In the middle of a vast expanse, an old college professor and his daughter patiently dig up mounting piles of sand while the searing sun scorches the barren spread upon which they are conducting their research, looking for fossils in a land which time forgot. Suddenly, the daughter calls her father frantically to let him know she has just found something interesting. In her hand she holds what appears to be a small dark object. It could be a tooth of a small prehistoric animal. It could be the carbon fossil of an ancient plant. But it is neither. Upon careful examination, he realizes that he is holding in his hand not just the vestige of some form of prehistoric life, but of intelligent prehistoric life, capable of developing at the very least some type of primitive tools. The professor gets in contact a little bit later with his liaison in the nearest city, and within a matter of days a team of scientists arrive at the scene to work by his side. Further excavations the same day uncover other types of tools, and as they dig deeper they begin to uncover more utensils and relics from a bygone era, tucked away in what appear to be primitive dwellings. Almost immediately the news get relayed across the world through the Internet announcing a major discovery.
Later, at a press conference, while confirming the discovery of the remnant of an ancient civilization, one of the reporters asks the professor and his daughter a very valid question: How were they able to figure out that the almost shapeless object was manufactured by a species exhibiting some form of intelligence? The professor then points his finger at an amplified photograph of the object and guides the reporters near the edge of the object. Even though the object has been worn down with the passage of time, the feature he is pointing out is unmistakably what appears to be a small hook. The professor then adds: “You see, there is no known natural process that can produce this hook”. The civilization that manufactured the object no longer exists. It has vanished forever into the past. But the clue to its prior existence was always there, waiting for someone to find it, waiting for someone to dig it up.
Many times we have wondered whether somewhere in another planet of the solar system like Mars, which now looks completely devoid of life and desolate, we would be able to find some proof that an ancient civilization once flourished in such a planet a long time ago. How could we recognize, just by looking at the remnants of something that appears to be complex or to exhibit some unusual shape, whether that something was the result of random processes beating astronomically overwhelming odds, or whether that something was actually the handiwork of an intelligent being or an advanced civilization capable of abstract reasoning and displaying creative powers? As in the case of our old college professor and his daughter, it turns out that there actually is a yardstick we can use, a yardstick that many scientists and philosophers agree can be employed to determine whether or not some object under study could have been produced by some intelligent being, a yardstick we have already mentioned in passing on several occasions. The yardstick can be posed as a very simple question:
Can any known natural process produce the object?
If so, then we might even be able to replicate in a laboratory the initial conditions that led to the formation of such object and produce a similar object. If not, then we are left to wonder who could have created the object.
Take, for example, Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa. There is no known natural process that can gather in a single place all of the materials required to produce such a masterpiece. Though some recent avant-garde paintings look so odd that a non-connoisseur might lead himself into believing they could have been produced by an accidental spilling of colors if not by a chimpanzee turned loose on an artist’s canvas, at the very least the canvas itself is proof of the prior existence of a living intelligence that was at work in the making of the canvas, since there is no natural process we can think of capable of producing a canvas (much to the chagrin of starving artists).
On a similar vein, if at this point in time we decided to broadcast powerful radio signals from Earth into deep space with the hope that the signals might be picked up by another civilization “out there” at least as technologically advanced as we are, letting them know of our existence, what kind of message should we use? Sending out brief speeches in one of Earth’s many languages might not do, for such a speech might easily be misinterpreted by an alien civilization as “random noise” produced by some unknown natural process (we ourselves sometimes experience such a feeling when listening to a conversation between two people on Earth in a foreign language). Sending out a series of equally spaced bursts of electromagnetic energy might not be an answer either, for such bursts could easily be mistaken by an alien civilization to be the result of another natural process, much like the one responsible for making pulsars emit the periodic radio pulses to which they owe their full name (pulsating radio sources). [When the signals from the very first pulsar to be discovered were detected here on Earth by radio astronomers Anthony Hewish and S. Jocelyn Bell at the University of Cambridge in 1967, there was actually an expectation that such periodic radio signals could be coming to us from an alien civilization, and it was thought at the time