A Quest for our Cosmic Origins

Design and Creativity

In the third morning life on Earth makes its first appearance, lacking a central nervous system that could mediate intelligence. Our intelligence is a great step up from the life of plants or bacteria, but their life is also a great step up from lifeless chemical compounds, however complex. Creative design can leap over high barriers, but is there any easier way? Did our life begin and develop on its own? Our quest will apply precise science to evaluate critically modern conjectures about design processes that don’t depend on outside intelligence.

Many naturalists marvel at the environmental adaptations they see in the plant and animal kingdoms. Evidently the adaptations are the product of a design process. Many scientists believe that the designer is God. But Charles Robert Darwin (British naturalist, 1809—1882) had a different idea.

Darwin and Adaptive Variation

Darwin started from the observation that animals regularly produce far more offspring than the food supply can support, and plants produce many more than enough seeds to maintain the plant population. This puts every species in competition with others for survival. Only the survivors grow to maturity and reproduce themselves.

Almost always a species reproduces according to its own kind. Darwin proposed that the characteristics of a species vary slowly.

From time to time a random mutation produces an individual with some characteristic different from what is normal for its species. A dog may have only three legs, for example. Mutations are changes in the genetic structure that affect the development of the embryo. Usually such changes are fatal. Only a few mutant embryos develop to maturity. Even then, most mutations are disadvantageous to the individual. A three-legged dog cannot pursue prey as rapidly as a normal dog. Such a mutant dog is unlikely to survive unless someone keeps it as a pet and feeds it.

Very infrequently a mutation changes a characteristic in a way that is advantageous for the individual’s survival. A beneficial mutation may provide better camouflage or stronger armor or faster escape from predators. The favorably mutant individual is more likely than normal individuals to survive to maturity. If the mutation is heritable the mutant will pass on its advantage to its offspring. The offspring in turn produce more and more favored mutants. These compete for survival with dwindling numbers of normal individuals. After many generations, most of the individuals in the population have the mutation. In this way the mutants become the normal members of the species. Then a new cycle of improvement can begin.

The greatest survival potential thus selects naturally certain random changes in form or characteristics. This is what Darwin meant by the phrase “survival of the fittest.” Darwin said that biology goes through a natural process of evolution. He published his speculations in The Origin of Species in 1859. He pointed out that every species needs its food, and many species are the food of other species. Predators evolve at the same time as their prey. Every time a species develops a variation that favors its survival, it disfavors some other species, and that species has to develop, too. Darwin proposed that such cycles of improvement repeat themselves endlessly.

The dominant variation of the species is the one that is naturally designed for survival. In other words, Darwin discovered a natural automatic design mechanism.

A design mechanism must make identifiable changes in the form or morphology of organisms for survival advantage, changes that clearly adapt the species to the environment. Statements like “the fit are more likely to survive” are vacuous if the only way we know an organism is fit is because it survives.

Finches and Form Adaptation

Darwin began to get his ideas from observing the finches of the Galapagos Islands. Some finches had hard, short, strong beaks, well adapted to crushing seeds. Other finches had longer but weaker beaks that they inserted between cactus spines to eat the pulp. There were 14 species, all with small variations in morphology that made them well adapted to differing conditions on different islands.

The capability of making small adjustments in form or structure in response to environmental change is structural adaptability. The changes are called adaptive morphology. This capability is a seldom-achieved goal of creative design. Let’s see what is right about Darwin’s original discovery. We will limit ourselves to provable science, excluding the many unsupported extrapolations of Darwin’s ideas.

Design engineers would like to imitate Darwin’s natural mechanism. An important goal is to design systems with artificial intelligence. Once systems are sufficiently intelligent, designers hope that the systems themselves will make small variations in behavior or even structure to improve performance. Let’s consider, for example, where aerospace engineers are going with “robust design.”

Adaptive Behavior and Structure

Aerospace engineers occasionally hold conferences about making robust designs. They want to design instruments that can complete their missions and report back to Earth even when there are unanticipated difficulties.

One idea that comes up repeatedly is to design systems with a capacity for adaptive behavior, the ability to change activity modes depending on needs and environment. For example, when walking on dry land, we save energy by swinging our legs but scarcely lifting our feet. When we need speed we switch to running mode, lifting our feet much higher. If we walk in water over our ankles we quickly discover it is easier to lift our feet out of the water before swinging our legs forward. Our new behavior, constrained by need, minimizes our energy expenditure in a new environment. We use our intelligence to adapt our behavior to new circumstances and requirements. Intelligent instruments should be able to imitate us.

