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Friday, March 11, 2011
The Quantum
Creationist
SCIENCE OR SOMETHING. Just kidding. There's no such thing as a Quantum Creationist. Not that I know of, anyway. But I was struck by some documentaries I saw today on Netflix. The first was called Incredible Creatures that Defy Evolution. It's frankly creationist, but that doesn't mean it has no interesting points to make. There's a website that provides some background, and it lists creatures whose set of special survivability capabilities would seem to be simultaneously necessary, not gradually developed through a process of incremental Darwinian adaptation:
* Bombardier Beetle
* Giraffe
* Woodpecker
* Australian Incubator Bird
* The Chicken Egg
* Platypus
* Black & Yellow Garden Spider
* Gecko & Chuckwalla Lizards
* Human Eye & Ear Drum
It's completely useless, of course, to point out that I believe there's room for some intelligence in the species definition game without a simple "God did it" explanation. The harpies will be here in an instant to denounce me as an idiot and fool for noticing that Darwinian gradualism -- "punctuated equilibrium" notwithstanding -- just doesn't work in every instance.
That's why I was similarly struck by a documentary called "The Quantum Activist," in which a renowned physicist argues for the existence of God as a scientifically verifiable concept.
I don't agree with everything he says, either, but he speaks eloquently about the difference between the "bottom up" materialism of contemporary science and the "top down" possibility of a quantum universe characterized by nonlocal communication. Of consciousness as the catalyst of the material world, not the by-product of mere matter. Which I've only been writing about for 40 years or so.
If you're interested, you can watch it here.
If you're not, you can wait breathlessly with the rest of the American population for the two-foot tsunami that's threatening Los Angeles with seriously soggy Jimmy Choos.
P.S. And, yeah, I'm feeling heartsick for the Japanese. Kind of creepy, really, to hear all the fretting about Hawaii and California when there are real casualties in Japan. Have we really become a nation of pussies?
