In the 1990s Noam Chomsky abandoned his 'standard' P&P approach, publishing his
new minimalist program around 1992. However massive divides persist in linguistics to this day, and computational linguistics has moved out of linguistics into computer science - to a considerable extent losing and ignoring the traditional psychological and linguistic insights.
In the 21st century, academic scientists and university department have unfortunately gone back into their disciplinary boxes and ivory towers, while research in artificial intelligence has largely been driven by commercial considerations. The rapid expansion of information technology and black box approaches to neural networks has left little room for students to be trained in the relevant cognitive science, or to learn the language and ethos of the other relevant disciplines.
Dawkins: Evolution vs God
The
second illustration we will use is the treatment of evolution in science,
including both formal scientific writing and the popular writing of esteemed
scientists.
In the
penultimate paragraph of the introductory chapter to his 2019 book
"Outgrowing God",
Richard
Dawkins writes "all I need to say at present is that evolution is a
definite fact: we are cousins of chimpanzees, slightly more distant cousins of
monkeys, very much more distant cousins of fish and so on." Is this what
we would expect from a top scientist?
In his
previous writings Dawkins refers to biblical stories and characters as myths, while other people from similar periods
are treated as historical. In "Outgrowing God" he does seek to
justfiy this view by referring to literary criticism of the historical
documents, and hypotheses of assertions. In the end, he admits the possibility
that Jesus actually existed (and notes that the gospels were written long after
Jesus death, and that people "wrongly believe" they were written by
the authors they are attributed too - ignoring the internal evidence of Mark, Luke
and John in particular, that there were stories circulating from early times,
and identifying themselves in their texts).
There is
considerable support for believing that key biblical characters existed. To start with the most obvious and superficial: Christians incorporate the name of Christ, and Semites (semitic races)
incorporate the name of Shem, reflecting traditions going back to the named figures, with two large racial groups tracing their roots to
Abraham (through Ishmael and Isaac). Other key biblical figures interacted with key political figures of
the time - and generally the bible's view of Jews and Christians is not always
positive: it tends to be no holds barred in a way that speaks to their
existence. In several cases, there is more evidence than for other historical
figures of the same era. Thus it is prejudicial to call these mythical and others historical.
There are no testable predictions and scientific experiments we can perform here, but
nonetheless there is, in all cases, evidence we can weigh.
On the
other hand, acknowledging these people actually existed doesn't of itself mean
that God exists, created the universe, or is interested in mankind, or has sent a saviour – although it
does suggest that there are some purportedly miraculous events in the historical records that otherwise
need to be explained away.
The
essential point here is that evolution is also a theory where it is difficult
to make testable predictions. It should not be held as a matter of faith - to do so is religion not science.
Furthermore the theories of how particular
animals might have evolved depends on myths called "just so stories"
that take their name from Rudyard Kipling's (1902) Just So Stories
for young children, stories like How The Camel Got His Hump; How The Leopard
Got His Spots; How The First Letter Was Written; How The Alphabet Was Made.
These evolutionary "just so stories" are true myths, as nobody
seriously believes that they represent actual historical events – although their
authors hope there might be some similarity to what actually happened (but in
some cases they seem more hysterical than historical).
One additional
complication with dealing with evolution as a theory is that there is no
well-defined theory, and indeed different people at different times mean
different things by evolution.
Evolution
vs Genetics
Charles Darwin knew all about selective breeding, that is artificial
selection, and that is where the name came for his
theory of natural
selection. His contemporary, Gregor Mendel formally
studied artificial selection and effectively predicted the discovery of genes
and the idea of genetic crossover of the parents genes – however, Darwin may
not have been aware of Mendel's contemporaneous work. It seems he did have the
journal volume in which the paper appeared, but the pages in that copy had not
been cut (although that doesn't necessarily mean he didn't hear about it on the scientific
grapevine or have someone else show him their copy).
Work and publication of Origin of the Species did make Darwin question his Christian
faith, or at least orthodox versions of it, as well as gaining him the
criticism of some elements of the church –despite withholding his discussion of
mankind as "so surrounded with prejudices" (letter to Alfred
Wallace). He, however, didn't use the word "evolution" till Descent of
Man, which did address this application to mankind and
human races (and indeed the one use of any version of the verb
"evolve" came right at the end of the extant editions of Origin of
the Species).
Natural selection as a building block of evolutionary theory is well
established, and these days not particularly controversial – having the
character of making predictions that have been confirmed. Of course, there is an artificial component to all
experiments, but rather than direct breeding it has been possible to explore
the changes in certain species engendered by changing environmental conditions
or translating them to a different environment and/or ecosystem.
Creation
Accounts and Myths
It should be emphasized that many Christians (and people of other religions) have no particular problem
with proposed artificial and natural selection mechanisms, and the genetic processes
that lead to evolution of species to better fit their changing ecological niches.
Although transmutation of species, or evolution of new species, has proven hard to
demonstrate (in the sense that new phenotypes and genotypes can still
interbreed).