Far beyond designing adaptive behavior into systems is the goal of designing systems that can change their form to meet new requirements. When our path lies across deep water, we adapt our behavior and swim, but we don’t grow longer toes with webbing between them. We walk on snow much as we walk in shallow water, lifting our feet before swinging our legs. But if the snow becomes too deep, we have no way of making our feet broader so we can walk or slide on the surface of the snow. Instead we strap snowshoes or skis on our feet. That is, we change our shoes for others with a form adapted to new conditions.

Do we ever change our own form? Yes, in a sense. Soldiers in basic training must slim down to fighting trim through exercise and diet. This helps them crawl through small tunnels and climb over high barriers. Within limits we can adapt our form to new conditions and purposes.

Some robotic instruments can adapt their behavior but few at present can adapt their structure. We have to watch cartoons to see ordinary cars or airplanes turn into intelligent fighting robots.

Aerospace engineers are driven to seek creative designs with adaptive behavior and even adaptive structure to explore planets, asteroids, and comets that are more and more remote in the depths of space.

Intelligence and Autonomy

On 4 July 1997 the Pathfinder probe landed on Mars and its six-wheeled, multi-jointed, robotic rover, the Sojourner, began analyzing the atomic composition of rocks. This was one of the first of a series of missions planned to be “lighter, faster, and cheaper,” according to NASA administrator Daniel Goldin. Previous rover projects called for a brawny device as large as a garden tractor. The Mars Rover was as small as a skateboard, but it was brainy.

The team that built the Mars rover programmed it to have a certain level of autonomy. They could issue a command on the level of “seek rock” and the rover would find a rock to analyze. This autonomy was necessary because Mars is far away. The distance between Earth and Mars varies from as little as 56 million kilometers (35 million miles) to as much as 378 million kilometers (235 million miles). It takes radio waves or laser signals anywhere from 3 to 21 minutes to carry a command to Mars, depending on the distance. When a robot executes the command there is an equal interval of time before the controllers on Earth can see the results. The delay between giving the command and seeing the results is unavoidable because radio waves and light travel at a high but limited speed. No signal can go faster than the speed of light. A robot on Mars needs some autonomy to detect a hazard and respond appropriately before its Earth-bound controllers can tell it what to do.

Mars missions have never occurred at the time of closest approach to Earth. Aerospace engineers must choose the probe trajectory that takes the least fuel. They launch the probe when the planets are approaching each other. The probe arrives when the planets are receding again. When the probe finally lands, the distance between Earth and Mars is much larger than the minimum. Typically the roundtrip light-speed delay is 15 minutes.

Suppose that the Earth-bound controllers see an interesting rock a hundred meters away and send their rover toward it at a slow crawl, just fast enough to arrive in 20 minutes. What happens if, 80 meters from the starting point, there is a crevice in the ground, a crevice the controllers couldn’t see when they commanded the rover to move? Suppose that the rover’s television camera first sees the crevice when it is still ten meters away and sends the picture back to Earth. As soon as the controllers see the crevice they signal the rover to hit the brakes. By the time their command arrives, the rover has lain broken at the bottom of the crevice for 13 minutes.

Obviously, the rover needs sufficient visual processing capability on board to let it recognize the hazard and apply the brakes without waiting for intervention from Earth. It must have intelligence and some autonomy.

If we send a robot to explore Pluto, the roundtrip light-speed time is 10 hours and 40 minutes, plus or minus 16 minutes depending on the position of the Earth. Exploration will be agonizingly slow if every step has to be decided from here. The robot will need considerable artificial intelligence and autonomy to send interesting reports to the folks back home.

The nearest star is four light years from Earth, and extra-solar planets are farther still. To begin exploring beyond the solar system we must develop artificial intelligence that will give a robot nearly complete autonomy. However, the robot must not have enough autonomy to decide that its mission is too dangerous to fulfill!

Extra-solar exploration robots will also have to be very lightweight to arrive in a reasonable time, because there are limits on the fuel and money we can dedicate to any given project. The lightest weight of all would be a constructor robot built on a molecular scale, capable of building many larger robots from local materials found near the distant exploration site. The larger robots would be of various types and would have various programs for the purpose of exploring and reporting.

