PBS: Where Science Goes to Die

Last night PBS aired a show called the Forces of Nature (I think it was). It went breathless about how everything that exists does so due to electromagnetic forces and gravity. I missed the first 15 minutes or so, but it appeared that they were pushing the "balance" of forces and the necessity of symmetry. Two things were obvious.

First, the concept of the hexagon was elevated to a mystical status of wondrous symmetry as snowflakes were animated and filmed. Hexagonal due to the shape of water molecules? Some sort of resolution due to minimizing energy requirements to provide the magical hexagonal shape? Why, hexagons are everywhere, like bee's honey combs and other stuff.

What they failed to mention is that hexagons are a mathematical necessity due to adjacent circles: simple high school geometry. Put a circle somewhere. Then make a circle, same size, which touches the first circle, next to the first circle. Repeat that going around the first circle, making circles which touch and don't overlap. That amounts to six circles surrounding the first circle. That is the mathematical necessity of the hexagon in nature, not all that other crap about forces and symmetry. Look at a stack of pipes endwise. A stack of firewood. Sure, they're held there by gravity, but they could also be banded that way. The hexagonal necessity is still mathematical, not force.

The second half was focused on the force of... evolution. Yep. Evolution is now a force according to the perpetual evolution TV programs, just like gravity and electromagnetic forces, only it is restricted to living things. And living things are representative of the magic of symmetry, too. Well, not all living things, of course, like prokaryotes. Or Plants. Or even all eukaryotes. But there are quite a lot that do have symmetry: bilaterialism. Meaning that there are complementary right and left halves, but not front and back halves. And not internal things either, like intestines, livers, hearts, entire legions of feedback control systems, delivery channels, glands etc. But some are, like lungs and kindeys and brain halves which don't function symmetrically, but are physically symmetrical.

Apparently bilateralism is initiated by HOX genes, or at least described there in code. If that is the case, then the chemical property of the gene is the special force within life which is causal for bilateralism. But just for certain eukaryotes, of course.

Projecting this knowledge onto the additional evolutionary claim that there is no essence to life, that life is merely deterministic chemical activity resolving to the laws of electromagnetism, then this proposition is testable. The genetic chemistry, when applied to correctly assembled, lifeless materials which also have no life essence, should do its job and create bilateralism there as well. Symmetrical rocks should ensue due to the application of this new force, and easily, since their complexity is far less then that of life, but their essences are equal. They are merely electrochemically influenced molecular structures... just like life.

That is absurd, of course. But the challenge of how bilateralism came to be a feature demands an answer to the following paradox: which came first, physical bilateralism, or code for bilateralism? It occurred rapidly in the Cambrian Explosion epoch, along with non-bilateral plants and non-bilateral eukaryotes as well.

It's very similar to the other paradoxes, such as the creation of sexual reproduction which requires very high dual, complementary complexity coming into existence simultaneously; and other conundrums such as the pupation of butterflies, for example, where one physical creature is transformed into a completely different form in the secrecy of its cocoon.

And the ultimate paradox: how did a living cell, filled with thousands of necessary processes come into existence, while containing the coded molecule which precisely defines that cell embedded in the cell and ready to divide for procreation. It's no wonder they deny any intellectual responsibility for answering that.

But back to PBS. The program was to be about the forces of nature, which one might delusionally think that would be the four forces of physics. But this is PBS. It's agenda is showing.