Calculating God

9

I’ve never smoked. So why do I have lung cancer?

It’s actually, so I’ve learned, somewhat common among paleontologists, geologists, and mineralogists of my generation. I was right, in a way, when I attributed my cough to the dusty environment I worked in. We often use tools that pulverize rocks, creating a lot of fine dust, which —

But lung cancer takes a long time to develop, and I’ve been working in paleontology labs for thirty years. These days, I almost always wear a mask; our consciousness has been raised, and almost everyone does so when doing that kind of work. But, still, over the decades, I’d breathed in more than my share of rock dust, not to mention asbestos fibers as well as fiberglass filaments while making casts.

And now I’m paying for it.

Some of Susan’s and my friends said we should sue — perhaps the museum, perhaps the Ontario government (my ultimate employer). Surely my workplace could have been made safer; surely I should have been given better safety instruction; surely —

It was a natural reaction. Someone should pay for such an injustice. Tom Jericho: he’s a nice guy, good husband, good father, gives to charity . . . maybe not as much as he should, but some, each month. And he was always there to lend a hand when someone was moving or painting their house. And now good old Tom had cancer.

Yes, surely someone should pay, they thought.

But the last thing I wanted to do was waste time on litigation. So, no, I wasn’t going to sue.

Still, I had lung cancer; I had to deal with that.

And there was an irony here.

Some of what Hollus was saying about what he took as proof for God’s existence wasn’t new to me. That stuff about the fundamental constants was sometimes referred to as the anthropic cosmological principle; I’d touched on it in my evolution course. He was certainly right that the universe, superficially at least, seemed designed for life. As Sir Fred Hoyle said in 1981, “A common-sense interpretation of the facts suggests that a super-intellect has monkeyed with physics, as well as with chemistry and biology, and that there are no blind forces worth speaking about in nature. The numbers one calculates from the facts seem to me so overwhelming as to put this conclusion almost beyond question.” But, then again, Sir Fred championed a lot of notions the rest of the scientific community balked at.

Still, as Hollus and I continued to talk, he brought up cilia — although he called them “ciliums;” he always had trouble with Latin plurals. Cilia are the hairlike extensions from cells that are capable of rhythmic motion; they are present in many types of human cells, and, he said, in the cells of Forhilnors and Wreeds, too. Humans who believed that not just the universe but life itself had been intelligently designed often cited cilia. The tiny motors that allow the fibers to move are enormously complex, and the intelligent-design proponents say they are irreducibly complex: there is no way they could have evolved through a series of incremental steps. Like a mousetrap, a cilium needs all of its various parts to work; take away any element and it becomes useless junk — just as without the spring, or the holding bar, or the platform, or the hammer, or the catch, a mousetrap does nothing at all. It was indeed a conundrum to explain how cilia had evolved through the accumulation of gradual changes, which is supposed to be how evolution works.

Well, among other places, cilia are found on the single layer of cells that line the bronchi. They beat in unison, moving mucus out of the lungs — mucous containing particles that have been accidentally inhaled, getting them out before cancers can begin.

If the cilia are destroyed, though, by exposure to asbestos, tobacco smoke, or other substances, the lungs can no longer keep themselves clean. The only other mechanism for dislodging phlegm and moving it upward is coughing — persistent, racking coughing. Such coughing isn’t as effective, though; carcinogens stay longer in the lungs, and tumors form. The persistent coughing sometimes damages the surface of the tumor, adding blood to the sputum; as in my case, that is often the first symptom of lung cancer.

If Hollus and the humans who shared his beliefs were right, cilia had been designed by some master engineer.

If so, then maybe that’s the son of a bitch who should be sued.

“My friend over at the university has got a preliminary report on your DNA,” I said to Hollus, a few days after he’d provided the sample I had asked for; I’d missed the landing of the shuttle again, but a Forhilnor who wasn’t Hollus had dropped off the specimen with Raghubir, along with the Forhilnor data on supernovae Hollus had promised to give to Donald Chen.

“And?”

At some point, I would ask him what governed which mouth he would use when he was only going to utter a single syllable. “And she doesn’t believe it’s extraterrestrial in origin.”

Hollus shifted on his six feet; he always found it cramped in my office. “Of course it is. I confess it is not my own DNA; Lablok extracted it from herself. But she is a Forhilnor, too.”

“My friend identified hundreds of genes that seem to be the same as those in life from this planet. The gene that creates hemoglobin, for instance.”

“There are only a limited number of possible chemicals that can be used to carry oxygen in the bloodstream.”

“I guess she was expecting something more — well, alien.”