Such a system of robots imitates biology by storing compactly immense catalogs of information. The information consists of sets of instructions, some for building various kinds of structures, and other sets of instructions for fulfilling a purpose or mission. There has to be some initial structure capable of finding and using available resources to manufacture the other structures, or at least to make the first robot factory. When robots make other robots at the destination, their activity will be analogous to biological reproduction.

Designers can hardly do better than living organisms at storing structural information on the molecular level. Let’s review how living cells specify their structure and manufacture new cells, cells either like themselves or adapted for other purposes.

Biological Structure and Reproduction

A cell nucleus contains deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA). DNA is a long-chain molecule composed of certain atomic structures called nucleic acids. These are arranged like a twisted ladder, a spiral staircase, or like the mating teeth on a zipper. The sequence of nucleic acids is the genetic code.

The structure is stable most of the time. But when the cell is reproducing itself, an enzyme partly unzips the DNA in the middle of a strand. It acts like the kind of zipper that one can open in the middle by moving two zipper sliders in opposite directions. Another enzyme reproduces one of the unzipped strands of DNA. It makes a new mating half for that strand. When the mating half is finished and floating away free inside the cell, the first enzyme zips up the original DNA again. Then other enzymes make a matching half to the floating half strand, and zip the two halves up. At the end of the process there are two zipped zippers instead of one.

The new zipper or DNA strand moves away from the original DNA strand to the far end of the cell. The cell is then ready to pinch itself in the middle and divide in two, with one DNA strand going to each half. This is the normal method of cell reproduction.

The two strands of zipped-up DNA are identical, because only certain pairs of nucleic acids interlock exactly to make the teeth of the zipper. In this way a cell makes an exact copy of its own genetic information before it divides and reproduces.

Once a cell reproduces it has to grow. Other enzymes read the relevant sections of the DNA code in the nucleus and provide instructions for manufacturing all the enzymes the cell needs. These enzymes produce all the proteins of the cell and all the molecules needed to digest food.

Enzymes all by themselves are fragile. Some enzymes must be kept on ice or they will denature. How then can they operate in living organisms at body temperature? Part of the requirement for life is the ability of the structure to maintain itself. When part of the maintenance system goes down, the whole organism collapses and dies. At the moment of death it still has most of the structure necessary for life, if only the broken part could be repaired quickly. However, within minutes thermal agitation disrupts the delicate coiling or folding of proteins that makes some of them active as enzymes. The enzymes denature and cannot catalyze the necessary chemical reactions. The structures they were maintaining then break down, and death becomes irreversible. It takes large systems of enzymes to maintain life.

Engineering is still far from miniaturizing its information storage and retrieval systems to the molecular level, or manufacturing such tiny robots as the enzymes in living cells.

Adapting the Form of Robots

The conditions the robots will encounter are unknown. Their programming must include a wide variety of adaptive behaviors. The robots must have enough autonomy and intelligence to choose behaviors strategically from an on-board “bag of tricks.”

Beyond adaptive behavior there is adaptive form or structure. If we study the different kinds of robots sent to the Moon before human exploration began there, we can trace an adaptation of form.

At first aerospace engineers knew very little about surface conditions on the Moon. Astronomers could see that the Moon’s surface is covered with craters. From the rain of meteors and meteorites that fall into the Earth’s atmosphere, they rightly predicted that the Moon’s airless surface must be covered with dust. They did not know how deep the dust was. Also, they could not predict if the layers of dust were stable. What if the layers slid easily over one another? Could astronauts walk upright on the Moon? Or would they slip and fall, and sink down into a layer of dust so thick it would swallow them? One cannot send people, no matter how brave, to encounter extreme, unknown conditions. It was sensible first to send robots.

Aerospace engineers doomed to destruction on arrival the first robots they sent to the Moon. The robots were simply automatic cameras that looked forward and took pictures as they approached the Moon. Each successive television frame came from a closer range, showing a smaller and smaller area in greater and greater detail. The last frame was always incomplete because the crash ended the transmission.

The next series of robots had considerably more structure. NASA designed them as three-legged vehicles with large footpads, and endowed them with a rocket motor that fired between their legs. This arrangement allowed the robots to make soft landings on the Moon. They had no wheels or moveable leg joints and couldn’t travel anywhere. They couldn’t even level themselves if one of their feet happened to land on a rock.

