James Le Fanu: Why Us? (The limitations of science)

by John Clinch , Friday, June 19, 2009, 18:29 (5634 days ago) @ John Clinch

Part 4 - Finally on evolution, LeFanu without a trace of irony focuses on the human eye. It's funny how anti-evolutionists always bring this one up. It formed the basis of much of William Paley's argument and it's oft-cited by ID'ers today as an example of what they call irreducible complexity. They love this point: they think it's so clever. Without one of the exquisitely perfect features of the eye, they say, the whole system would fail. LeFanu says something very similar: he calls it "the problem of perfection." But the human eye is actually a rather bad example. The optic nerve enters the eye in the middle of the retina, a very unhelpful place indeed. We have adapted a very good way of coping with this blind spot but it really isn't the place a designer would put it. It is, however, where you would expect to find it if the eye evolved by natural selection from light-sensitive cells on simpler organisms to an organ of such sensitive ability to enable our brains to perceive the world. - Further, there are good reasons for supposing that the whites of our eyes (something that other primates don't have) derives from our intensely social nature as a species, when it is easy to conceive how it may have been a matter of life or death that we could see exactly who was looking at whom and how, accordingly, trust could be built up within the group to withstand attack and to hunt and forage. But, of course, LeFanu would have no truck with that ... it smacks too much of sociobiology, which discipline he again dismisses with a wave of the hand and, again, for reasons that have nothing to do with science and everything to do with his vague moral outlook. - I'll grant him that the hard problem of consciousness is a tougher nut to crack. Scientists are at least honest that this presents a serious difficulty: no-one is making the over-extended claim that PET scans bring us significantly closer to cracking it. It is the one area in which scientists are most comfortable discussing with philosophers, accepting as they must that there may be in-principle limits to science here, for it is quite possible that however sophisticated the brain sciences become in explaining the workings of this astonishingly complex brain of ours, they may never take us closer to appreciating precisely how this produces subjective personal experience. Neuroscience will probably help explain certain aspects of mind ... such as the intriguing question of whether or not free will is an illusion ... but we may never properly appreciate how the firing of neurons is mind. Predictably, LeFanu draws yet another premature conclusion from this and declares himself a dualist (without the merest hint that there are enormous problems with this as a philosophical position.) For all that, he could just as easily adopt my position ... monism. For what it's worth, my own conviction is that neuroscience will explain more and more until finally we all agree that mind is just what the brain does, just as the heart pumps blood. It seems to me axiomatic that mind is part of matter. I like Dennett's quote: "Yes, we have a soul and it's made up of tiny robots." If LeFanu can't see the wonder and the beauty in that, then I feel a bit sorry for him. - Why this self-awareness gave us an evolutionary advantage is another remaining puzzle, but it plainly did. Self-evidently, science has yet to uncover the answers to many, many remaining questions and, of course, the answers it does provide throw up yet more questions. It will probably always do so but, I guess, it may grind to a halt one day. Not quite so soon, though, Mr LeFanu. We have the tantalising results of the first experiements at the LHC at CERN to look forward to and countless further discoveries in astrophysics and biology. We have quantum mechanics and relativity to reconcile and consciousness to explore. If he isn't salivating at the prosect, some of us are. - Whether or not we ever get to the "end of science", though, we may be entirely justified in supposing that there is, as LeFanu apparently believes, a self-organising creative metaphysical principle of the universe. In this connection, his book could have discussed the anthropic cosmological principle (something first formulated by Australian physicist Brandon Carter), or explored the evidence for the "fine-tuning" of natural forces necessary for the production of life, which would have been much more convincing in this regard. But, oddly, it didn't. Rather than consider the system as a whole, which for a seemingly religious man would be a much richer seam to mine, he prefers to shoe-horn into the gaps in our current understanding of nature an unnamed and unexplored force (as you know, he never actually uses the God word) that accounts for the rest. - Cont'd