“I am as alien a being as you are every likely to encounter,” said Hollus. “That is, the difference between your body plan and mine is as great as we have ever seen. There are practical engineering constraints on how weird life can get, after all, even” — and here he raised one of his six-fingered hands and did a Vulcan salute — “if your filmmakers seem incapable of coming close to the variety possible.”

“I suppose,” I said.

Hollus bobbed. “The minimum number of genes required for life is about 300,” he said. “But that quantity is sufficient only for truly primitive creatures; most eukaryotic cells share a core group of about three thousand genes — you find them in everything from single-celled lifeforms to elaborate animals like ourselves, and they are the same, or almost the same, on every world we have looked at. On top of that, there are 4,000 additional genes that are shared by all multicellular lifeforms, which encode proteins for cell-to-cell adhesion, signaling between cells, and so on. There are thousands more shared by all animals with internal skeletons. And thousands more beyond that are shared by all warm-blooded animals. Of course, if your friend keeps searching, she will find tens of thousands of genes in Forhilnor DNA that have no counterparts in Earthly lifeforms, although, naturally, it is easier to match genes than to find unfamiliar ones. But there really are only a few possible solutions to the problems posed by life, and they recur on world after world.”

I shook my head. “I wouldn’t have expected life from Beta Hydri to use the same genetic code as life on Earth does, let alone any of the same genes. I mean, there are even some variations in the code here: out of the sixty-four codons, four have different meanings in mitochondrial DNA than they do in nuclear DNA.”

“All lifeforms we have examined share essentially the same genetic code. It surprised us at first, as well.”

“But it just doesn’t make sense,” I said. “Amino acids come in two isomers, left– and right-handed, but all life on Earth uses only the left-handed versions. For starters, it should be a fifty-fifty shot for any two ecosystems to both use the same orientation. And there should be only a one-in-four chance that three ecosystems — yours, mine, and the Wreeds’ — would use the same one.

“Indeed,” said Hollus.

“And even just taking the left-handed kind, there are still over a hundred different amino acids — but life on Earth only uses twenty of them. What are the chances that life on other worlds would use those exact same twenty?”

“Pretty darn remote.”

I smiled at Hollus; I’d expected him to give me a precise statistical answer. “Pretty darn remote indeed,” I said.

“But the choice is not random; God designed it that way.”

I let out a long sigh. “I just can’t buy that,” I said.

“I know,” said Hollus, sounding as though he despaired for my ignorance. “Look,” he said after a time, “I am not a mystic. I believe in God because it makes scientific sense for me to do so; indeed, I suspect God exists in this universe because of science.”

My head was starting to hurt. “How’s that?”

“As I said earlier, our universe is closed — it will eventually collapse back down in a big crunch. A similar event happened after billions of years in the universe that preceded this one — and with billions of years, who knows what phenomenal things science might make possible? Why, it might even make it possible for an intelligence, or data patterns representing it, to survive a big crunch and exist again in the next cycle of creation. Such an entity might even have science sufficient to allow it to influence the parameters for the next cycle, creating a designer universe into which that entity itself will be reborn already armed with billions of years worth of knowledge and wisdom.”

I shook my head; I’d expected something better than a riff on “it’s turtles all the way down.” “Even if that’s so,” I said, “that hardly solves the problem of whether or not God exists. You’re just pushing the creation of life back one step farther. How did life start in the universe before this one?” I frowned. “If you can’t explain that, you haven’t explained anything.”

“I do not believe that the being who is our God was ever alive,” said Hollus, “in the sense of being a biological entity. I suspect this is the first universe in which biology and evolution have ever taken place.”

“Then what is it, this God-being?”

“I see no evidence here on Earth that you have yet achieved artificial intelligence.”

That seemed a non sequitur to me, but I nodded. “That’s right, although a lot of people are working on it.”

“We do have self-aware machines. My starship, the Merelcas, is one such. And what we have discovered is this: intelligence is an emergent property — it appears spontaneously in systems of sufficient order and complexity. I suspect that the being which is now the God of this universe was a noncorporeal intelligence that arose through chance fluctuations in a previous universe devoid of biology. I believe this being, existing in isolation, sought to make sure that the next universe would teem with independent, self-reproducing life. It seems unlikely that biology could have started in any randomly generated universe on its own, but a localized space-time matrix of sufficient complexity to develop sentience could reasonably be expected to arise by chance after only a few billion years of quantum fluctuations, especially in universes unlike this one in which the five fundamental forces have less divergent relative strengths.” He paused. “The suggestion that essentially a scientist created our current universe would explain the long-standing philosophical conundrum of why this universe is indeed comprehensible to the scientific mind; why Forhilnor and human abstractions, such as mathematics and induction and aesthetics, are applicable to the nature of the reality. Our universe is scientifically understandable because it was created by a vastly advanced intelligence who used the tools of science.”

