Comment by rglover | Hacker News Reader

Comment by rglover | Hacker News Reader

> “We found multiple lines of evidence supporting the fact that the global microbiome’s plastic-degrading potential correlates strongly with measurements of environmental plastic pollution — a significant demonstration of how the environment is responding to the pressures we are placing on it,” said Prof. Aleksej Zelezniak of Chalmers University of Technology in Sweden.

> Jan Zrimec, also at Chalmers, said: “We did not expect to find such a large number of enzymes across so many different microbes and environmental habitats. This is a surprising discovery that really illustrates the scale of the issue.”

> The first bug that eats plastic was discovered in a Japanese waste dump in 2016. Scientists then tweaked it in 2018 to try to learn more about how it evolved, but inadvertently created an enzyme that was even better at breaking down plastic bottles. Further tweaks in 2020 increased the speed of degradation sixfold.

This is why I believe in God. The absolute "holy crap" of the system quietly upgrading itself to handle whatever we throw at it. As an engineer that's incredibly humbling.

> of the system quietly upgrading itself to handle whatever we throw at it

Not only is this dangerously wrong but it’s an incredibly convenient perspective to enable someone to not deal with problems. Head in the sand.

Magic man in the sky will hotfix our fuck ups. And if millions die, that was meant to be.

In my opinion, this cripples an engineer’s thinking.

That's not what I said. Calm down.

I copied and pasted your comment. Do you want to revise what you meant?

I encourage you to elaborate on what you meant if I got it wrong.

You did and then you editorialized a very ignorant interpretation of it.

Seems pretty accurate to me

Sure. Humans introduced something with a negative potential into the world (created out of things that were already in the world). Because of that negative potential, God (IMO, not a "man in the sky" but a form of positively-charged energy) introduced an organic solution as a starting point for humans to fix the problem. Then, scientists (following what I'd argue is a God-given impetus and capacity to do so) iterate on the discovery of the bugs to improve their efficiency.

The central idea being that one of the great mysteries of life is that things tend to work out in one way another, despite all of our thrashing about. The mischaracterization of negative events being inherently "bad" (I view them as lessons or guidestones) ignores the inherent creative potential of those moments. Bugs evolving or coming into existence to compost the plastic is—as far as I see it—a tap on the shoulder saying "it's okay, try this."

A very good encapsulation of this idea is from Carl Jung and is well-explained in this book: https://www.amazon.com/Jungs-Thoughts-God-Religious-Psyches/...

This is a very deep topic and I'm happy to discuss over email: me@ryanglover.net.

Thanks for sharing. This is a fascinating perspective for sure.

I’m very guarded about the idea of “the system can correct to handle whatever we throw at it” because that makes it trivially easy to say “we don’t need to worry because it’ll sort itself out!” That’s dangerous, in my opinion.

God as “positively charged energy” piques my interest. Thanks for the link.

What makes plastic something with a negative potential? Was lignin a "thing with negative potential" until some organisms capable of dissolving it appeared? What makes humans a separate thing from "God" - are they not a part of the same nature that created them (and lignin)?

Don't get me wrong - plastic pollution is a serious issue. it just seems to me that the "negativity" of plastic pollution lies in making life more difficult for humans. Appearance of lignin surely influenced whatever forms of life existed at the time, we just don't care that much because we were not around (though carbon deposits from that time were surely useful as a source of easily accessible energy). We are born and we die in a world where lignin is biodegradable and not much of a hassle so we might be inclined not to call it "negative" even though it shares some similarities with plastics.

Things sometimes play out in our favor (like the aforementioned coal deposits providing easily accessible energy) and sometimes they don't (like the CO2 from burning all this coal pushing the chemical composition of our atmosphere outside of favorable range of parameters). I don't really see any advantage of introducing additional beings into the description (I don't think it enables us to make more accurate predictions), though I guess it could be an interesting thought experiment along the lines of the Gaia hypothesis (or the Medea hypothesis for those of more pessimistic inclinations).

I apologize if I made myself unclear or impolite - I tried my best to make this response as understandable as possible while trying to keep it reasonably short.

Not unclear or impolite at all. I appreciate the thoughtful response.

> What makes plastic something with a negative potential?

