Lab Notes
The Intelligent Designers

Creationism comes in as many different flavors as religion itself, but for the purposes of science fiction, we can lump them into three broad categories. First (and perhaps commonest among scientists) is the belief that the laws of physics reign supreme, but that the creation of the universe looks for all the world like an intentional act.

OK, I can hear you groaning out there—not another spiteful commentary on the creation vs. evolution debate! What other topic ever manages to be so inflammatory while also being so dull? Worse yet, no one ever seems to change his mind—the arguments rage, sometimes for years on end—but the beliefs never soften. Why, you ask, would Science Fiction Weekly open a can of worms like this?

It's a fair question, and the simple answer is that these issues have profound implications for science fiction. In fact, in retrospect, it seems a bit strange to talk about the science in SF here every month for seven years without ever stopping to reflect on the origins of life, the universe and everything. My goal here is not to offend anyone's beliefs, but to see if they make for good fiction. That is, after all, why we're here.

Now, the big bang is where, in my opinion, belief in intentional creation finds its firmest scientific support. The closer we look, the more the universe appears to be an artifact. Why? Because the constants of nature—"just six numbers", as cosmologist Martin Rees has said—seem weirdly fine-tuned for the existence of life. Tweak the cosmological constant just a little bit higher and stars never form out of the primordial hydrogen; a little lower and the universe collapses back on itself almost immediately, without bothering to do anything interesting. Twiddle the strength of the strong nuclear force up or down by just 4 percent and stars lose their ability to create carbon. As a result, organic chemistry never happens and life as we know it cannot exist. Et cetera.

The explanation? Well, the "anthropic principle" states that there must be a very large—perhaps infinite—number of universes out there in some hyperdimensional space, and these questions only arise in the vanishingly small fraction where intelligent life exists to ask them. But the theistic explanation—Fiat lux! Let there be light!—makes just as much sense, and has just as much evidence (i.e., zero) to support it. In the absence of data from outside our universe, the best we can do is flip a coin and believe accordingly, or else reserve judgment. (This last makes a lot sense to me, since we can't observe the big bang directly and thus can't be 100.00 percent certain it happened the way we think. See "Cosmology Comes up Flat?", May 2000.) As it happens, both explanations have seen their share of action on the stage of science fiction (see, for example, Vernor Vinge's Marooned in Realtime) and need no further elaboration from me.

Could the Earth be forever young?

On the other end of the creation spectrum are the Young Earthers, who believe the Earth is only 5,000 years old, was created in seven days, and was subjected at one point to a global flood that completely covered the continents for 40 days and then receded. According to polls, something like 45 percent of Americans believe this, although the percentages are much lower in other Western nations (for example, around 5 percent in Australia). However, since it flies in the face of everything we know about geology, meteorology, nuclear physics and radioisotope decay, the process of planetary formation, etc., this can be considered an unscientific—in fact, antiscientific—belief.

Unless, of course, the evidence has been faked. Since astronomers can directly observe the habits of other planets, and since all of us can observe the cycles and composition of the Earth, the creator of a young Earth would've had to craft the world to look old for some reason, convincingly enough to fool the experts. I'm not saying this can't be true, just that conventional science has no ability to prove it. Still, this idea has been touched on in science fiction as well—hilariously in Douglas Adams' Hitchikers Guide to the Galaxy, where the world is created by a pair of mice to serve as a galactic supercomputer, and a bit more soberly in Walter Jon Williams' Aristoi, where apparently ancient planets are crafted by future nanotechnologists—the Aristoi—as laboratories for exploring different types of human society.

The most extreme form of the Young Earth view is that the entire universe is only 5,000 years old, and any appearance to the contrary is, once again, a deliberate trick of design. The problem with this view is that it slides too easily into solipsism: What if the universe were created this very second, and only appears to have a past and future? This actually comes pretty close to a new class of scientific theories in which time itself is an illusion, built up of complex, multidimensional "instants" that, like the panels of a comic book, appear to have continuity even though there's no actual cause-and-effect relationship connecting them. But that's a controversial idea, too, and you won't find many scientists who really believe it.

