God's Debris

Scott Adams book "God's Debris" took my fancy today. An interesting read, as much for the errors therein as the ideas.

The most blatant factual error is that gravity propagates at the speed of light, not instantaneously as stated. Not that any crucial part of the argument is affected thereby, but...

The most glaring logical error is that God had at least one choice other than self-destruction; namely the creation of a universe that He cannot predict the future of. Any all-powerful all-knowing critter is, by definition, capable of such paradoxical behaviour!

Then there is the chapter titled "Evolution", which spectacularly misses the point.

Scott Adams has his Avatar character say: "The theory of evolution leads to no practical invention. It is a concept that has no application". Evolutionary medicine and psychology are obvious exceptions. More generally, the explanatory power of the concept is extraordinary. It has impacted probably every arena of human thought; especially since the recent development of chaos theory.

The Avatar goes on to argue that an alien race could validly assume that our cookware evolved, using us to achieve this. Bad analogy. An alien race might misread the fossil evidence of us and our computers, as the latter will appear more complex than our mere bones, but cookware has no internal structure worth scanning for. (That said, artefacts are evidence for our social evolution, (and thus change a myriad times for each speciation event).)

The Avatar further states, as evidence against Darwinian evolution, that there is a lack of evidence of present day mutations. Actually there are billions happening all the time. Experiments have been performed. Similar step-wise adaptation happens all over the world at every moment of every day. Punctuated equilibrium events are rarer, often in response to catastrophic environmental changes, but the evidence for them is strong. We haven't witnessed a super-volcano in historic times either - the last was about 70,000 years ago - but we know they occur.

The last error I'll point out (there are several others) is the common misconception that evolution only results in more complex life forms. Not so. Flightless birds are one contrary example, whales another. Evolution fits a species to its environment. If simpler is fitter, then simpler wins.

Despite the above, the book is an interesting read.