{\huge Scientific Gifts}

And how to recognize them \vspace{.2in}

George Dyson is the author of Turing's Cathedral. This book was newly released when we saw copies at Princeton's celebration of the Alan Turing Centennial last May. It covers John von Neumann and his wife Klára von Neumann even more than Alan Turing in a multifacted canvas of the emerging digital age. He also wrote Darwin Among the Machines: The Evolution of Global Intelligence. His works show both the lyricism and the futurism of his renowned physicist father, Freeman Dyson.

Today we discuss evolution and technology as we close the Turing centennial year, and consider how Nature provides scientific gifts.

We are thinking of gifts in the Christmas season, of course. Often you receive a gift you wished for, maybe even after circulating the idea to loved ones or putting it on a public wish list. There are gifts of things you need that aren't exciting. Some gifts alas you'd like to return. But then there are gifts that are unexpected and yet deeply appropriate, which bring the ``aha'' of discovery and are relished most afterward. We like to think of gifts from science as being this kind.

Dyson's two books make a complicated argument and prediction about communications technology and the near future of humanity, not all of which we follow. It accords with Ray Kurzweil's famous assertions that a ``Technological Singularity'' is at hand, but argues that humanity will not be able to control natural processes of evolution and selection at work in it. We have a few simpler points to offer.

Darwin Drawn Inward

Here is a representative quotation from ``Darwin Among the Machines'':

``...[I]t appears to us that we are ourselves creating our own successors ... we are daily giving them greater power and supplying by all sorts of ingenious contrivances that self-regulating, self-acting power which will be to them what intellect has been to the human race. In the course of ages we shall find ourselves the inferior race...

Day by day, however, the machines are gaining ground upon us; day by day we are becoming more subservient to them; more [people] devoting the energies of their whole lives to the development of mechanical life. The upshot is simply a question of time, but that the time will come when the machines will hold the real supremacy over the world and its inhabitants is what no person of a truly philosophic mind can for a moment question.''

Did we fool you, or did you notice our use of quotes which are not the style for book titles? These words were penned not recently but almost 150 years ago, in an anonymous letter published under that title in 1863, and later acknowledged as his by the essayist Samuel Butler. Dyson named his book after that letter.

Butler was already extending the argument of Charles Darwin's Orgins of Species\/, which was published in 1859 just four years before, to intimate aspects of human societal development. Dyson brings this up to date. Well, even in 2013 we think people ``of philosophic mind'' can question the supremacy of computers as an inevitable evolutionary outcome.

What we observe is simply that much of today's technology comes from scientific facts that seem to be separate from both the long-term process of evolution by natural selection, and the civilizing process of the last 10,000 or so years. Hence we think of them as ``gifts.'' This already has consequences.

What Makes a Scientific Gift?

Here are some things we don't mean: That carbon is wonderful for biology, and that we breathe oxygen and expel carbon dioxide, while flora largely does the opposite, are vital facts---but life as we know it is already predicated on them. We are enjoying a humanly long interval of temperate climate over most of the Earth's surface after a series of ice ages, but civilization needed this to flourish. To have complex materials at all may require supernovas, and to have matter at all may require physical constants to be just-so, but precisely because of their necessity we exclude all such ``anthropic coincidences'' from our notion of ``free gift.''

Muons provide a boundary case. In response to the discovery of the muon particle, when it seemed to have no larger purpose in physical theory, Isidore Rabi famously exclaimed, ``Who ordered that?'' Now we know that muons---aided by a relativistic phenomenon that we explain as lengthening their lifetimes so they can reach the Earth's surface from cosmic-ray bursts high in the atmosphere---are the main engine of mutations. No muons, perhaps no Darwin. Hence we could class them as necessity not gift. On the other hand, evolution was already well established without a pre-conceived need for the muons' agency, so they were a free discovery.

So does the mass-energy conversion represented by Albert Einstein's $latex {E = mc^2}&fg=000000$. That we get so much $latex {E}&fg=000000$ from so little $latex {m}&fg=000000$ was unexpected, and has been a driver of technology for good and ill. But this is fundamental to how the world works to begin with. Other facts of quantum mechanics are transparently basic to life processes.

A free gift is a fact where we could still expect the world as we know it if it were false, but can hope for a better life tomorrow because it is true. Many facts underlying technology covered in Dyson's book strike us here.

Gifts From Complexity?

For example, it is remarkable that radio waves broadcast from New York City and Chicago can both reach my basic car radio driving on the NY Thruway upstate, going through my body without damage. We did not evolve with radio receivers, and although one can note living beings' imperviousness to ambient waves, this doesn't automatically give carte blanche to powerful human-pumped radiation. A closer-run related matter is radiation exposure from cellphones. As described by Dana McKenzie in his book The Universe in Zero Words, this avoids being a cancer risk owing to a fundamental equation governing rates of absorption after emission.

Open Problems