It was staggering to think that intelligence could arise more easily than life itself could — and yet we really didn’t have a good definition of intelligence; every time a computer seemed to succeed at duplicating it, we simply said that that’s not what we meant by the term. “God as a scientist,” I said, tasting the thought. “Well, I guess any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”

“Pithy,” said Hollus. “You should write that down.”

“I don’t think it’s original to me. But what you’re proposing is just that — a proposal. It doesn’t prove the existence of your God.”

Hollus bobbed his torso. “And just what sort of evidence would convince you?”

I thought about that for a while, then shrugged. “A smoking gun,” I said.

Hollus’s eyes moved to their maximum separation. “A what?”

“My favorite genre of fiction is murder mysteries, and—”

“I am astounded that humans take pleasure in reading about killing,” said Hollus.

“No, no,” I said. “You’ve got it wrong. We don’t enjoy reading about killing; we enjoy reading about justice — about a criminal, no matter how clever, being proved guilty of the crime. And the best proof in a real murder case is to find the suspect holding the smoking gun — actually holding the weapon used to commit the crime.”

“Ah,” said Hollus.

“A smoking gun is incontrovertible evidence. And that’s what I want: indisputable proof.”

“There is no indisputable proof for the big bang,” said Hollus. “And there is none for evolution. And yet you accept those. Why hold the question of whether there is a creator to a higher standard?”

I didn’t have a good answer for that. “All I know,” I said, “is that it will take overwhelming evidence to convince me.”

“I believe you have already been given overwhelming evidence,” said Hollus.

I touched my head, feeling the smoothness where my hair used to be.

Hollus was right: we do accept evolution without absolute proof. Sure, it seems clear that dogs are descended from wolves. Our ancestors apparently domesticated them, breeding out the fierceness, breeding in companionability, eventually turning the Ice Age Canis lupus pallipes into Canis familiaris, the modern pooch with its 300 sundry breeds.

Dogs and wolves can’t jointly reproduce anymore, or, at least, if they do, the offspring are sterile: canines and lupines are different species. If that’s the way it really happened — if human breeding turned Akela into Rover, creating a new species — then one of the basic tenets of evolution has been demonstrated: new species can be created from old ones.

But we can’t prove the evolution of the dog. And in all the thousands of years we have been breeding dogs since, producing all those myriad kinds, we have not managed to create a new canine species: a Chihuahua can still mate with a Great Dane, and a pit bull can hump a poodle — and both unions can bring forth fertile young. No matter how much we try to emphasize their differences, they are still Canis familiaris. And we’ve never created a new species of cat or rat or elephant, of corn or coconut or cactus. That natural selection can produce changes within a type is disputed by no one, not even the staunchest creationist. But that it can transform one species into another — that, in fact, has never been observed.

In the vertebrate-paleontology gallery at the ROM, we’ve got a long diorama filled with horse skeletons, starting with Hyracotherium from the Eocene, then Mesohippus from the Oligocene, Merychippus and Pliohippus from the Pliocene, then Equus shoshonensis from the Pleistocene, and finally today’s Equus caballus, represented by a modern quarter horse and a Shetland pony.

It sure as hell looks like evolution is happening: the number of toes reduce from Hyracotherium’s four on the front feet and three on the rear until there’s only one, in the form of a hoof; the teeth grow longer and longer, an apparent adaptation for eating tough grasses; the animals (excepting the pony) get progressively larger. I pass that display constantly; it’s part of the background of my life. Rarely do I give it any thought, although often enough I’ve interpreted it when conducting VIP tours of the gallery.

One species giving rise to the next in an endless pageant of mutations, of adaptations to ever-changing conditions.

I accept that readily.

I accept that because Darwin’s theory makes sense.

So why don’t I also accept Hollus’s theory?

Extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof.That had been Carl Sagan’s mantra when confronted by UFO nuts.

Well, guess what, Carl? The aliens are here — in Toronto, in L.A., in Burundi, in Pakistan, in China. The proof is inescapable. They are here.

And what about Hollus’s God? What about the proof for an intelligent designer? The Forhilnors and Wreeds had more concrete evidence, it seemed, for that than I had for evolution, the intellectual framework upon which I’d built my life, my career.

But . . . but . . .

Extraordinary claims. Surely they must be held to a higher standard. Surely the proof should be monumental, irrefutable.

Of course it should be.

Of course.