Philosophy of Science
Book Review: Lonely Planets: The Natural Philosophy of Alien Life by David Grinspoon
(out of 5 stars)
Planetary scientist David Grinspoon presents a robust presentation centered on alien life in the universe. An interesting and popular subject, this book was somewhat underwhelming overall, though it had some interesting and enjoyable passages.
While the book presumes to be a "natural philosophy" of the subject, the actual philosophy in the book is largely contained in a few sections of a few chapters. Most of the book describes historical or scientific fundamentals necessary for understanding the alien discussion, including histories of planetary science, alien philosophy, and biology. Except for the history of alien philosophy, which was the best part of the book for me, the history and science sections were good but not great. And while it is necessary to understand these basics, Grinspoon takes several hundred pages to get to his "philosophy". By that time, the decent narrative felt overly-drawn out.
Still, the book is a decent read for anyone with an interest in this sort of subject matter. But don't expect too much if you are an experienced reader, Grinspoon doesn't cover a great deal of original ground here, and except for the history of alien theories, I've read much better treatments of the history and science matters. Additionally, SETI dominates much of the discussion in a way which I found a bit off-putting, though I honestly can't say why. I like Grinspoon and love his enthusiasm, but I came away from Lonely Planets with a sense that it needed to be condensed and reorganized significantly. Three stars.
Book Review: What Is Life?: Investigating the Nature of Life in the Age of Synthetic Biology by Ed Regis
(out of 5 stars)
Philospher and popular science writer Ed Regis takes a modern look at the biological and philosophical nature of defining life in What is Life. While the subject matter is utterly fascinating, and at times this book is quite engaging, there were lots of problems with Regis's presentation.
Right off the bat, Regis sets up his story by detailing the work of researchers seeking to create artificial cells. The work itself is amazing and full of intriguing aspects. However, Regis somehow manages to drag the reader through this section with far-too clinical a look at the business and economic side of the work. While this sort of detail is appropriate in a larger, more comprehensive work, this was a large section of a book with less than 170 pages of actual text.
From there, a long stretch of science history is described, including Schrodinger, Watson, Crick, and others. Far too often for my taste, Regis quotes the brilliant but often highly-criticized Stephen Jay Gould. Gould's views on biology are frequently the subject of harsh criticism from his peers, and while that certainly does not make him incorrect, Regis fails to offer opposing views in situations where Gould's impressions are not necessarily so widely accepted. Regis does this in several other cases as well, in one instance offering a single sentence mentioning Richard Dawkins work, immediately following this by proclaiming that Dawkins's selfish gene theory "hardly settled the issue." Well of course it didn't settle the issue, but that's hardly the point.
Throughout the book, Regis asks us to think about what life is and how we might describe it. He hints early on that his conclusion centers on metabolism. Certainly a reasonable hypothesis, but only rarely does Regis offer actual support for this thesis. At one point, after describing the creation of a synthetic virus, he states: "That itself would have been an example of creating life ... except for the fact that a virus was not a living thing, but rather only a string of dead chemicals inside a protein coating." While that may be one way to describe a virus, this is a skewed interpretation based on Regis's theory that metabolism is absolutely required in a definition of life, a thesis that is not completely agreed upon by biologists or philosophers. Viruses in the wild do appear to have no life-like characteristics, but in vitro they are clearly performing many aspects of replication, mutation, and natural selection. It is hard to say a set of 'dead chemicals' can suddenly transform into something life-like without really explaining to the reader why this is so. Regis drops the ball and offers no explanation.
To be fair, parts of the book are enlightening and enjoyable, including later parts describing the modern work being done in the field of artificial life. But the narrative of history is mediocre, and the author's own philosophy often gets in the way of the story. Three stars.
Book Review: Unweaving the Rainbow: Science, Delusion, and the Appetite for Wonder by Richard Dawkins
(out of 5 stars)
Richard Dawkins has a knack for writing popular science books which offer poetic descriptions of the grand expanses and microscopic details. In Unweaving the Rainbow, Dawkins takes on the notion that science can be quite literally poetic. The book's title comes from the notion put forward by poet John Keats that Isaac Newton destroyed the beauty of rainbows by explaining its form. Dawkins turns that notion around and shows that the beauty and poetry of nature are greatly enhanced by explaining the details.
This wide-ranging book includes a strong mix of popular science (including biology, chemistry, astronomy, anatomy, and zoology) as well as Dawkins' characteristic philosophical thoughts. Unweaving demonstrates to the reader that the wonder of science is not that it destroys the beauty of nature, but that it allows us to gain an even greater appreciation for that beauty. From the nature of starlight and genetics to the ways in which humans are deceived by those claiming supernatural 'facts', Dawkins constantly expresses his awe of the natural world.
The latter parts of the book are centered on genetics and philosophy of mind. Here, of course, Dawkins is in his comfort zone, and the reader who has not read the authors' biology-centered books such as The Selfish Gene will explore some of the amazing characteristics of evolution and DNA. Experienced readers of Dawkins' works won't find much new information in this section, but should read it anyway since Dawkins incorporates a philosophy of science that is often skipped in the more clinical studies.
Unweaving the Rainbow is simply one of the very best widely-accessible popular science books out there. The discussion of coincidence is fantastic and should open the eyes of a reader who had never considered probabilities in this way. While it would help to have some exposure to science writing prior to picking up this book, Dawkins is very careful to introduce the nature of science softely and with much poetic contemplation. One of the best introductions to a wide-range of scientific thought and philosophy and very highly recommended to science readers at all levels. Four and one-half stars.