that some kind of message from intelligent life was being received from beyond the solar system (a pulsar such as NP 0531 located within the Crab Nebula in the constellation Taurus is sending out radio bursts at about thirty a second with the precision of a clock that would be in error by only a second in many millions of years). After the discovery of other pulsars exhibiting a similar behavior, as awe faded and the truth set in with the finding that radio bursts from pulsars can be explained as natural phenomena due to natural causes, astronomers have since become very skeptical of periodic bursts of radio signals as possible messages coming to us from alien intelligent life.] However, if we use our yardstick, we could still send out powerful yet brief spikes of electromagnetic energy, but instead of spacing them equally in time we could send them out at growing intervals spaced out in such a way as to follow the sequence of prime numbers (e.g. one millisecond, two milliseconds, three milliseconds, five milliseconds, seven milliseconds, eleven milliseconds, etc.) These would immediately be recognized by any intelligent alien civilization as a clear sign of intelligence out here, for there is no known natural process in the Universe capable of generating a sequence of prime numbers. They would immediately accept our presence in the Universe as intelligent beings since we would be communicating to them using the most universal language of them all: the language of mathematics, a language that cannot come out of randomness, a language requiring instead a refined abstract intelligence that only a highly evolved species can develop. (On November 16th 1974, a burst of radio waves were sent from Earth towards a globular cluster of stars called the nebula M13 and located some 34,000 light-years away; and the pulses lasting 169 seconds carried in binary form some essential information about us and planet Earth, including the numbers one to ten, the atomic numbers for the five key elements of life on Earth, the cartoon-like representation of a human, structure of the solar system indicating the position of Earth, the chemical formula of the basic constituents of DNA, etc.)
Let’s see how we could try to use our yardstick to determine if some object under study was the result of purely random processes or whether the existence of an intelligent life form was necessary to create such object. Imagine you are walking on a beach somewhere along the East coast of Africa and you stumble onto a small boulder that has the following marks engraved in its surface:
According to our yardstick, the above pattern could only have been produced by some form of intelligent life, capable of symbolic reasoning, since for a boulder located near a beach there is no natural process known to Man that could produce such marking, especially not on a solid boulder that is slowly being worn down in time by the waves on the seashore. Perhaps we may not be able to make any meaning out of the above pattern, although we could assume that when the pattern was carved out it had some purpose. If the above pattern, instead of being carved out of the surface of the boulder, was instead formed by stripes of mineral deposits of a slightly different color (and interesting patterns are sometimes observed on many small rocks that can be picked by campers on an outdoor excursion) coming from within the boulder itself, then we could attribute the pattern to a natural random process completely devoid of any intelligence, however improbable it might have been. Of course, there is always the possibility that a boulder with such a peculiar looking pattern coming from the inside out could have been made entirely by an intelligent being, but the enormous difficulties in trying to accomplish such a feat even with the help of modern technology would force us to rule out that possibility.
What about snowflakes? If on a cold winter day just after a snowstorm has fallen, if we pick a very small amount of snow and look at it closely with a magnifying glass, we will find that the snow is actually made up of many beautiful intricately designed geometrical patterns, completely symmetrical, each one different from the other (so much so that even until recent times it was believed that no two snowflakes are the same, such is the variety that can be found among them). The patterns themselves suggest some form of intelligence at work in the making of each snowflake. Yet we see no elves of fairies churning out each snowflake one by one. Once the process in the formation of a snowflake is analyzed and understood, then, as complex as the patterns of snowflakes appear to be, we must conclude that there is no intelligence actively involved in their production, since they are the result of a natural process.
What about the wafer of an integrated circuit? If somebody takes a close look under a microscope at an integrated circuit chip with a high level of integration, perhaps made up of more than a million tiny transistors, the near perfect and intricate linear geometrical patterns etched on the surface of the silicon substrate will immediately convince anybody that such a tiny object with such a complex structure could only have been produced not just by a single intelligent being but perhaps by a collective of intelligent beings, a technologically advanced civilization capable of manipulating and organizing matter at the sub-microscopic level to fit their own purposes, since no natural process known to Man can spontaneously out of nowhere produce such a thing as an integrated circuit.
