Science B20

Page B20

Science in the News The Town Voice The Complex Made Simple

The Illusion of Randomness

By Arlon Staywell RICHMOND — An explanation often given for the assembly of things of an unknown origin is randomness. Many people believe, or at least claim to believe, that randomness assembled, or perhaps could have assembled, life in the first place. It was an especially popular idea, even with intellectuals, about the time of the Civil War. Of course that was only with primitive concepts of biology. As the understanding of biology improved, the notion of random assembly of life had to be abandoned by anyone of intelligence. Of course many unintelligent people didn't get the memo. Even to the beginning of the internet, even to the present day, you can see and hear arguments that life was randomly assembled. If one allows enough time, it was and is often argued, eventually monkeys playing with typewriters, or the modern computer equivalent, would eventually type complete books in perfect English. And it is argued that one can't prove that they wouldn't accomplish that eventually.
But that isn't true. It can be proved, insofar as anything can be proved in science, that life could not arise "randomly." First of all it must be recognized that there is no such thing as "randomness." Randomness is an illusion caused by insufficient data. The toss of dice is only "random" insofar as it is not possible to have enough information about the air temperatures and currents and elasticities of the dice and the table top and other necessary data to predict the outcome of the toss. The information exists, it just can't be collected. If the information could be collected the outcome would be known. There is no such thing as randomness.
What Is It Then?
Consider the smoke from a fire. If that isn't random, what is it? All the changes that occur in the shape of the smoke are the the result of some agency or other, what are they? The second question is far more easy to answer, the fire and the air currents from the heat of the fire and the heat of the smoke are the agents, mostly, of the shape of the smoke. The question at this point is whether the smoke from a fire will eventually form the words of a book in perfect English.
Characteristics of Agencies Are Limited
Let's begin by asking whether smoke will make the form of a triangle. A triangle consists of three straight line segments joined end to end. Unfortuitously the characteristic of smoke is to swirl, not make straight lines. If the smoke were truly random in the sense that anything can happen with it, then eventually straight lines would form. The smoke isn't random though. The agencies of the shape of the smoke are known and their characteristics are known and straight lines are not a characteristic of those agencies. Because straight lines are not a characteristic of smoke we can then say that unless some other agency gets involved somehow there will never in all eternity be any straight lines in the smoke. Of course if you take a small enough sample of any curving line it can appear straight, but the point here is that no triangle of any significant size will form ever.
By extension of this principle smoke will also never form perfect English
Similarly monkeys have characteristics. They eat. They move about, sometimes by grasping tree branches. They perhaps explore their world with some curiosity. A triangle is no use to a monkey. No monkey is likely to draw one anymore than smoke is likely to draw one. Triangles are no more characteristic of monkeys than smoke. Monkeys might draw "randomly" in the dirt or bang "randomly" on keyboards. But remember that it isn't truly random. It will always be characteristic of drawing by monkeys or characteristic banging by monkeys. It will suit a monkey's brain and proclivities.
This of course is with no other agency involved. A human might train a monkey to draw a triangle. Such a triangle is not produced "randomly" though.
A Definition of Consciousness
The word "random" is sometimes used to mean "unconscious." For example a cart rolls down a hill "randomly" if no driver is aboard or if the driver is unconscious. The following might seem paradoxical, but the monkeys can't type books in perfect English because monkeys are not random agencies, they are "conscious." A computer might be built that takes several natural "random" events and combines and converts those into the selection of letters. Such a "true" randomness might eventually result in a book in perfect English given enough millenia. But such a computer is not itself a natural thing. Human agency is involved. Notice that the computer must select from several "natural" sources of "randomness" because if it used only one, for example smoke, the letters chosen would forever have a pattern characteristic of smoke, or whatever single source, not perfect English.
Let me be careful not to omit something here, I almost did, that could be important to philosophers. Another definition of consciousness is an agency with a "free will" to change the established course of things in the unconscious world. While that true "randomness" might be an agency with no limit on its characteristics, it can't be used to explain the origin of life without consciousness.
A Definition of Order
Having thoroughly establish that there is no such thing as randomness, it is important to note that there is such a thing as disorder. In fact disorder or "entropy" is the natural tendency of the non-living universe. That's from the second law of thermodynamics. While various agencies; smoke, rain, wind for example produce various patterns; swirls, circles, dunes, the characteristic pattern of non-agency is disorder. When the agency that causes the swirls in smoke stops, when the fire goes out, the smoke unswirls. It redistributes "evenly" unless some other agency causes some pattern of redistribution.
No matter how many million or billion or trillion times a tornado goes through a junk yard it will never assemble anything except according to the characteristics of tornadoes. It will never build a working gasoline engine, ever.
Although we can imagine in our minds complex arrays of patterns from numerous natural agencies that together appear "truly random" and expect those to produce some highly complicated thing over enough time, the natural tendency of the non-living universe doesn't favor such arrays occuring in the first place. Life must involve itself in the first place. Life cannot arise from a dead universe.
Although disorder is a definite reality, randomness, in the unconscious world, is an illusion.

Proponents of the theory of "emergent complexity" will sometimes use pictures of snowflakes to argue that complexity "emerges" in nature. Water molecules are among the more simple in nature, true. And freezing is a simple agency, true. Although the crystals formed by the freezing of water vapor are extremely "varied" there is a definite pattern and they are always hexagons. That means that, as with other naturally occurring agencies, the characteristics are limited. Snowflakes cannot even draw something so simple as a square any more than smoke will.
Proponents of the theory that "order arises from disorder" use examples which are actually the "simplicity" formed as potential energy decreases.
Neither the "complexity" nor the "order" can "arise" in nature. They are the pre-existing characteristics of the materials and agencies which are themselves no designers of the complex systems required for life.
Although some of the simpler components of life systems have been assembled in labs; micelles, amino acids, none were assembled using smoke and snow. With all the availability of smoke and snow, nothing has been assembled from them so far but wet soot.

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