All the robots carried a camera. NASA mounted the camera on swivels to take photos in almost any direction. The camera could only rotate and look up and down through a narrow slit, but the operators pasted the pictures together into a complete panorama. Especially, NASA’s engineers made sure they could focus the camera on the robot’s footpads.

The first footpads were excessively large because no one knew how big they had to be to stay on top of the dust. The pictures of the footpads were very important. Engineers studied the pictures to find out how deep the pads sank into the dust as they bore the weight of the robot.

NASA designed the footpads for the manned lunar landing module and the astronauts’ shoes in accordance with earlier findings. The later footpads were smaller than earlier ones in relation to the weight they had to bear. The engineers had a better idea of just how large the footpads had to be. NASA did not make the footpads excessively large because the engineers wanted to reduce the weight of the footpads themselves. The savings in weight permitted adding extra instruments and capabilities to the mission payload.

From this story we can see that aerospace engineers modified the form or structure of the robots in accordance with new purposes and better knowledge of conditions. This is creative design. Let’s note, however, that it was the designers who had the creativity. None of the robots that reached the Moon had either sufficient artificial intelligence or mechanical capability to adapt its form to unforeseen conditions. Once the robots found the terrain stable, none of them could take off its oversize footpads and use the unnecessary material for some other purpose.

Aerospace engineers have to develop robots to explore unknown environments before human exploration can begin. A design goal is always to program in adaptive behavior, especially as the exploration sites become more and more remote and timely consultation with Earth-bound controllers becomes impossible. A higher design goal would be to provide adaptive structure, but at present that is still a science fiction dream.

However, the farther we send robots, the more we may have to think of things like that. We would like to find ways of programming adaptive behavior and even adaptive form. That will be creative design at its best.

The Origin of Adaptive Form Variation

Darwin was a creationist. He submitted to the scientific world the idea that God may have used the mechanism of adaptive form variation to create the different species. In Darwin’s vision, small adaptive form variations might accumulate in some individuals of one species until they became a new species.

The confirmed biological examples of adaptive variation under environmental pressure are evidence for highly creative design programmed into nature. But how did it become programmed? Were random mutation and survival of the fittest enough to establish a capability that engineers cannot yet imitate, or did a great, pre-existing intelligence design all life forms?

Darwin’s Discovery Extrapolated to Darwinism

Distinct from Darwin’s discovery of adaptive variation is a concept we will call Darwinism. Darwinists believe that all living species including humankind are naturally selected variations of a common ancestor. Furthermore, they hold that the common ancestor, the first microorganism, arose from lifeless chemicals because of a very improbable accident. At that time, perhaps 3 800 million years ago, or maybe much more recently, certain chemical substances made a fortunate combination and generated the first life form that survived and reproduced itself. This was so unlikely that it couldn’t have happened more than once on the Earth. All present living organisms are descended from the first microorganism. Random variation and natural selection, acting over hundreds of millions of years, have produced the rich variety of life forms on Earth.

Classifications range through kingdoms, branches, phyla, classes, cohorts, orders, families, tribes, genera, and species. Some authors simplify the classifications by leaving out branches, cohorts, and tribes. There are the plant, animal, and fungi kingdoms and usually two kingdoms for one-celled organisms. Protista cells have a nucleus and prokaryote cells do not. Within species (such as dog or cat) there are varieties (like spaniel or retriever).

It was not Darwin, but others, notably Thomas Henry Huxley (British biologist, 1825—1895), who seized on Darwin’s discovery and extrapolated it into the idea that all the species arose from one primordial life form by natural selection without any intervention from pre-existing intelligence. Huxley took the origin of species and extended it back to the origin of the first microorganism. He also extended it forward to the origins of genera, families, orders, classes, phyla, and kingdoms.

The Development of the Sciences

Most of the sciences had precursors in superstition and magic. These outdated ideas continue to plague the sciences. Astrology came before astronomy, alchemy preceded chemistry, shamans tried to heal before there was medicine, and pantheons of gods and goddesses took charge of every mysterious phenomenon before cosmology was a science. There were fertility rituals before science discovered agricultural fertilization and assisted reproduction.