But what of the the
"myths" of the Bible, as Dawkins calls them: the "creation
myths" and "genealogical myths".
In
many ways the Bible's "genealogical myths" are not much different
from the "biological classifications" of Linnaeus. The Linnaean taxonomy was a very important
contribution, and the classifications did represent specific predictions about
relatedness that have been tested (and much revised) based on genetic evidence.
The family genealogies of the Bible did, of course, start off as oral history,
and have been maintained more recently in written records. Cluster Analysis and Principle Component Analysis of genome
diversity across races is remarkably consistent with
the biblical genealogies dating back to Noah, and it is also interesting to
compare that with taxonomic/cluster analyses and geographical dispersion of linguistic
diversity.
Genesis 1 and
Genesis 2 actually provide two different accounts of creation — the first dealing with creation in its broader sense, culminating
in the creation and dominion of mankind, while chapter 2 gives the story of
Adam and Eve and lays the foundation for the fall into sin of Genesis 3 The
first chapter has a somewhat poetic character and the seven days can be
interpreted as eras (like the day of the dinosaur) and this is reflected
elsewhere in the Bible. Similarly there is some evidence of editing of the lists of generations and choosing key figures to make a point. Days and weeks, sixes and sevens, are used metaphorically as for (in)complete periods of time. Matthew's grouping into three groups of fourteen generations from Abraham to David to Exile to Jesus is six of seven "weeks". We are still in the seventh "day" of creation, the day of rest, according to the book of Hebrews, and we are evidently in the seventh set of seven "generations" according to Matthew. In fact, Genesis 2:4-5 uses the same word "day" to encapsulate the entire period of creation up to the point where man was created.
The Genesis 1
account thus doesn't purport to be day by day history, but reading through it sounds remarkably like a bystander viewpoint on different stages of creation. Many
Jews, Moslems and Christians tend to believe that it is not intended to be
taken literally — and this view was current around the time that Darwin
published Origin of the Species and
accounts for the less than expected criticism across the church — in a sense it
was overshadowed by the more general controversy over literary criticism of the
biblical texts.
Psalm 90 and 2 Peter 3 equate a day with an epoch of "a thousand years". And as for "week", in Genesis 29, Jacob's weeks of work for Laban are 7 year each; and in Leviticus 25 "week" is used first for a seven year period, and then for seven such seven-year periods leading to the jublilee. Daniel 9 also makes a prediction of 70 weeks (=490 years). Our word sabbatical, is the sabbath day of rest at the end of the work week translated to years of employment.
Story structure is still at sixes and sevens in modern story telling (cf. John Truby, Chris Booker and Randy Ingermanson). Indeed our psyche is very much at sixes and sevens as evidenced by Miller's Magical Number Seven. We perceive (subitize and discriminate) accurately below seven and chunk in approximate terms like a handful, half a dozen, several, or a week... We have seven hour marks on the (sun)dial for dawn to midday and midday to dusk and similarly for month markings between equinox and solstice (curves on sundials). Even powerpoint slides in best practice limit to at most seven dot points.
The Genesis 2
account reads very much like a just-so-story or fable aimed at teaching a
particular lesson in poetic dot points, although in the bible many such stories are painted as
literally happening, sometimes there is debate as to they are meant to be
interpreted literally or as parables. But in a sense this is irrelevant, as an
omnipotent God could choose to teach Adam his place in the world, and that of
his wife/woman (no separate words in Hebrew or Greek), by literally enacting
this Adam's Rib story. In the Old Testament, God loves these acted parables/prophecies.
The Genesis 7
account of Noah and the flood is also open to interpretation. In particular
what is meant by "world" or "earth". The gestation period of 40 weeks (also thought of as six weeks of weeks) is a time of testing/travail cut short and leading to (re)birth ("travail" has both the sense of traveling on a journey, and is etymologically a form of "travel", as well as the sense of painful hard work and "labour" in the sense of the journey through the birth canal. The period referred to by the 40 translates down to days for individual experience (40 days of Noah's flood, of Jesus' temptation in the wilderness marking the start of his ministry, and of Jesus time of teaching his disciples after his resurrection before his ascension), and up to years (Israel's 40 years of testing in the wilderness after escape from slavery in Egypt) or even decades (Israel's 400 years in Egypt, birthing a nation).
Here it is important
to remember that when it was composed, the most it could be expected to
represent was the "known inhabitd world" centring around the meeting point of
Africa, Europe and Asia (the Middle East): the "new world" had yet to
be discovered, and even that was just the Americas - the southern continents of
Australia and Antartica are not part of either the old or the new world!
Furthermore, the word "earth" (the expression in this chapter is "face of
the earth" or "face of the ground") and can refer to the dirt
and soil that is the foundation for life. There is no claim or words that imply
"global flood", and a global flood wouldn't have been needed to wipe out mankind
when still confined to the region of the Africa–Middle-East conjunction (actually part of Africa until relatively recently).
