Let’s recap:
1. Ever since 1991, I can’t watch a Jodie Foster movie without expecting Anthony Hopkins to bust in and say “Hello, Clarice ….”
2. Information is considered to be the product of intelligence.
3. Matthew McConaughey could have had some serious pony hair, but he was never serious enough to really make it *pop* like Leibniz.
An important thing to realize about the movie “Contact” (1997) is that the SETI team defines a threshold: subsequent data events that meet or exceed the level of specified complexity in that first radio transmission are automatically deemed to be information, and that’s what happens in the film. The team refocuses its radio telescopes and picks up new messages of increasing specified complexity, culminating in a message containing instructions for how to build and operate a space-time transportation device that the team lead (played by Clarice Starling Jodie Foster) uses to visit the author of the messages. I know, it seems implausible and goofy far-fetched, but it’s science fiction. It’s also a captivating illustration of how Information Science could be used in an unconventional and amazing way.
Space-time transportation device; moves forward in time 3.6k seconds-per-hour. $1k OBO. Contact silkyponybff@hotmail.com ….
It also inspires a question that Sagan probably didn’t consider when he wrote his book:
What if the culminating message of the film didn’t contain instructions about a space-time transportation device but instead contained instructions for how to build and maintain a complex, multi-cellular organism?
Or to put it another way: Why should scientists consider a 1,186-character binary string expressing prime numbers to be an artifact of intelligence … but dismiss DNA as the product of a random, unguided (essentially accidental) process?
DNA is arguably the most complex data structure known to humanity: Human genetic material, for example, consists of some 3 billion adenine-to-thymine (AT/TA) and guanine-to-cytosine (GC/CG) base pairs, forming a binary quaternary string complex enough that the odds of its occurring at random are about (1/4)^3,000,000,000. That number is so small that when I enter 4^-3000000000 into my laptop calculator app, it simply replies “invalid input” like I’m trying to divide by zero or something. Maybe someone who has MATLAB can send me an actual value.
Even if we hadn’t known about prime numbers for millennia, we could still investigate what the numbers 83, 89, and 97 have in common and discern a pattern (they’re only divisible by 1 and themselves), and we’ve already determined what genes in the chromosomes of DNA have in common (they all provide instructions for making proteins needed for life). DNA is therefore both highly complex and specified; it is therefore, by the standards of Information Science, to be regarded as information; and it is therefore an artifact of intelligence. There is simply no reasonable alternative explanation because if you think that the prime-numbers message would definitely be an artifact of intelligence (as Carl Sagan evidently did), congratulations: You also necessarily believe that DNA came from an intelligent mind.
That’s the bed Sagan made for himself, and now he’s snoozing in it.
I considered naming this post series “Mind & Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature is Almost Certainly False,” but then I realized that the atheist philosopher Thomas Nagel beat me to the punch by six years with his 2012 book title. I also thought I might title it “The Deniable Darwin,” but I realized the agnostic philosopher David Berlinski beat me by 22 years with his 1996 essay of the same name. If you haven’t heard any good rebuttals to the dogma of Charles Darwin’s explanation for the origin of life, you can read a quite few … including some authored by actual professing atheists and agnostics. My point here is that you can’t simply dismiss criticism of scientific materialism/neo-Darwinism as some pathological theistic impulse; you’re obligated to address the substance of these arguments. By his own admission, Berlinski rejoices to poke his thumb in the eye of smug orthodoxies, especially those that wobble on an ever more shaky foundation, and though the deficiencies of Darwinism leave no shortage of opportunities for Berlinski to indulge his amusingly spiteful pastime, his criticisms cannot simply go unanswered. Otherwise, he wins by default. You can’t win if you don’t bother to play.
And it’s also evidently possible to simultaneously maintain agnosticism/atheism and disbelief in the neo-Darwinian paradigm—in case you’re super concerned about that—although in my experience as a former agnostic, it’s exceedingly difficult to endure that kind of cognitive dissonance for very long. I’ve struggled with insomnia for most of my life, and I know how difficult it can be to sleep with a storm like that raging in your mind.