A Revolution in Evolution Is Underway

ANN ARBOR, MI — The small town of Dover, Pennsylvania today became the first school district in the nation to officially inform students of the theory of Intelligent Design, as an alternative to Darwin’s theory of Evolution. In what has been called a “measured step”, ninth grade biology students in the Dover Area School District were read a four-paragraph statement Tuesday morning explaining that Darwin’s theory is not a fact and continues to be tested. The statement continued, “Intelligent Design is an explanation of the origin of life that differs from Darwin’s view.” Since the late 1950s advances in biochemistry and microbiology, information that Darwin did not have in the 1850s, have revealed that the machine like complexity of living cells - the fundamental unit of life- possessing the ability to store, edit, and transmit and use information to regulate biological systems, suggests the theory of intelligent design as the best explanation for the origin of life and living cells.

Richard Thompson, President and Chief Counsel of the Thomas More Law Center, a national public interest law firm representing the school district against an ACLU lawsuit, commented, “Biology students in this small town received perhaps the most balanced science education regarding Darwin’s theory of evolution than any other public school student in the nation. This is not a case of science versus religion, but science versus science, with credible scientists now determining that based upon scientific data, the theory of evolution cannot explain the complexity of living cells.”

“It is ironic that the ACLU after having worked so hard to prevent the suppression of Darwin’s theory in the Scopes trial, is now doing everything it can to suppress any effort to challenge it,” continued Thompson.

If the act of decision is your criterion, of course, you must recognize that we don't generally recognize the ability of children to make free decisions. Will iself is a continuum, not a binary quantity....

Yes, the act of decision would be my criterion, RightWingProfessor. For to "decide" requires that one select a particular choice from among a potentially very large set of competing alternatives, and once a decision is made, only one outcome is realized, and all the rest of the alternatives present in the probability amplitude remain unexpressed. I know that vector state collapse is a term normally associated with observations made within quantum systems, but as you'll recall I mentioned that effectively the same type of operation can be observed in "real-world systems," such as even a child making a decision.

Now you say that a child is incapable of making a "free" decision. I gather you do not spend much time observing children. Any child can select an alternative that he intends as a means of satisfying a perceived need or desire. All other potentially competing possibilities for the child's action remain unexpressed once the child fixes on one of them, and moves to realize it. This looks to me like an excellent example of the collapse of a probability amplitude to me. Whether or not a child is "competent" to make an informed choice, as presumably an adult would do, is beside the point. Even a mentally handicapped person can make a decision. And with the decision once made, all other possible decisions that person could make remain in the "netherworld of possibilities" that do not become reified. And this, to me, is the hallmark of state vector collapse.

Perhaps will may be a continuum; but an actual choice represents a "quantized" event. The choice or decision could have been otherwise, but it was not. Ergo, state vector collapse has occured.

I am revulsed by Pinker's idea that "of course we have a revulsion towards the idea that what we are and what we do might be the result of the operation of a set of natural laws, because we evolved to act as if we have a control of our destiny." Surely you see that this is mere opinion; for there's no way Pinker's insight could be falsified/validated. As an insight into human psychology, Pinker's statement is such that only an communist ideologue could love. To say that people have no control of their destiny because they are simply the sum-total of the operations of "natural laws" (what natural laws???) has been repeatedly invalidated throughout the course of human evolution, as any student of history is aware.

Or was there just something unique about the way the biochemistry worked out to produce a, say, Alexander the Great? Or a Hitler, for that matter?

Pinker's remark is an absurd reduction. It is a case of letting one's doctrinal tail wag the dog of reality. FWIW

Thank you so much for your excellent post! I certainly agree with you on all of it.