The third class of creationism—the "intelligent design" hypothesis—states that the Earth and universe are billions of years old, that the fossil record is real and accurate, that the flora and fauna of the Earth have changed over time, that many species have gone extinct, and that species (including humans) now exist that were not present in the distant past. Where this view parts company from conventional science is in the causes to which this turnover is attributed.

From the seemingly perfect conditions of our "Rare Earth" to the sudden appearance of complex multicellular life (aka the Cambrian Explosion) to the birth of life out of nonliving chemicals (see "Exploding Animals and the Snowball Earth," September 2002), from the existence of complex organomolecular machinery to the total replacement of dinosaurs with birds and mammals, intelligent design proponents see everywhere the fingerprints of creation. Not one-time creation, but an ongoing process where the Earth is cared for like an enormous garden, and new creatures are periodically rolled out like new models of automobile. There are strong parallels here to the science fiction concept of terraforming, first introduced by Olaf Stapledon in 1930 and formally named in 1949 by Jack Williamson (and covered here a year ago—see "Why Crush the Moon?", late May 2005), right down to the notion that supporting human life is the ultimate goal.

Interestingly, most ID proponents acknowledge that species can evolve individually, but resist the notion that these evolutionary changes, adding up over geologic time, could result in entirely new species. With phrases like "irreducible complexity," the IDers insist that features like the eye, the ribosome, and the genetic code itself could not have arisen spontaneously from simpler components, and that the fossil record does not and cannot prove otherwise. I could argue these points from a number of different directions (including recent findings that directly show molecules within a living cell line being adapted to completely new purposes), but I won't.

Questions with no answers

Instead I'll take the IDers at their word, that they're advancing these ideas as serious, peer-reviewable science. Now, properly speaking, Intelligent Design is a hypothesis rather than a theory, because a theory makes testable predictions about the world, which are then borne out by the evidence. A hypothesis tells us where to look, and a theory tells what we found when we did so, and what we think about it. Can Intelligent Design rise to this challenge? If so, we need to start asking hard questions, which (coincidentally enough) also make excellent fodder for science fiction. To wit:

1) Who are the intelligent designers?
2) How many are there?
3) Where are they?
4) What is the purpose of their tinkering and periodic re-speciation campaigns?
5) What are their design criteria, and why?
6) What physical mechanism permits them to introduce new living things onto the Earth and/or remove old ones?
7) Does this process leave any traces behind? If so, what form might they take?
8) When is the next model year for Earthly life, and what would we see if we could observe the rollout in progress?
9) Are the designers doing anything else to the Earth while they're at it?

If the only permissible answers are "God, one, Heaven, mysterious, mysterious, miracles, no, never, and answering prayers," then the hypothesis can never be examined critically, and can never become a real theory. If, on the other hand, we remain open to other possibilities, we might just find some surprising new evidence (or reinterpret some old evidence) that would rewrite the history of life on Earth in a truly amazing—and truly scientific—way.

What if life didn't originate here at all, but arrived on a comet or meteor? What if this happens more than once across the history of a habitable planet? What if the Earth really has been visited by ancient astronauts, who've engaged in terraforming or genetic engineering for some purpose of their own? Weirder still, what if the laws of quantum mechanics can be twisted to affect the course of events on a distant planet? What if this is happening all around us, all the time? How could we tell? Could we do anything about it if we wanted to?

Feel free to barrage me with angry e-mail; it wouldn't be the first time, and I'm sure it won't be the last. But first, please do think about these questions a bit. If Intelligent Design is legitimate science, it's also legitimate grounds for science-fictional speculation, and I'm guessing we can squeeze some brilliant, fascinating, thought-provoking stories out of it if we try. Who knows? We might even find God.

Sources:
Stanik, Mary: "Evolution of 'irreducible complexity' explained"
Adami,Christoph: " EVOLUTION:Reducible Complexity"
Wikipedia: ("creationism")
Strobel, Lee: The Case for a Creator, Zondervan Publishing, 2004
Muncaster, Ralph O.: Dismantling Evolution, Harvest House Publishers, 2003
Powell, Michael: "In Evolution Debate, Creationists Are Breaking New Ground", The Washington Post, 25 September 2005
Rees, Martin: Just Six Numbers, Basic Books, 2000
Ward, Peter and Brownlee, Donald: Rare Earth, Copernicus Books. January 2000
Barbour, Julian: The End of Time, Oxford University Press, 1999