And what about the buckyball? The buckyball, also known as buckminsterfullerene, and more formally known as carbon-60 (C60), is a hollow molecule consisting of sixty carbon atoms arranged in a soccer-ball-like structure, with the sixty carbon atoms located at the vertexes of a truncated icosahedron. Because of its high chemical stability and because of its all-carbon structure, the buckyball is commonly referred to as the third major form of pure carbon, after graphite and diamond. The buckyball is such an exotic form of carbon that even near the late 20th century such form of carbon was not known to exist, until it was discovered in September 1985 by Richard Smalley (a professor of physics and chemistry at Rice University in Houston) and Harold Kroto (a chemist from the University of Sussex). A buckyball can be manufactured inside a laboratory by inducing an electric discharge between graphite electrodes, using a device similar to an arc welder. The heat generated at the point of contact between the electrodes evaporates the carbon to form buckyballs, soot, and other carbon compounds. The buckyballs are then extracted from the soot by using sophisticated chemical separation techniques. Even though the buckyball appears to be a very sophisticated molecule, and even though the buckyball being used nowadays for research purposes must be artificially created, if we were to be given a single buckyball and were asked to determine whether such a buckyball could have been the result of a natural process or whether it could only have been created artificially by an intelligent life form we would be forced to conclude, applying our yardstick rigorously, that an intelligent being is not necessary for the creation of such a molecule. Indeed, there is a lot of carbon out there in Nature, and every time there is an electrical storm there is a potential for lightning bolts zapping some of that carbon -much in the way in which an electric discharge comes from the tips of an arc welder-, a natural process that can easily create perhaps a few buckyballs. If we had followed this line of reasoning, time would have confirmed our assumptions, and indeed naturally occurring buckyballs have been discovered recently, as we can read in the following excerpt taken from the book The Most Beautiful Molecule by Hugh Aldersey-Williams:
“Surely, such a molecule is too beautiful not to occur in nature. The appeal of such a perfect object emerging from chemical chaos in not only aesthetic, it is also logical … In 1992, however, Peter Buseck and Semeon Tsipursky, mineralogists at Arizona State University in Tempe, were sent samples of shungite, a rare carbonaceous Precambrian rock found in Karelia on the Russian-Finish border … Examining the lustrous black rock, they found a small vein with the distinctive ‘fullerite’ array of stacked spheres (familiar to them from an earlier examination in their laboratory of a man made buckminsterfullerene sample). Subsequent analysis confirmed the presence of both C60 and C70.”
Thus, an intelligent being cannot leave footprints of his intelligence by leaving a very small amount of buckyballs behind. However, it can use buckyballs to leave proof of his existence provided he leaves behind enough buckyballs gathered together in the same place, protected from the harm of the outside environment. Indeed, the process of separating buckyballs from the soot that surrounds them is so sophisticated that no known natural process we can imagine is capable of gathering together in the same place a relatively large quantity of buckyballs (much to the chagrin of chemists). Thus, if while exploring inside a cave we happen to stumble on what appears to be a very primitive container, and inside the container we find one pound of chemically pure buckyballs, we must conclude that all those buckyballs were left by some intelligent life form that was no simple caveman.
And what about a strand of a very long molecule, such as a strand of a DNA molecule that carries the genetic information contained inside each cell of a living organism? [DNA stands for DeoxyriboNucleic Acid. The very long DNA molecule has the shape of a double helix, much like the shape you would get if you took a very long flexible ladder and began twisting it parallel to its length. The rungs of the twisted ladder consist of paired bases called nucleotide bases of which there are four: adenine (A), guanine (G), cytosine (C) and thymine (T). Starting from one side of the ladder and listing the bases in the order in which they are found, as in TTAGTTCAGGTTCCCATC…, we can describe the structure of a DNA molecule. Each living organism has a different DNA sequence. The DNA contains all the necessary information to build a living organism. This is the reason why DNA has been called "the code of life"] (We are assuming that we have only found or have only received a sample of the molecule, without a chance to examine the source from which the molecule came from or was taken.) In this case, it would be a very tough call, and the answer we would give would depend upon our current level of technology. At first (with technology before the 1950s), the seemingly long random sequence of “nucleotide bases” would make no sense to us (as a matter of fact, to this date we are still unable to “read” the significance of a lot of major segments of a DNA molecule, and building a master dictionary that will show us how to identify each segment according to the specific protein it encodes or the instructions it generates is one of the major goals of modern science). So as a first guess we might be tempted to dismiss the sample molecule as something that can be produced by