"Irreducible Complexity"

I love this book. I've loved it since I bought it in 2002. It's called "A New Kind of Science" by Stephen Wolfram. He invented Mathematica. He was a child prodigy, publishing his first paper on particle physics at age 15, going on to acquire a Ph.D. from Caltech when he was just 20, and proceeding quickly to important results in quantum field theory and cosmology. Stephen Wolfram is undoubtedly one of the smartest people on the planet. I also love his thoughts on clarity and modesty:

There is a common style of understated scientific writing to which I was once a devoted subscriber. But at some point I discovered that more significant results are usually incomprehensible if presented in this style. For unless one has a realistic understanding of how important something is, it is very difficult to place or absorb it. And so in writing this book I have chosen to explain straightforwardly the importance I believe my various results have. Perhaps I might avoid some criticism by a greater display of modesty, but the cost would be a drastic reduction in clarity.

I bring him up because his massive work entitled "A New Kind of Science" demonstrates that a seemingly "irreducibly complex" system can be the result of a set of very simple laws. I haven't posted about it on this weblog before, but in the interests of thoroughness, I feel it's necessary to do so. Below is an excerpt of a comment I made in an ongoing war I'm personally waging at an Intelligent Design blog:

It's not a matter of saying that there is not a possibility of a designer at the very, very beginning of the universe's life. There are many varied and possible models and theories of how and if a big bang occurred, but our human knowledge does not, at this point, extend that far into the past. Deists can agree with that much. But, after that point, the things that [the previous commenter calls] the building blocks of life were able to evolve, and for a mathematical demonstration, you can see Stephen Wolfram's tome "A New Kind of Science" which I heartily recommend.

http://www.wolframscience.com/thebook.html

The book literally illustrates that simple programs can produce extraordinarily varied, and what in retropsect appear to be completely random, results. For example, the model at

http://www.wolframscience.com/nksonline/page-27
and
http://www.wolframscience.com/nksonline/page-28
and, most importantly, what it produces at
http://www.wolframscience.com/nksonline/page-30

Some regularities are evident, particularly on the left. But even after all these steps there are no signs of overall regularity - and indeed even continuing for a million steps many aspects of the pattern obtained seem perfectly random according to standard mathematical and statistical tests.

A very small version of the Rule 30 cellular automaton. Notice the regularity on the left, and the complexity and apparent randomness on the right. See http://www.wolframscience.com/nksonline/page-30 for a clearer view, and http://www.wolframscience.com/downloads/basicimages.html for the rule set.

This model demonstrates that extraordinarily complex results - even statistically random ones - can be rendered from extraordinarily simple rules. C'est la vie. The universe is guided by sets of elegantly simple and concise laws including gravity and such varied forces, that when they interact they bear a startling array of diversity from planets to black holes to atoms and everything in between.

Finding those simple rules are an integral component of science, and to remove those goals is to limit and effectively end scientific inquiry. Einstein said that his goal of a unified theory is something that could be explained to a child, something that could fit on a t-shirt. The rubric below the illustration of rule 30 on page 27 of the links I posted fits those criteria well. I look in amazement at what it produces on page 30.

How many steps has the universe undergone since the execution of those primitive rules billions of years ago, rules which may very well be the results of even more basic laws? The fact that the variety of the results is baffling to our human brains does not mean that such laws cannot be discovered in time through the nexus of tenacity, perspecasity and inspiration.

The truth is detectable. How dare so-called "scientists" stand in the way of this most noble of pursuits by trying to impede its progress through criticizing that which we have necessarily not yet answered. These are small minds which have designed a similarly small God, and I have no use for them.