J. Scott Turner

“that obscurantism in an academic subject expands to fill the vacuum of its intrinsic simplicity. Physics is a genuinely difficult and profound subject, so physicists need to – and do – work hard to make their language as simple as possible (‘but no simpler,’ rightly insisted Einstein). Other academics – some would point the finger at continental schools of literary criticism and social science – suffer from what Peter Medawar (I think) called Physics Envy. They want to be thought profound, but their subject is actually rather easy and shallow, so they have to language it up to redress the balance.”

For example, both [a cumulus cloud and cauliflower] are what we call open thermodynamic systems, that is, organized streams of matter and energy that, through what has come to be called the Fourth Law of Thermodynamics, generate a peculiar and specified orderliness.

This uncomfortable spot is the starting point for the broad question that will be my theme throughout this book: do we have a coherent theory of evolution? [...]We are coming to the point, though, where what it cannot explain is coming into stark relief, making it impossible any longer to ignore the muddle.
For example, we don’t have a good Darwinian explanation for the origin of life.

As the conventional story goes, adaptation is the “good fit” between organism and environment, that suite of behaviors, attributes, phenotypes, whatever we wish to call them, that enable “fit” organisms to be more fecund than organisms that are not so “fit.”

To illustrate, consider how a recent (and admirable) textbook of evolution put it: “Adaptations are the products of natural selection, while adaptation is the response to natural selection.” This demonstrates, in one short and elegantly crafted sentence, The Problem: our current conception of this core evolutionary idea is essentially meaningless. What is adaptation? The product of natural selection! What is natural selection? The outcome of adaptation!

The conclusion is inescapable: something beyond mere chance seems to have drawn life into being, helping it up from the dead world. But what could that something be? Creationists are at the ready with their answer, of course, waving their irrefutable claim for what (or, more precisely, who) did the helping. You can scoff at their answer all you want, but that’s just deflection from the embarrassing question: what is your answer?

...from where do the replicators themselves come, things begin to loop around on themselves. The replicability that underlies DNA’s status as a repository of hereditary memory depends upon a host of metabolic processes specified by particular protein catalysts. Those protein catalysts would not exist, of course, without the replicable hereditary memory. [...]
The dilemma is obvious: each of the two necessary attributes of current life—heredity and metabolism—must exist for the other to exist. It is impossible (deluded, actually) to imagine such an intertwined system coming together all at once, with no intelligence guiding it.

Which leads us to the strange question: what law demands that life has to evolve up, from the small scale to the large? Why couldn’t it have been the other way? Why couldn’t life—homeostasis, essentially—have emerged first at the large scale, even as a planetary phenomenon, sustained at a large scale on pre-existing orderly flows of matter and energy until it could be encapsulated within the safe harbor of the cell? All that is needed is an energy source that is large enough to overcome the disruptive power of diffusion at a small scale and that is persistent enough to allow incipient conspiracies of homeostasis to piggyback on that standing thermodynamic wave. And that only occurs at large scale.

Even stranger, cognition and intentionality had to have actually preceded the origin of cellular life. He argues cells are the way they are because they wanted to be that way; that birds fly because their ancestors wanted to fly. Turner says "intentionality can be defined very broadly." Sure, if the definition doesn't fit your conclusion, change the definition!

He likes to call out the question marks of what we don’t know yet. You will see his God of the gaps is homeostasis. Apparently, it is at odds with the theory of evolution, and so is he.

Which brings me to the book you hold in your hand. I have come to believe that there is something presently wrong with how we scientists think about life, its existence, its origins, and its evolution

But any reader of mild astuteness will see what his god really is.

I am reminded of a bit from Isaac Asimov’s Foundation: Asimov has a main character take a liberty of having someone analyze an Imperial envoy’s supposed assurances of protection and “after two days of steady work, [the analyst] succeeded in eliminating meaningless statements, vague gibberish, useless qualifications [...], he found he had nothing left. Everything canceled out. Lord Dorwin [not a misspelling, though somewhat coincidental] rather , gentlemen, in five days of discussion didn’t say one damned thing, and said it so you never noticed.”

I noticed.