some natural process. But upon closer examination we may get extremely suspicious, for if the DNA strand is a very long strand consisting of some one hundred million nucleotide bases arranged in a linear sequence one after the other, biochemically encoding what appears to be a lot of information, then we could immediately begin to suspect that the sample strand of DNA was perhaps actually built on purpose by some form of intelligence. We certainly would not be able to build such a molecule in any reasonable amount of time (does a time frame of a few hundred thousand years sound reasonable?) in any laboratory. We might therefore surmise that the giant molecule may actually be encoding some kind of information (which it is!), and thus conclude that the molecule could not have been produced by any natural process. But with technology from the 1950s, after Watson, Crick and Wilson announced in 1953 the discovery of this complex structure as conveyor of the “code of life”, we would be forced to retract and, on second thought, conclude that a natural process can indeed produce such a molecule, and in this case the natural process has to be life itself! However, as time moves forward, and we get into higher levels of technology, we find that we can actually build “gene machines” that will help us carry out the assembly process of small strands of DNA material built entirely to our specifications (an example of one such machine is the “Gene Assembler” built by Pharmacia during the mid-1980s). So, on third thought, we would be forced to make again another retraction and conclude that if the strand of a DNA molecule is small enough, then it could either have been built by some kind of natural process or by some form of intelligence. But as we start out the third millennium with much more powerful computers and with much more sophisticated molecular biology techniques (aided by newly emerging fields such as nanotechnology), we might be forced to make a never ending series of retractions by constantly redefining “small enough” upwards until the concept becomes so big so as to make the definition of “small enough” a purely philosophical issue, eventually throwing us into the dilemma that it will be nearly impossible to determine if a complex strand of human DNA was created by clever scientists in a laboratory or was created by Nature itself with no human intervention whatsoever.
Nowadays, and on final analysis (setting aside the issue of all man-made DNA), the only reason we would quickly conclude that a sample of something as complex and highly structured as a very long strand of DNA material was produced by a natural process with no human intervention is because we already know the nature of those natural processes that can produce it. Otherwise, perhaps there would not be the slightest doubt in our deluded minds that such an elaborate molecule had to be built from scratch by an upper form of intelligence. It is rather ironic that, in this case, the longer (and thus more complex) a DNA strand is, the more likely it is to have been created by "random" Nature, and the less likely it is to have been created by "intelligent" human scientists. But if complexity alone may not be enough to help us decide whether something can be built from scratch by some known natural processes or by some form of intelligence, what else can we do or use to reach a decision, the right decision? This is an extremely important philosophical issue, one that is still being debated. The only common agreement there seems to be is that there is no substitute for knowledge and experience (aided perhaps with a little bit of common sense, a “sense” which unfortunately is not that common).
So far, when we have talked about things created by no known natural process, we have referred to things created by some form of intelligence at least as intelligent as Man. Ants can create an intricate array of tunnels wherever they might build a colony, but such tunnels do not exhibit any prior design (although they do have a purpose) and thus no two ant colonies are ever built the same. Their tunnels are designed on the spot and built on the fly, without any prior blueprints, without using any measuring devices, without any ornaments beyond those strictly necessary for the survival of the colony. Such colonies are the result of a natural process very well known to us, and even after a colony of ants becomes extinct (perhaps after being sprayed with insecticide) what they leave behind will only by of interest to an entomologist, not to an archaeologist. If a manned mission to Mars finds many small antlike tunnels on its surface, it might be forced to suspect that those tunnels may be the vestiges of some form of small ancient life, not necessarily intelligent life, but life nonetheless. The same could be said about a beehive, but in this case the regular and symmetric geometrical arrangement of the cells would be more than enough to make us wonder if we didn’t knew any better. Only because we are familiar with the way beehives are built are we willing to accept that beehives are the result of a known natural process. If we ever find on the Moon a small structure resembling a beehive, depending upon the material out of which the structure has been built we might classify it as a purely natural process produced without the intervention of any living organism (much like the processes that give rise to crystal structures such as diamonds), a natural process brought about by some kind of primitive life form (lunar bees?), or otherwise it must be the remnant left by some intelligent species (especially if the structure is made out of something like stainless steel).
