Complexity

"It's very complex." How many times has someone said that line at one time or another to dismiss a question? One gets it thrown in ones face whenever the topic is economics or global warming or anything else that pundits have an answer for that they can't explain.

How is it that we can solve our economic problems by spending money we don't have? Bailouts are just another way of saying impoverish your children or bankrupt the nation. Nations have to live by the same laws of the universe, including economics, as everyone else. "Ignore the man behind the curtain." Congress is no more able to ignore the laws of economics then they are at getting anything meaningful done. It's all smoke and mirrors.

Global warming is another one of those things. I've been reading about ice-ages and looking at graphs until I'm blue in the face with annoyance about the general nonsense being purveyed. The current warming trend extends back to before the industrial revolution and has continued without appreciable change in general slope through the period that fossil fuel usage ramped up. No sign in the data of any particular change in slope unless you carefully cherry pick your data. So yes the planet is warming and no, we don't seem to have much to do with it. "It's all very complicated you know."

Life is that way too. The Darwinian theory of evolution is certainly an interesting intellectual jump from the capacity of animal breeders to modify animals by selection to the idea that everything has preceded by the same principle only naturally preserving random modifications that have survival value. It's a terrific source of "just-so" stories. I do have some questions about whether it has predicted very much since there seems to be a story which explains things regardless of what the things are. One of the proofs used to be that we had lots of vestigial organs in the human body. You know, organs that are really unnecessary, that don't do very much, that are left over from earlier adventures of the lifeform, but we don't hear much about that argument anymore. Why? Because we've discovered what they do for the most part and it would just reveal our prior ignorance to keep on repeating the argument.

In the DNA genome world there is a similar thing going on. There is this phrase "junk DNA" going around to describe all the DNA that we haven't figured out that lies between the DNA that we have figured out. I'm rather confident that after a century or so we'll look back on these writings with a distinct sense of superiority since by then we'll likely have figured out what a lot of that "junk DNA" actually is doing. "It is, after all, very complex."

Of course complexity gets a bad name. Poking around my library, which threatens to take over the house and spill out into the universe, thereby releasing a scourge no less severe than opening Pandora's box, I stumbled upon my copy of "The Design Revolution" by William A. Dembski. The subtitle of this work is "Answering the Toughest Questions about Intelligent Design." I'd like to comment on the tautology "Intelligent Design" — there really isn't any other kind of design. If there is a design, then there is a designer. If the case were otherwise then we couldn't properly call it design at all. That being said, complexity (that's what we're talking about after all) that has a point, that is ends up being teleological, is hard to explain unless it is evidence for design.

Chesterton put it this way: It is absurd to complain that it is unthinkable for an admittedly unthinkable God to make everything out of nothing, and then pretend that it is more thinkable that nothing should turn itself into everything. -- G.K. Chesterton from his book on St. Thomas Aquinas