The Red Notebook

Marcus Chown writing in this week’s New Scientist [subscribers only link] about the so-called Goldilocks Paradox (i.e. why do the laws of physics seem fine-tuned for life?):

The most likely explanation for fine-tuning is […] that our universe is merely one of a vast ensemble of universes, each with different laws of physics. We find ourselves in one with laws suitable for life because, again, how could it be any other way?

The multiverse idea is not without theoretical backing. String theory, our best attempt yet at a theory of everything, predicts at least 10⁵⁰⁰ universes, each with different laws of physics. To put that number into perspective, there are an estimated 10²⁵ grains of sand in the Sahara desert.

I don’t think that puts it into perspective at all. Do you? What Chown is saying is that the number of grains of sand in the Sahara is 10⁴⁷⁵ times smaller than the theoretically predicted minimum number of universes in the multiverse (10⁵⁰⁰ ÷ 10²⁵ = 10⁴⁷⁵).

I don’t think 10⁴⁷⁵ is much easier to envisage than 10⁵⁰⁰. That’s a 1 followed by 475 zeroes, as opposed to a 1 followed by 500 zeroes.

Chown might almost as well have said, “To put that number into perspective, I only have two legs”. Two is much closer to 10²⁵ than 10²⁵ is to 10⁵⁰⁰. Several hundreds of orders of magnitude closer, in fact.

In other words, as I’m sure Chown would agree, 10⁵⁰⁰ is an unimaginably vast number. You can’t really put it into any sort of perspective.

Nice try, though, Mr Chown: you certainly got me thinking.

Remember this?

New Scientist's infamous cover, published one month before Darwin's bicentennial celebrations.

Well, today my New Scientist subscription finally came up for renewal (I have been a subscriber for about 20 years):

My response

We have long memories in Yorkshire.

The latest 15 editions of New Scientist, unopened since their stupid Darwin Was Wrong marketing hype.

They’re backing up like turds in a poorly maintained sewer. Ever since New Scientist published its stupid and irresponsible Darwin Was Wrong story in the midst of the Darwin bicentenary celebrations, this particular long-term subscriber just hasn’t felt like reading the damn rag. And, as with a sewage back-up, I’m not at all sure what to do about it.

Darwin was wrong, you see, because species aren’t really related to each other in a tree-like structure.

Meanwhile, the National Center for Biotechnology Information, which has been amassing genetic sequences for three decades, recently published the largest phylogenetic tree ever constructed.

Yes, that’s right, a tree.

Do you think someone should tell the poor dupes that they’ve got it all wrong?

–
See also:

• Hands off our tree!
• Dead trees

New Scientist increases its cover price to 30 pieces of silver!

(And they say the Red Notebook doesn’t do satire.)

Letter to New Scientist:

Sir/Madam,

Compare and contrast:

“Nobody is arguing – yet – that the tree concept has outlived its usefulness in animals and plants… [I]t is still the best way of explaining how multicellular organisms are related to one another” [Graham Lawton, New Scientist, 24 Jan 2009].

“Darwin was wrong: cutting down the tree of life” [New Scientistcover, 24 Jan 2009].

I appreciate you need to hype up your headlines to sell more deadtrees, but I expected better of New Scientist – especially just oneweek after your own editorial vowed to strive to avoid sexing upheadlines in future. Do your marketing people think they’ve identifieda gap in the creationist market or something?

I presume, in future, whenever you show a clade diagram in one of yourarticles, its caption will come with the disclaimer, “Please Note:This is wrong”.

More science, less marketing hype please.

Richard Carter, FCD
The Friends of Charles Darwin
http://friendsofdarwin.com/
Charlie is our Darwin

I think so too!

*sigh*

The latest edition of New Scientist (my butler reads it) contains a very interesting, albeit irritating article entitled Why Darwin was wrong about the tree of life, which asserts that, what with horizontal gene transfer and hybridisation and all that malarkey, life’s genealogy should not be represented, as Darwin said, by a tree, but rather by a convoluted web.

I say bollocks to that.

Yes, the history of life on Earth is indeed far more complex than even Darwin could have imagined. Life really isn’t that simple. It never is. Newton’s Laws of Motion are a wonderfully elegant set of equations that explain the motions of the heavens. They also, to Einstein’s great regret, happen to be flawed. But they were still good enough to get us to the sodding moon. Rutherford’s model of the atom is, we now realise, wrong, but it’s a hell of a lot easier to explain to young would-be scientists than fuzzy blobs which don’t seem to be able to make up their minds whether to be waves or particles. Such horrors are best held in reserve for unleashing on unsuspecting undergraduates. (I write from bitter personal experience.)

Darwin’s tree of life is still a pretty good approximation of the genealogy of species—whatever that word means in this hopelessly complex genetic age. It’s a useful metaphor that even young children can understand. It makes a great T-shirt and a damn fine fridge magnet.

Hands off our tree! Let’s not throw the baby out with the bathwater.