The first stage in the history of a science is descriptive. The scientific facts come from careful observation. For example, many medicines owe their discovery to careful classification of the beneficial effects of various herbs. Later, experimenters arrange to make their observations under controlled conditions. Analysis of experimental data helps to form mathematical models. The models develop into a body of theory. At a certain stage of development, theory can occasionally predict previously unobserved phenomena. Theory, full grown, leads to the uniform treatment of a wide range of seemingly diverse phenomena. In physics this last stage, the era of unification theories, is the most recent development.

Physics, chemistry, biology, social sciences, and psychology are all at different stages of development in the scheme outlined above. They also seem to progress at different rates, allowing of course for growth spurts when great scientists arise.

Biology is not yet as precise a science as physics or chemistry. Some of its branches, like genome sequencing, are advancing rapidly toward greater precision. Talented biologists are working on provable hypotheses and quantitative experiments, not description and speculation. They now make computer simulations and do meaningful experiments to confirm their hypotheses before publication. Darwinism, however, remains where it began, in the 19th-century descriptive phase.

Darwinists propose the spontaneous growth of unplanned complexity. Their proposal is incompatible with the known laws of physics. The most general physical law relevant to the Darwinist notion is the second law of thermodynamics. In later chapters we will study how the second law applies to living systems. The precise sciences of thermodynamics and information theory exclude the spontaneous production of information.

Contrasting Darwinism and Thermodynamics

Let’s make a preliminary comparison. Both Darwin’s The Origin of Species and the second law of thermodynamics come to us from the 19^th century. However the two ideas have developed very differently.

In the 19^th century and well into the 20^th century many people thought the Earth had existed forever more or less in its present state. That allowed an infinite amount of time for random action to try all possible variations, with natural selection always discarding unsuitable morphologies. Darwinism’s originators didn’t know that their favorite mechanism had to succeed or fail in the limited period of some 4 000 million years since the crust of the Earth cooled.

Darwin had some 19^th-century ideas that scientists have since invalidated, like the heritability of acquired characteristics. Ignorance of the mechanisms of heredity flawed his speculations. Neo-Darwinists patched up the flaws they could and tried to enter an experimental phase. Their efforts culminated in the production of amino acids under very contrived conditions a hundred years after the publication of The Origin of Species. Yet even these achievements were unavailing. The results did not lend direct support to the evolutionary conjecture. In our days, Darwinist speculators try to explain why evolution is not subject to experimental verification.

No one has ever observed the origin of a species. All we see is the destruction of a dozen species per year. Conservationists tell us that many other species are doomed to extinction, often because of human encroachment on the habitats of wild animals. Environmental biologists want to save the endangered species, but they cannot justify their concern from evolution. If the struggle to survive is what leads to progress, shouldn’t they be happy if the whales and lions and tigers and condors are dying out? Darwinists tell us that man is the greatest product of evolution to date. Then of course man is going to exterminate weaker species by taking away their ecological niche. Isn’t trying to save the endangered species a way of working against Darwinism in its supposedly onward and upward course?

Let’s lower the number of annual extinctions to ten for the sake of argument. The appearance of one or two new species every year is not enough to maintain the current number of species. No new species counts if it arose through deliberate human intervention or has achieved reproductive isolation because of behavioral changes only. The Darwinist process is mindless and purposeless. Since the publication of The Origin of Species more than 140 years have passed. Darwinists should supply a list of at least 1 400 new species before claiming that Darwinism is ongoing. If there is, just at present, a temporary lull in the appearance of new species, they should explain why.

Charles D. Walcott, a former director of the Smithsonian Institution, used to spend summers digging fossils out of the Burgess Shale of British Columbia. Between 1909 and 1919 he shipped more than 60 000 fossils back to Washington, D. C. When he found evidence that all the phyla are represented in the Pre-Cambrian era (more than 620 million years ago), he experienced so much cognitive dissonance with Darwinism that he never published his findings. He simply left the fossils in the drawers of the Smithsonian, to be rediscovered in 1966, long after his death. Paleontologists from the University of Cambridge found at least 15 animals that didn’t fit into any known phylum. All the phyla separated from each other in a few tens of millions of years. This finding ought to have shattered the Darwinist idea that different types of organisms came at different times, gradually, through a process of mutation and selection. But these days Darwinists just say that “Mother Nature suddenly got inventive,” and call the find the “Pre-Cambrian Explosion.” Is this conscious imitation of the popular notion of the “Big Bang”?