Book Review: Life of the Cosmos by Lee Smolin
(out of 5 stars)
Having read and loved both of physicist Lee Smolin's more recent books, Three Roads to Quantum Gravity and The Trouble With Physics, I picked up a copy of Life of the Cosmos, his first book. Life centers around Smolin's theory of cosmological natural selection, a proposal which directly counters the weak anthropic cosmological arguments. While Smolin is a brilliant scientist, this first book left a lot to be desired, especially when compared to the two books he has since released. I expected this to be much more a work of philosophy of science, which it was, but the awkward structure and presentation make it a mixed bag for the reader.
Published in the late 1990s, this book was Smolin's first attempt to bring physics to a popular science audience. However, from the first few chapters, it is clear that the book's organization and argument style are cloudy at best. Smolin gives the reader a muddled set of preliminary background, a great deal of which has little to do with explaining his cosmological natural selection theory.
The meat of the book should be Part 2: An Ecology of Space and Time and Part 3: The Organization of the Cosmos. Unfortunately, the book is light on details and often drifts off-subject. I was personally left with only a basic outline of the theory Smolin offered, and would have love to see the implications of cosmological natural selection fleshed out a lot more.
Later parts of the book drift off to mostly philosophical and historical subjects and greatly abandon the arguments for the book's thesis. By the time I finished the book, it had easily been a hundred pages since any lengthy discussion of cosmological natural selection had taken place. Much of this latter history should have been included in the earlier parts of the book or left out entirely.
One area of argument that irked me a bit was Smolin's reliance on the Gaia hypothesis to provide backbone for his discussion of feedback systems. While I respect Lovelock's theory (and the work of other supporters such as Lynn Margulis), Smolin's use of Gaia in support of his own theory does nothing to improve his argument. It is entirely possible to describe the ecological relationships found on this planet without relying on Gaia to explain the processes. Not only is Gaia widely criticised by scientists of myriad disciplines, the modern versions of it are somewhat at odds with some of the aspects Smolin cites (Lovelock himself conceded early on that his initial hypothesis had serious problems, as pointed out by critics, and has backed off many of his original assertions). To be fair, I don't know what Gaia hypothesis actually proposed in the late 1990s at the time Smolin wrote this book. so I suppose this criticism may be a touch harsh.
Overall, Smolin is still a brilliant guy and despite the numerous problems with structure and content, Life is worth reading if you really dig philosophy of science and/or physics/cosmology books. If this one doesn't grab you, don't give up on Smolin as an author. His writing and presentation styles improved tremendously with Three Roads and have become outstanding with Trouble. As for this book, three stars.
Lee Smolin on the Unique Universe
Lee Smolin has made a name for himself over the past decade by running against the majority in theoretical physics, including his outright anger at the way the largely untestable string theory and M-Theory have come to dominate physics. In his latest book, The Trouble With Physics, Smolin hammers string theory, and by extension, the notion of a larger multiverse which must be posited to understand how we see the physical laws we see in our universe.
He penned a few thoughts on the idea that time, as posited by many current popular physics theories, is emergent and therefore there must not be fundamental. Smolin argues instead that taking time as fundamental in our view of physical laws is not only natural but necessary in order to make any sense of what we experience. Newtonian laws, he asserts, must be understood as merely local approximations, which fail to explain much of observational cosmology. A few excerpts:
It is apparent that a scenario in which a population of universes evolves, rather than just being a random timeless distribution, requires a notion of time that is real at a level above individual universes. But to understand why the timeless picture fails, we have to go deeper to the foundations of quantum theory. For example, without time, and without the assumption that what exists is the single universe that we observe, it is hard to make sense of statements about probability relevant to what we observe in our universe. Since quantum mechanics is a probabilistic theory, we then run into trouble by trying to extend it to a realm where probability appears to make no sense. A number of authors have attempted to address this question, by proposing ad hoc measures for deducing predictions from ensembles of multiverses. At least up to the present time, none of these appears to be justified by anything other than the need to reproduce what we observe.
The third principle incorporates the notion that time is an aspect of causal relations. A reason for asserting it is that anything that just existed in a moment, without causing or implying an aspect of the state at a future moment, would be gone in the next moment. Things that persist must be thought of as processes leading to newly changed processes. An atom in a moment is a process leading to a different or a changed atom in the next moment.
This alternative metaphysical framework has implications for the nature of physical law. Since nothing is true or real outside of time, there is no possibility of speaking of eternal laws. Laws are regularities that we discover hold for very long stretches of time, but there is no reason for laws to be true timelessly — indeed, there is no way to make sense of that notion. This opens the door to the possibility that laws evolve in time, which is an idea that has been on the table ever since the great American logician Charles Sanders Peirce wrote in 1891 that “To suppose universal laws of nature capable of being apprehended by the mind and yet having no reason for their special forms, but standing inexplicable and irrational, is hardly a justifiable position. Uniformities are precisely the sort of facts that need to be accounted for. Law is par excellence the thing that wants a reason. Now the only possible way of accounting for the laws of nature, and for uniformity in general, is to suppose them results of evolution.”
From this point of view, the notion of transcending our time-bound experiences in order to discover truths that hold timelessly is an unrealizable fantasy. When science succeeds, we do nothing of the sort; what we physicists really do is discover laws that hold in the universe we experience within time. This, I would claim, should be enough; anything beyond that is more a religious urge for transcendence than science.
So, what is physics without a clean separation into laws and initial conditions, and hence, without the notion that there is a space of configurations that exists timelessly? We do not know the full answer to this, but we have a few observations.
First, by discarding the Newtonian schema for cosmology we have much less reason to consider our universe one of many other actual universes. Indeed, we may also be able to dispense with the notion of a vast number of other possible universes, that somehow are never realized. We can imagine instead a notion of law that applies only to the single universe that really exists. We also no longer have any reason to suspect that time is an illusion because, as outlined above, the main arguments from physics for time being emergent and not fundamental come from the misapplication of the Newtonian schema to the universe as a whole.