Also, when we have talked about passing judgment on whether some object or some structure is the result of some known natural process or perhaps something else, we have assumed that the object under study is a bona fide object rather than something designed to take us as fools. For example, if we come across a skull that appears to be the famous “missing link” between Man and ape, after the skull is closely examined we might come to the conclusion that the skull really is part of the remains of a lost species. However, when the skull is re-examined many years later with more advanced anthropological techniques, we may be stunned after finding out that such skull, rather than being a biological piece manufactured by the long natural process of evolution, is instead an object deliberately manufactured on purpose by a fame-seeking scoundrel. As a matter of fact, this is precisely what happened in the case of the (in)famous Piltdown man. Supposedly dug up between 1909 and 1915 from an early Pleistocene gravel bed near Piltdown Common in Sussex, England, by English lawyer and amateur paleontologist Charles Dawson, it was supposed to be representative of a very early species of man, Eoanthropus dawsoni. In 1953, it was proved beyond all doubt to be a forgery. The hoax was very craftily assembled with the juxtaposition of the cranium of a man and the mandible of an ape, with some grinding and burnishing to make the pieces fit. The fact that the fraud went undetected for nearly half a century was a major blow to the credibility of paleontologists and evolutionary theory itself, casting serious doubts as to the validity of their conclusions based upon many so-called “ancient fossils”.
So, an answer to the question “Is X the result of some known natural process?” will pretty much depend also upon our gullibility. The only known antidote, knowledge and experience, should be enough to help us most of the time avoid being taken in by many subtle hoaxes such as the Piltdown chimera. But this may come at the price of turning us into hardened skeptics, something that may very well stand sooner or later in our way towards the truth about our own origins and the origin of the Universe.
In these days of robots and artificial intelligence and computer networks and bioengineering, a valid philosophical question is being raised more often. If (and this is a big if) we were able to create some form of artificial life in the laboratory (e.g. inside the substrate of a gigantic semiconductor chip or in a complex biomass resembling a human brain), and if that life form begins to acquire a consciousness of its own, could it find out something on its own about its creators? Could we, the creators, leave behind the footprints of our intelligence so as to allow our creation to infer about our existence? The task is actually a lot harder than it seems. For one thing, our creation, living inside its own environment, would be living at a different level of reality from our reality. We may be unable to give our creation all of our five senses. If our creation is some highly complex cellular automaton moving about inside a massive computer memory, it may very well be deprived of smell or taste. It may be unable to perceive colors. It may be unable to “see” as clearly as we see, with our three-dimensional perception of depth. It may be unable to hear. This does not mean that the creature would be necessarily dumb. The critter may actually be quite a prolific investigator. Assuming its whereabouts are exposed to us through some sort of giant screen, there is very little it can try to hide from us, for we can follow its every move inside its very limited universe. Perhaps with a lot of ingenuity, we could design some optical sensors and devise some kind of interface to connect the sensors to the hardware where our creation resides and make them available to it so that it could “see” outside its very limited environment. But whether it can make any meaning out of what it is able to see coming from “outside” is a whole different story. Perhaps the best way our creation would be able to infer about our existence, about the reality of some upper form of intelligence that has fostered its birth and growth, would be to let our creation to its own for some length of time, allowing it to become familiar with its environment, allowing it to start asking itself some questions and then try to find on its own the answers to some of those questions. One question our creation might ask itself would be the one concerning its own origin and the origin of its environment. If the creature evolves to a point where it is able to “look” at itself and start exploring its own structure, perhaps it would discover that it is actually made up of similar “units”. And the units, being similar instead of being variegated, would reveal some type of recurring structure, a structure that cannot come out of nowhere, a structure revealing order, not randomness. This is precisely where it would begin to find the footprints of our intelligence. Anything else may just not work. We could try to write some “message” inside the environment where our creature lives, but the message might very well be sheer nonsense to the creature and it may very well be counterproductive, for with no logical theories to explain the origin of such strange patterns our creature may start doubting its own sanity. We could try to “drop” in a structure similar to one of the structures that our creature is developing, but it would be useless since our creature, rather than inferring about our own existence from such structure, would instead suspect the existence of another creature similar to it inside the same environment, and from there on perhaps it would be consumed in a desperate but fruitless search for that “twin brother”.
The above speculations force us to reconsider the role played by the initial conditions carried along by the singularity from which the Universe was born. Those initial conditions could certainly not have been created by any natural process known to Man, since Nature itself did not even exist before the Big Bang took place. To complicate matters further, those initial conditions could not have been created or set up by any corporeal intelligent being (or any collective of corporeal intelligent beings) inhabiting anywhere within this Universe, at least not at the moment the Big Bang occurred, for life as we know it (and any other form of life we could possibly think of that would be made up by a corporeal ensemble of atoms and molecules of any kind) could not have existed until things were allowed to cool and “settle down”, at least a few billion years later after the primeval explosion. So, if the initial conditions that gave birth to this Universe were not the result of any known natural process, where then did they come from?
