Which came first, …

Which came first, intelligence or stupidity?

This is the deep metaphysical puzzle I have been grappling with ever since I heard the question, “Which came first, chicken or egg?” The question is not answerable because each came from the other, and therefore neither of them could have been the first.

Many a guru has used this nonsense question at the start of a session for bamboozling his or her visitors, in an effort to convert them into disciples. Most recently I read this in the book Swami Chinmayananda Reader (I had posted a piece on this earlier [1]), edited by Anita Raina Thapan, published by Penguin (ISBN 0-14-400062-8). There is no answer except the one the guru condescends to give: both the egg and the chicken came from an “uncaused cause”.

As shallow as this thinking is, it is given the veneer of deep thinking.

I have an answer for the question. It is for you to tell me whether my answer is as stupid/shallow or as brilliant/deep as the non-answer the guru gives.

The chicken came from a pre-chicken and the egg came from a pre-egg. The pre-egg came from a pre-pre-chicken which came from a pre-pre-pre-egg and all the way back to the original pre-pre-…-pre chicken/egg. Let us call them the proto- egg-chicken couplet. That does sound like the guru’s answer, “uncaused cause”.

But, let us think a little bit more, admitting to the plausibility of evolution through natural selection. What we see in our lifetime, the chicken-egg pair, is the product of incremental changes, accumulated over eons and generations, in the egg and the chicken, each transmitting to the other such changed imprints. The ancestor of the chicken did not come from a chicken egg; likewise, the ancestor of the chicken egg did not come from a chicken. But, our life being so short we can see nothing but the chicken coming out of an egg and egg coming out of a chicken. Their ancestors are beyond our ken. Hence, the question loses its relevance in the elongated time frame in which evolution works.

How do we know this? We do not. But, we have seen guppies in Trinidad change their breeding due to selection pressures in the presence of a predator [2]. Likewise, we have seen single-cell algae respond to changing environment over hundreds, thousands of generations [3]. It is this which gives me a level of confidence in what I had written about pre-pre-… stuff.

I want to shift briefly from biology to physics to ask and try to respond to an equally troublesome question. Is light a wave or particle? The ready answer is, it is both and it depends on what experiment you do. In a sense this is the physics equivalent of the chicken-egg question.

Richard Feynman does not like this hocus pocus. He claims that light is a particle. There is no wave. All that wave-particle duality is sheer nonsense. Is the claim correct? Yes, but you have to understand the context.

I will expand on the context taking recourse to an exchange between a student and his physics teacher, my father. The student asked, if light is a particle, as indeed photoelectric effect proves, what happens to those particles that enter a room and you shut the door. You throw a ball into the room and shut the door. The ball stays in the room. Likewise, does the light particle stay in the room?

Well, I am not going to tell you what answer my father gave, but I will speculate what answer Feynman might have given: We are not interested in what light is. But we have constructed a model that assumes light is a particle and whatever we observe matches absolutely fantastically with what the model says. This is the reason we can claim light is a particle. All that facile equivalence drawn between quantum mechanics and the non-dual Advaita philosophy stand exposed as mere sophistry, not beyond sophisticated philosophers and philosopher-scientists.

Both the supposedly deep questions have been shown to be most shallow and they look deep only because we are conditioned to think of them as deep. What the theory of evolution and quantum mechanics, indeed the whole range of frontier physics, tell us is that metaphysics is valid or can evoke awe only for a short duration. But, repeating a question that has been answered to browbeat a knowledge seeker is least spiritual and does not behoove a spiritual guru.

Now, as per the guru, both he and I have come from the “uncaused cause”, like intelligence and stupidity.

Do you think I am stupid? (Please play that question in your mind to the tune of Do you think I’m sexy by Rod Stewart, lyrics suitably altered.)

Raghuram Ekambaram

References

1.    http://nonexpert.blogspot.in/2012/06/comic-strippish-spirituality.html

2.    http://scienceblogs.com/notrocketscience/2010/02/01/evolving-guppies-shape-their-environments/

3.    http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/31/science/studying-evolution-with-an-eye-on-the-future.html?pagewanted=all