved in understanding interactions at much smaller size scales where quantum effects do matter.) Each trajectory has a probability, so repeating the experiment 1000 times, I can estimate how often I would expect to see each path. The same thing will not necessarily happen each time. (Quantum also has the uncertainty principle which says I cannot know the position and momentum of the pencil simultaneously, and other fun effects.) [. . .]

It is crucial to understand that this probabilism is a fundamental property of nature, not some mathematical tool. [. . .] In quantum we give up trying to understand the motion of a single electron around a nucleus because it is fundamentally not possible to understand that motion. The uncertainty principle tells us that the better we know the momentum of an electron, the less we know its position, and vice versa. Even attempting to make a measurement changes the state of what we're measuring.

I don't know how many people have made it this far but I'll press on with the point I'm trying to make. It seems to me that at the core of intelligent design is a resistance to the notion of randomness. The ID supporters want to remove the random mutations of evolution with a more orderly process guided by a designer. This is very similar to the debate in the physics community in the early 20th century when quantum physics began taking hold. Many physicists rejected quantum for exactly the same reason. Einstein and Niels Bohr had a celebrated exchange of letters arguing this philosophical point, with Einstein making the famous comment, "God does not play dice with the universe."

Randomness is not simply an element of evolution. It is a fundamental property of nature. To resist evolution because it is makes use of random processes is to also resist all of modern physics.

I am also glad that I have not studied modern physics, as this sounds far more complicated than my sad little right-brained head can handle. But it precisely this kind of problem--the truth is complicated and lies can be so simple--that gives Intelligent Design such great purchase in our society. I'm glad that folks nominally on their side, like Doc, have the patience and good will to explain it to them.