People can only study the fossils that they and others find or have found, and then the results are at most descriptive. Is the study of fossils a dead end? Fossil human bones appeared in excavations in the Neander Valley near Düsseldorf, Germany, in 1856. The first skeletal remains of Cro-Magnon man came out of a cave by that name in France in 1868. The discoverers of Neanderthal and Cro-Magnon man are now gone and can’t defend their claims. Darwinists now count these discoveries as varieties of present-day man. This leaves room for living Darwinists to make new, more important finds. News magazines publish a new chart for every find. The chart usually puts the find of the featured discoverer in the most prominent place. The new fossil is almost always the oldest or the most like modern people or the most prominent in some other way. All the other finds of other discoverers are usually on branches that lead to evolutionary dead ends. The charts contradict each other, so they can’t all be right. There is no consensus among the experts.

Sensationalism seduces, and non-specialists are defenseless. Meave Leakey, wife of Richard Erskine Frere Leakey (Kenyan paleoanthropologist, 1944—) and head of paleontology at the National Museums of Kenya, made a very sensible comment in a recent article. The article did not feature her finds, but the reporters asked for her perspective on the claims of others. She said, “There are all sorts of hypotheses, and they are all fairy tales because you can’t prove anything.”[1]

How far can survival of the fittest carry adaptive changes of form? DNA encodes a bag of tricks that necessity can activate to produce new varieties within a species. On the other hand, we never see a series of mutations that accumulate to make the vast changes in morphology required for a new phylum or body plan. Most mutations involve suppression of information, not new information. Body parts occasionally fail to develop, or they develop in the wrong places. New body parts or complex organs never appear.

Darwinists based their evolutionary development scheme on morphological classification systems, but they did it in ignorance of the full genomes of the organisms. Now that we can sequence the DNA in a genome, we are finding that genetic similarity is showing up big errors in the morphological scheme of evolutionary development. If the first Darwinist conjecture was wrong, is that any reason for believing them now?

We might think that these days, when peer-reviewed journals cover their publication costs by charging each author’s institution an amount proportional to the number of pages, people simply cannot fill up half an article with idle speculations that cannot be proved. A flagrant example of fruitless speculation is the dispute about whether prokaryotes, cellular organisms that do not have a distinct nucleus, evolved faster than their supposed successors, eukaryotes or cells with nuclei. The “proof” some people offer for the faster evolution of prokaryotes is that they don’t need a nucleus and are therefore more advanced though less complex than eukaryotes. But Darwinists need publications like everyone else to keep their academic positions. Their institutions pay the publication charges to boost their institutional prestige. The system actually rewards authors for extending their remarks.

During the 1950’s and 1960’s nearly every article in biology had to pay lip service to Darwinism. There were even a few new articles about variations in the Darwinist story. Most of these now are limited to the semi-popular literature of divulgation, or to monographs with no peer review at all. Darwinism is stagnant, presently degenerated into a morass of competing, mutually contradictory ideas.

On the other hand, the second law of thermodynamics has been confirmed again and again. Extensions cover situations where there is no apparent temperature involved. At present the laws of thermodynamics apply to all physical phenomena. There are no known exceptions. Let’s take note of three major extensions of the second law of thermodynamics.

First, Ludwig Boltzmann (Austrian physicist, 1844—1906) found a formulation of the second law that later could be extended to 20^th century quantum mechanics. Boltzmann could not have anticipated the special needs of a theory that arose years after his death. He was working with classical, 19^th-century knowledge of heat and radiation. At the beginning of the 20^th century Planck discovered a new, more accurate, quantum-mechanical description of heat and radiation. Yet Boltzmann’s formulation still applied, because both the second law of thermodynamics and quantum mechanics are accurate descriptions of nature.

Second, Claude Elwood Shannon (American applied mathematician and electrical engineer, 1916—2001) modified Boltzmann’s formula and used it to measure information.[2] Information theory developed from this insight. The second law of thermodynamics is about a measure of disorder called entropy. We need information to restore order, so information is the negative of entropy. We can state that more clearly. Since we normally consider order and information to be positive, desirable quantities, it is better to think of entropy as negative information.

We need a little background to understand the third extension. Black holes are foci of incalculably strong gravity. They are spheres of a radius called the Schwarzschild radius, after Karl Schwarzschild (German astronomer, 1873—1916). Light and matter can fall in through the surface of the sphere toward the black hole, but nothing can come out.