The human perception of it (bad aesthetics and contamination of water being the most concerning).

> I don't really see any advantage of introducing additional beings

I'm not positing God as a being nor a question of what's advantageous. It's an admission that we can't explain everything and the hole is God-shaped (again, IMO). We can observe quite a bit and form hypotheses/conclusions, but we can't go produce a perfect copy of Earth—we don't know how. Our best solution to a "backup Earth" at this point is to terraform Mars which is just manipulating an existing reality we didn't create. My general point being: something of superior intelligence had to produce the reality we're living in (irrespective of the form that intelligence takes).

Using evolution as proof of God's existence is something I find truly intriguing.

It begs the question: who created evolution? (I’m not saying “God”; just asking a question).

Exactly. Evolution can't explain evolution.

Perhaps it can.

Put simply, (maybe) life that does not evolve gets out competed and dies out.

I actually think that's the logical conclusion.

Yes, but how did the rules for evolution come about?

We can push the question further back.

In the abstract, we can say that some form of evolution is going to occur whenever you have imperfect replication. That is the only criteria needed, and the "rules" emerge naturally such a start.

You could ask, ok, why DNA based molecules and while not definitive, we have models around how their chemical precursors could become available in conditions similar to earths ancient past.

You could ask why did earth have such conditions, and the answer is something like: many planets could have similar conditions, and given the size of the universe regardless of how common such conditions, one might expect them to arise like earth's somewhere.

Ok, then you might ask what causes the universe have the types of stellar conditions and planetary formations and similar, to which we have cosmological models that generate these conditions from early energy states after the big bang.

Ok, so then you ask what created the big bang, or the universe as whole? We don't have a great answer. But understanding how evolution itself comes to be doesn't require such a leap if we are will to accept an earlier starting point and start examining phenomenon from there.

Consider that your question is based on a misunderstanding. There aren't "rules" of evolution, it's just our label for part of what happens when you leave a bunch of hydrogen sitting around for an extended period of time. It's emergent behavior.

You're driving at some sort of god thing, but that's actually unrelated. Sure, you can make the argument that the universe was created by something else, but however the universe got created, one bit of emergent behavior from it is the process of evolution.

[citation needed]

The word "evolution" describes a process we've observed in systems with heritable characteristics and environmental pressures that more or less randomly select for or against those characteristics. It doesn't need a prime mover per se, because it's a statistical phenomenon.

How did the laws or rules for that process come about?

The thing we call “science” is a loose collection of deductive, inductive, and abductive rules of inference, combined with empirical observation. A great deal of ink has been spent trying to determine the exact “laws” of science; Popper and Kuhn can probably help you with the details.

Religious fanatics have used this argument for the past few million things that have since been explained by science. Will likely do so for the next who knows how many years until everything is explained.

It's a valid argument (prepending "religious fanatics" to discredit it is intellectually weak). Science is nothing more than humans finding explanation for what was already created. The worship of it leads to an ignorance of the "why" and "who," putting an overemphasis on the what, where, when, and how.

Why? and who? are questions humans ask about their societies, families, and products. Assuming it applies to non-human natural phenomenon is quite intensely anthropomorphic and more than a little arrogant.

I shudder at the thought of your upbringing if curiosity is viewed as arrogance.

I'm not assuming that it applies, those are just the best tools I have at my disposal for understanding right now. I patiently await the monolith that changes that (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cHWs3c3YNs4).

My upbringing was evangelical Christian... thus my distaste for theological supremacism.

Yeah, that will do it (I have a close friend in the same boat and understand the distaste). It's difficult, but I'd urge you to separate your views of God from that point of view.

Beh, I see it as a bonus having had that upbringing and moving on from it. Kind of like an immunization shot. I read a lot of theology and philosophy of religion, frankly, I'm quite religiously literate and my discipline in university was philosophy. But I'm an atheist, or maybe a scientific pantheist of some kind. There's no part of me that is against "asking questions", but part of inquiry is knowing which questions to ask.

Should we expect evolution to explain evolution, though? It reminds me a bit of the "falsifiability is not falsifiable" kind of argument - just like falsifiability doesn't apply to itself (it applies to science and falsifiability is a metascientific term), evolution is a biological term and doesn't apply to cosmogony.

