Mamas in the kitchen, Daddies on the phone, and nobody knows what’s going on
Mathematical proofs feel both beautiful and inevitable. Once you understand a proof of, say, the Pythagorean theorem, you can be sure this knowledge won’t be contradicted by any future discovery nor changed by any new insight. So you can use your knowledge to measure distances or map people’s Netflix tastes with utter confidence. Unsurprisingly, as I heard the cosmologist Mario Livio say recently, “most working mathematicians are Platonists”—convinced their proofs and concepts exist independently of the human race, eternally out there, waiting to be discovered.
Biology isn’t like this. Evolution is accepted as the fundamental theory of life because we see evidence of it all around us. Not because it has been irrefutably, mathematically proved.
Gregory Chaitin: “it is scandalous that we do not have a mathematical proof that evolution works.” Hence one of his ongoing intellectual quests, described engagingly in this talk: The development of “metabiology.” Metabiology is to be a model of life that will let researchers “represent mathematically the fundamental biological principles of evolution in such a manner that we can prove that evolution must take place.”