Similar
considerations apply to the Genesis 11 account of the Tower of Babel and the
emergence of different languages. Interestingly, God decides to "confuse
their language" and does this by "scattering them abroad from there
over the face of all the earth" (diaspora).
Initially, that
need not have included crossing oceans to other continents, and humans clearly did
migrate across land bridges and cross rivers and straits, and 60-70,000 years
ago evidently accidentally or intentionally reached Australia without a
need to cross more than 100km of water – and indeed the evidence suggests that the earliest Australian
aboriginals were also able to cross to Tasmania, which was also accessible via a land
bridge even as little as 30,000 years ago. Indeed these Tasmanian aboriginals
seem to be genetically divergent from those that arrived in the last 10,000
years and one way of another the earlier race disappeared from the mainland. Even today, crossing
from Siberia to Alaska requires bridging only around 40km of the Bering Strait,
and there is evidence of accidental crossings of animals on ice floes.
Evolution
of the Gene - the Science and the Fiction
In general,
evolutionary theory is itself highly dependent on myths and just-so-stories to
illustrate how things might have happened, although without the miraculous
element of the Adam's Rib account. Furthermore there is a problem with
evolutionary being "saltatory", that is jumping faster than
evolutionists can easily account for - and the flipside of this is
"missing links". But this doesn't mean evolution of the species or of
mankind in such an undirected way is wrong, just that it is unproven - although it does beg further assumptions: e.g. the assumption of some kind of big-bang to primordial soup starting point (or
similar). Of course their are other possible assumptions, e.g. the assumption of a God that directs the course of
speciation – God could potentially directly reuse (genetic) components of earlier species and/or could control environmental conditions to more indirectly direct the course of
evolution.
Many Christians
accept this kind of post-genetic evolution in some form, but with God playing a
role at points in the story: theistic evolution. The case for atheistic
evolution is, however, not helped by its frequent personification as Evolution
with a capital-E in the role of intelligent agent.
Knowledge of
breeding and artificial selection techniques, and indeed theories that
predicted some sort of genetic basis for speciation, were already extant in
Darwin's time – and the predictions often did not tend to go beyond what was
already known to be possible, and as noted above involved direct or indirect
manipulation of either the breeding or the ecosystem.
Furthermore the big
question that is somewhat less in focus, but nonetheless fundamental to big-E
Evolution, is how the gene evolved, as well as related questions such as how and
why sexual dimorphism evolved.
And taking a step
back from that, there is the question of how
DNA, RNA, proteins and the like emerged from the mythical primordial
slime. Some relatively simple organic
molecules (components of DNA, RNA and proteins) have emerged in test tube
experiments, but we are a long way from explaining this.
From a science
fiction perspective, if there are environmental conditions and pressures that
could evolve such complex molecules, does this entail that compatible molecules
will evolve in different environments (different planets in different
galaxies). SF theories of parallel
evolution explicitly assume so - and it is not an unreasonable expectation of
this kind of pre-genetic evolution.
But interbreeding
between species on Earth is not possible (by definition of species), so
interbreeding between earth and interplanetary or intergalactic species is also
very unlikely without either some prior contact (genetic exchange/panspermia)
or some kind of deliberate engineering (genetic manipulation/splicing) or some
kind of common creator (intelligent
design/theistic evolution).
My Books
So it is not likely that "parallel evolution" could lead to compatible species on other worlds. Quite apart from the general question of "life" on other worlds, the inability of species to interbreed even on earth makes that difficult without some sort of genetic manipulation. But this is not the only questions - can we even expect to eat the plants and animals on another earth-like planet? Maybe!
The interesting question of compatibility at the level of DNA and RNA is one which is much more feasible as they are the only molecular building blocks we know of that can before their various genetic and messenger functions - my Paradisi Chronicles Casindra Lost series finds an affirmative answer to this on New Eden!
My Paradisi Lost stories
My Casindra Lost stories feature genetic engineering and an emergent AI 'Al' and a captain who is reluctantly crewed with him on a rather long journey to another galaxy — just the two of them, and some cats... There's another one, 'Alice' that emerges more gradually in the Moraturi arc. The Paradisi colonization aims to preserve the pristine ecosystems of New Eden, restrict mining to the other planets and asteroids of the system, and genetically modify people to suit the ecosystem rather than overwhelm it with introduced species: https://paradisichronicles.wordpress.com/
Casindra Lost
Kindle paperback edition ISBN-13: 978-1696380911 justified Iowan OS
Kindle enlarged print edn ISBN-13: 978-1708810108 justified Times NR 16
Kindle large print edition ISBN-13: 978-1708299453 ragged Trebuchet 18
Moraturi Lost
Kindle paperback edition ISBN-13: 978-1679850080 justified Iowan OS
Kindle paperback edition ISBN-13: 979-8640426106 justified Iowan OS
Author/Series pages and Awards
