Emergent Properties

Ice crystals on a twig by my driveway.

In The Gods Must be Crazy, a Coke bottle dropped from a plane threatens to disrupt the society of a tribe of Bushmen in the Kalahari desert.  Nothing like the Coke bottle has ever been seen.  Initially, its beauty and usefulness are interpreted as a sign the gods have blessed them.  But soon, its uniqueness and the resulting conflicts for possession of it lead the village elders to throw it over the edge of the Earth—the gods must have been crazy to give it to them.

Interpreting things we don't understand as actions of the gods is an old human behavior.  And that approach is still around—the Intelligent Design movement is an example.  (See here.)  We humans like explanations for what are essentially random events.  Perhaps this is best observed among non-professional gamblers, praying that a slot machine would fall their way as if prayer actually makes a difference.   Or someone who gambles that he doesn't need a seatbelt— ``When it's my time, God will take me.''

One of the hardest ideas for non-scientists to grasp is that just because they don't understand what's going on, it doesn't mean it can't be understood.  Let's suppose for a moment those Bushmen had never seen ice, a not-hard-to-believe assumption.  (In fact, many of my students in Kenya had never touched ice until at our school, where they said that it  burned when they touched it.)  So let's suppose we load up a group of Bushmen and take them camping by a lake where the nights are cold enough for the lake to ice over.  When they awoke in the morning and venture down to the lakeshore, how would they interpret the ice covering the lake?  Was some god punishing them by cutting off access to water?  Was some strange fish-god protecting his supporters?

Perhaps a bold Bushman ventured out onto the ice.  He recognizes that the walking has become treacherous, perhaps slipping and falling. A hazard fit for Hercules?   But worse, suppose our intrepid Bushman crashes through the ice and disappears into the lake below.  Has some god punished his insolence?  How dare he venture into a banned area!  As he disappears into the lake, never to rise again, (he can't swim, and the chances of finding the hole he passed through are small) those more timid Bushmen on the shore draw the lesson—the gods have banned ice walking.  Soon a new religious edict appears—Commandment 7: No walking on ice.

Despite the supernatural interpretation by our Bushmen, ice is an entirely natural phenomenon.  They simply haven't been in a cold and wet enough environment to encounter it.  Nothing supernatural.  A property of water they have never been exposed to emerges as the environment changes.  Such emergent properties—consciousness, playfulness, life—become a barrier for the religious to embrace science and its naturalistic explanations.


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