It is an emergent phenomena of imperfect replication

Why do you start from the question of something needing to be "created"? And why a "who"?

Evolution is a name humanity has given a process. It makes no sense to ask "who created evolution".

Change the question then: “who or what created the process or the laws that define the process?” I’m not providing an answer, but am wondering about your answer.

Isn't it an inevitable process considering how life works on this planet? I suppose you could say that life creates it, in the same way that you could say drivers create traffic patterns.

If it was God, it would beg the question, who created God?

Yes. And this is why I think humans are overly-hubristic in their thinking. It excites the hell out of me that we just don't know.

No. Even the things we do know you've just said aren't explainable by anything but God in this thread.

In effect, yes, but that's an oversimplification. This is a multi-hour/day/week/month/year conversation.

Not really. Humans created God. The end.

While we might dismiss human notions of a god, independent of humans, there still are cosmological details to the universe that do not have tidy answers. There is no reason to believe that advances in the understanding of the creation of universe will actually explain existence, but only push back our knowledge such that we will remain unclear on the prior causes whatever we figure out.

There is a profound "Turtles all the way down" problem even confined to fully rational discussion of the matter.

Ultimately "who created X" can kind of go on forever. Who created evolution? The Universe. Who created the Universe? God. Who created God? Uh oh. If you decide that God is and always was, then you could say the same about the Universe itself.

My current understanding leads me to believe that the Universe can't possibly exist. You can't create a Universe out of nothing. But here it is and here we are.

I wouldn't think about it too much. It will make your head spin.

This general problem is called the "unmoved mover" in philosophy. Aristotle famously determined that there were a couple dozen unmoved movers, i.e. celestial spheres.

Which begs the question: why limit ourselves to one guy in a robe when we can have a couple dozen of them pushing planets around?[1] :-)

[1]: http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3Atext%... and forward.

It really does not beg that question at all.

You might as well say "well, if the sky is blue, then who invented the color blue?". Nobody, it's just a name we give to a random light wavelength.

No it doesn't. Think for a moment about how absurd it is use the phrase "it begs the question" in this manner. The statement is on it's knees pleading for the question, "who created evolution?" That is what you are effectively claiming. Statements, whether true or false, can not drive cars, travel the world, raise a family, lose their jobs, be divorced, lose their home, and end up on the street with nothing, nor even beg.

Maybe it poses a question, maybe it raises a question, but it certainly does not beg the question. Question begging, dating back to Aristotle (who personally coined the phrase) is an informal fallacy that means assuming the conclusion. I expect you may know it as a circular argument. A simplistic example may be, "this car goes fast because it is a fast car."

The more you misuse language, the more you dilute the meaning of its words. Stop doing that, please. It's bad enough as it is with so many misunderstanding each other. Your cooperation is bagel. See? Now you have me doing it!

I’m sorry you focused on one verb in the sentence rather than the overall meaning of the sentence. You likely got my meaning but instead decided to focus not on the question but it’s particular wording. I think that is called pedantic, but I’m hesitant to invoke a word that might upset you because of my misuse of it.

I did not assume a conclusion when I asked that question.

Your sincerity moves me, so I will absolve you of my focusing on what words mean. So much for accuracy and semantics, which, by the way, contrary to popular belief, is of vital importance to understanding what you are saying and it being understood by anyone else.

gotta update the marketing

As someone who had a very orthodox upbringing (though would now class myself as an agnostic geek), I find the disparity between religion and science to be baffling, especially the more fundemental beliefs.

If I believe that God built the world, and I'm beholden to try and understand the will of God, then science is the only way of doing so. To believe that God clicked their fingers and willed everything into existence as it currently is, belittles the complexity of His/Her creation and belittles the deity too. I have no problem with science, evolution, biology etc - either it originated from entropy or it originated through design. What kicked everything off right at the start is almost a mute point - either way, we need to understand the systems that govorn the reality we're living in.

It's a rabbit hole, for sure. The way I came to this point of view is through programming and the intentionality of it all. Evolution is just an algorithm. Based on what we know about the world, something or someone had to write that algorithm. I've burned some serious cycles thinking about this and always end up laughing at how little we know.

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