All I can add is that the correspondents might recall the arguments for and against many-worlds quantum mechanics when contemplating the collapse of a probability amplitude:

Many-worlds Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics

The reason for adopting the MWI is that it avoids the collapse of the quantum wave. (Other non-collapse theories are not better than MWI for various reasons, e.g., nonlocality of Bohmian mechanics; and the disadvantage of all of them is that they have some additional structure.) The collapse postulate is a physical law that differs from all known physics in two aspects: it is genuinely random and it involves some kind of action at a distance. According to the collapse postulate the outcome of a quantum experiment is not determined by the initial conditions of the Universe prior to the experiment: only the probabilities are governed by the initial state. Moreover, Bell 1964 has shown that there cannot be a compatible local-variables theory that will make deterministic predictions. There is no experimental evidence in favor of collapse and against the MWI. We need not assume that Nature plays dice. The MWI is a deterministic theory for a physical Universe and it explains why a world appears to be indeterministic for human observers.

The MWI exhibits some kind of nonlocality: "world" is a nonlocal concept, but it avoids action at a distance and, therefore, it is not in conflict with the relativistic quantum mechanics; see discussions of nonlocality in Vaidman 1994, Tipler 2000, Bacciagaluppi 2002, and Hemmo and Pitowsky 2001. Although the issues of (non)locality are most transparent in the Schrödinger representation, an additional insight can be gained through recent analysis in the framework of the Heisenberg representation, see Deutsch and Hayden 2000, Rubin 2001, and Deutsch 2001. The most celebrated example of nonlocality was given by Bell 1964 in the context of the Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen argument. However, in the framework of the MWI, Bell's argument cannot get off the ground because it requires a predetermined single outcome of a quantum experiment.

Another example of a kind of an action at a distance in a quantum theory with collapse is the interaction-free measurement of Elitzur and Vaidman 1993. Consider a super-sensitive bomb which explodes when any single particle arrives at its location. It seems that it is impossible to see this bomb, because any photon that arrives at the location of the bomb will cause an explosion. Nevertheless, using the Elitzur and Vaidman method, it is possible, at least sometimes, to find the location of the bomb without exploding it. In the case of success, a paradoxical situation arises: we obtain information about some region of space without any particle being there. Indeed, we know that no particle was in the region of the bomb because there was no explosion. The paradox disappears in the framework of the MWI. The situation is paradoxical because it contradicts physical intuition: the bomb causes an observable change in a remote region without sending or reflecting any particle. Physics is the theory of the Universe and therefore the paradox is real if this story is correct in the whole physical Universe. But it is not. There was no photon in the region of the bomb in a particular world, but there are other worlds in which a photon reaches the bomb and causes it to explode. Since the Universe incorporates all the worlds, it is not true that in the Universe no photon arrived at the location of the bomb. It is not surprising that our physical intuition leads to a paradox when we limit ourselves to a particular world: physical laws are applicable when applied to the physical universe that incorporates all of the worlds.

The MWI is not the most accepted interpretation of quantum theory among physicists, but it is becoming increasingly popular (see Tegmark 1998). The strongest proponents of the MWI can be found in the communities of quantum cosmology and quantum computing. In quantum cosmology it makes it possible to discuss the whole Universe avoiding the difficulty of the standard interpretation which requires an external observer. In quantum computing, the key issue is the parallel processing performed on the same computer; this is very similar to the basic picture of the MWI.[9]

Many physicists and philosophers believe that the most serious weakness of the MWI (and especially of its version presented here) is that it "gives up trying to explain things". In the words of Steane 1999, "It is no use to say that the [Schrödinger] cat is ‘really’ both alive and dead when every experimental test yields unambiguously the result that the cat is either alive or dead." (Steane dismisses the interference experiment which can reveal the presence of the superposition as unfeasible.) Indeed, if there is nothing in physics except the wave-function of the Universe, evolving according to the Schrödinger equation, then there are questions answering which requires help by other sciences. However, the advantage of the MWI is that it allows us to view quantum mechanics as a complete and consistent physical theory which agrees with all experimental results obtained to date.

Whereas I can appreciate the many-worlds theory, I agree that it is cop-out and would further suggest that Schrödinger's cat is both alive and dead in f-Theory as well (extra temporal dimension).

On our worldline, though, in four dimensions - the cat is either alive or dead - and thus willfulness selects among the sum of histories.

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