To escape from a gravitating body an object must start upward with a certain minimum speed. The minimum speed is called the escape velocity. An object rising with less than escape velocity eventually comes to a stop and then falls back. No one is strong enough to throw a baseball into orbit around the Earth, much less to make it escape from the solar system. It usually takes multistage rockets to reach escape velocity from the Earth.

To come out of a black hole, matter or light would have to rise with an extremely high speed. However, matter can never be accelerated to the speed of light. Light projected upward from a black hole stops at the Schwarzschild radius and then falls back. Inside the Schwarzschild radius even the speed of light is less than the escape velocity. If light cannot escape, nothing else can, either.

Recent observations confirm that black holes exist. There are three stars close to the center of our own galaxy orbiting around an invisible central body. That is evidence for a black hole at the center. The mass of the black hole is at least 2 million times the mass of our Sun.[3]

Now that we know something about black holes, we can give the third example. Stephen William Hawking (British theoretical physicist, 1942—) applied the second law of thermodynamics to black holes. Hawking found that the surface area of the Schwarzschild sphere around a black hole is proportional to the black hole’s entropy. He related the black hole’s entropy to the minimal information preserved when material and energy fall into the black hole.

In the light of the three examples above one can see that the second law of thermodynamics is on the cutting edge of ongoing research. Darwinism, however, never gets past arguments about what seems likely to this or that proponent. It has never made quantitative predictions, so it is just a conjecture. It is hardly what physicists and chemists call a theory. It has never become an experimental science, much less a fact.

Darwinism Today

Even today, some people advance the Darwinist notion as the most plausible explanation for the existence of life in all its varied forms. But is it plausible to make such an extrapolation? Who would build a skyscraper on the roof of a hut? Are there any limits to adaptive form variation?

Let’s remember that Darwinism had its roots in the 19th century, before anyone knew of the DNA genetic code, before the discovery that the laws of thermodynamics apply to information, before computers could simulate long-term processes, and certainly before anyone knew the capabilities and limits of computer-aided design. At the beginning of the twenty-first century we are at last ready to evaluate the historical conjecture of Darwinism.

The Limits of Automatic Design

Today there are huge software packages available to help designers of all types: programmers, engineers, inventors, architects, artists, composers, and writers. The idea is to free the designer from mundane tasks and encourage unbridled creativity. Designers will make the soaring leaps of imagination, letting the design program ensure that their designs are scientifically feasible, technically sound, sufficiently strong, safe, and reliable.

Composers no longer have to copy their music laboriously onto music staffs, working out the details of harmony as they go. As soon as they have a new melody in their heads, all they have to do is play it on a piano keyboard connected to a computer. The score appears automatically on the screen, replete with standard harmony, ready for printout under the composer’s copyright.

Writers may give free flight to their fancy, and let the computer worry about spelling and grammar. Search engines automate the research, online encyclopedias verify the facts, and computerized anthologies supply the quotes.

Even mathematicians are finally learning that computers can help them to find mathematical proofs.

We still have not achieved a master system like the one science fiction writers described half a century ago. Once artificial intelligence reaches the level of creativity, some authors said that we should ask the computers how to build more powerful computers. The machines will then “lift themselves by their own bootstraps.” However, we do “boot up” our computers when we start them. The start-up program is called the “bootstrap” because it loads itself.

Engineers use machines to help them design and build new, more powerful machines. The present relationship between engineers and machines may merit the term “symbiotic.” Engineers and machines work together intimately in a mutually beneficial relationship. Together they are bootstrapping upward. However, at present the machines are not creative. They do not make great leaps of imagination or find new relationships between variables or synthesize new concepts. Hands must still lead the machines.

In the early 1960’s, engineers were just beginning to see the possibility of applying computers to their design tasks. The most adventurous of us learned to write programs in languages like FORTRAN (Formula Translation). Other programming languages came afterwards. Initial successes set some engineers to dreaming of the future. Hollywood immediately picked up the theme. In the future, according to the movies, we would only have to talk to a computer, and new designs would pop out, fully elaborated, automatically.

Success with programming languages led on to dreams about human languages. Won’t it be wonderful when computers can do automatic translation? We will achieve broad understanding between different cultures. Wars will cease, and everything will be peace and harmony.

This rosy picture is wonderful from a distance. Up close we notice a few flaws. In the last half-century we have discovered that there are limits to automatic design. There is no comparison with creative design.