Henri C. Ransford 2008-07-29
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
In its best passages, 'Challenging Nature' exposes interesting facts and effectively challenges unthought-through conventional `wisdom'. It then goes over, from a sometimes different perspective, some of the same ground that Jared Diamond and others have efficiently covered.
At its worst however, the book slides into factual scientific misapprehensions, in-the-box thinking, overlooking of contradictory evidence, unasked begging questions, and seemingly a measure of scorn for the fellow man. It's too bad, because a critique of the damage wrought by fundamentalism at the commanding levers of public science policy in the US is called for. However, when reading Lee Silver's effort one is sometimes left to wonder who, in this debate, plays the role of Charybdis the frying pan and who Scylla the fire.
The factual errors range from the forgiveably mundane (e.g. the assertion that the Earth will survive for another few billion years. The sun will indeed survive another 4 billion years or so, but in the process it will start heating up and eventually expand into a red giant (with a radius equal to the Earth's orbit) much earlier, making the Earth uninhabitable through radiated heat within one billion years at most), to the significant.
For instance, the debate about free will is one of the very few key unresolved debates of mankind (Valid arguments exist on both sides of the debate, which is why it is unresolved.) What appears solid however, is that at bottom the argument can only be resolved by an understanding of how quantum mechanics plays out within the human mind and in its engagement with the outside world (in toto, i.e. including any higher dimensional components.)
Now the whole debate is summed up in the book in a few seemingly valid lines: Quote : (free will can only play out) ... either through quantum interactions (which are nonpredictable but random) or macroscopic interactions (which are predictable but nonrandom). However by definition free will would be both nonrandom and nonpredictable - (Hence, free will is illusory.)
On the face of it the above argument sounds open and shut, and indeed it has been used by others. But wait a minute. Quantum effects never cease to operate and be valid, even in the macroscopic world. In fact, many properties of the everyday world, many everyday-world technological applications, emerge from quantum effects. Quantum effects in the macroscopic world are seemingly less prevalent because of statistical effects: so many zillions of particles are involved in macroscopic renditions that overall, things become mostly 'predictable'.
The assertion that therefore such effects cease to count is the equivalent of, in mathematics, rounding off numbers, of neglecting numbers that are to the right of a decimal point: to an experimental physicist, 0. 0000000000005 for instance is much the same as 0. But to an exact mathematician, the former figure is, properly and exactly, infinitely larger than the latter. Now the early history of physics is littered with such approximations and oversights which later turned out to be wrong and the overlooked, approximated-away effect turned out to have tremendous material significance. Einstein was one of the first to realize that neglected 'mathematical terms' actually meant something. In one instance, something as big and in your face as the terms leading to e=mc² and the bomb. A whole indepth, at least book-length analysis of the cracks opened up by quantum effects at the macroscopic level is called for: it is entirely possible that free will finds its real-world delivery through these cracks.
Another rather peremptory error seemingly caused both by the author's seemingly dim view of the average man's IQ, and by a mistake that says, in effect, that if it's not proven then it's false: the whole chapter about nutritional supplements. At a certain age, health can definitely be improved in manifold ways by supplements. We are, as the author well knows, biochemical machines (with waning absorbing/ processing ability and metabolism with age) and as such susceptible to the effects of added molecules and chemicals input through our system. The author dismisses without analysis the effects of supplements that can be objectively analyzed: one case in point, amongst others, is that of gingko biloba. Gingko is simply a blood thinner with viscosity-lowering properties (take gingko and cut yourself when shaving: if you really absorbed gingko rather than a fake product then you'll bleed for a long time.) The reason why it improves memory is a simple mechanism: gingko-ized blood starts flowing through capillaries in the brain where it would not be able to in its thicker, more viscous and slabber version: hence, hitherto unused parts of the brain are now oxygenated and susceptible to rejuvenation, thus useable 'online' by the larger neural network. Another case in point is vitamin supplements, lutein supplements for the eye, etc. The effects for some of the failure to take some supplements are immediately observable. That no convincing studies were conducted does not mean that the effects do not exist. If the author did not automatically think we're silly, he would perhaps pause and think that if Americans spend $100 billion annually on supplements, there just might be something there.
Now for the belief in god. Three points.
First, the author seems to make the same mistake that many Westerners seem to make, i.e. mistaking God or god for the god of sometimes anthropomorphic, overly narrow, overly artificially structured religions, perhaps laden with vast amounts of unrelated human baggage and interpretations and irrelevant history. Typically, when Westerners throw away their religion, they throw away the baby with the bathwater and become reductionist atheists.
Second, he dismisses without any analysis why sizeable proportions of populations everywhere insist on believing in something. The author's hoary, tired explanation that all of mankind's spiritual pursuits were born because we're afraid of death does not even begin to hold water (Some of the OBE experiences reported by some people, for instance, just cannot be dismissed the way the author does: there is a vast body of serious literature on that.) Once again, the author's approach here seems unscientific, and the impression is that he is guilty of the very sin he accuses, properly, the fundamentalist of: to wit, abandoning objectivity to a prior agenda.
Third, a definition of god is sorely needed, so that we know what it is we're talking about. The eschatological god of someone like Paul Davies, for instance (extremely well analyzed in his excellent latest book - titled "Jackpot" in the US and "the Goldilocks Enigma" in the UK) is a totally totally different god than most others (and closer to the only possible definition of 'god' in Buddhism, for instance.)
The problem here, as in a couple of other themes, is also a failure of imagination, of out of the box thinking. If for instance you agree with Buddhism that the whole point of life on Earth is to learn, then it can be that being a conjoined twin with someone else for some time serves a purpose: the biotech mechanism of how that happens is then largely irrelevant. Often, one has the impression that this reductionist author would critique a TV show by looking at the electronic components and nuts and bolts of his TV set. This approach does not work: a different level view is called for.
Finally, one last, but telling, example. The author says that only 5.5 % of biotech scientists believe in god (whatever that means, see above), and dismisses them as obviously idiotic. But here is where the mistake is (apart from the fact that several chapters further on, he avers that of all scientists, biomedical scientists are quote apt to be anti-visionaries rather than visionaries', and explains that biomedical scientists tend to think inside the box! There must be a reason why more quantum physicists believe in something than biotech people: quantum physics is so weird, opens so many vistas onto other unexpected worlds and different ways of looking at reality, that from its basis it's easy to conceptualize e.g. higher dimensional implicate worlds.) Anyway what is missing here, without which the 5.5% figure is meaningless: an indepth IQ test of the 5.5% and of the 94.5%.
The author's implication is that 5.5% would be less intelligent than the others. I submit that the results of a protocolled IQ test would show the opposite. All these Ph.D.s in biotech are already intelligent, or they would not be there. The 5.5% obviously see something that the others don't. Maybe they see higher level connections, other possible explanations. Maybe they understand that, as foreshadowed in Gödel's incompleteness theorem, to understand anything you have to step outside of that something : be it maths (Gödel's) or biotech. Maybe they understand that in physics, time is largely an illusion, and that therefore evolution over millions of years, seen from a higher dimensional perspective, may mean something slightly different from what first meets the eye. Maybe they understand that to understand life, you have to understand it from without.
Carry out this test, Dr. Silver.
