I was reading some article or another in Wired, which happens to be about dinosaurs. And of course, the religious kooks came out of the woodwork to attack evolution on the comment board. And it occurred to me: the dynamics in which the creationist and scientists talk over the heads of each other is a rather nice illustration of speciation, albeit not in the traditional exchange of biological genetic material, but in the exchange of information genetic material.

Those of you who watched and understood a little bit of, say, Serial Experiment: Lain or Ghost in the Shell may already have an inkling what I am getting at.

Consider the following: let's say that the information age really began around the 17th and 18th century, the time of Newton and the time of the founding of the Royal Society. Since then, science as we know it has been developed in a manner largely dependent on the exchange of ideas between individuals. The modern theories of physics, chemistry, mathematics, biology, and more, are the cumulative result of some original ideas compounded upon with generations of revisions.

The same can be said of religious doctrines. The edicts of past popes and papal councils are still constantly being interpreted for the modern day; the Hebrew scholars have debated on the Torah for centuries; and similar developments can be seen in many religions in the world, when principles and faiths are continuously modified to be applicable to the modern age.

Some of these have a central authority that dictates the "facts". Some of these arrive at a conclusion by concensus. In either case, through the generations, knowledge and ideas are not static, but evolving.

Going back to the 17th and the 18th century, the schism between the naturalists and the church may have begun to approach a critical point. Prior, the alchemical investigations are often rooted in a philosophical search for truth, which in turn are often based on a religious conviction to better understand the magnificence of god. It is around the time of the Royal Society when the study of nature for the sake of understanding nature begin to take its own roots independent of religious views.

Perhaps that marks the beginning the the speciation of humans into the religious types and the scientist types. Of course, this speciation is not yet complete, as there are still middle-ground scientists and middle-ground religious figures who accept the principles of both and encourage a dialogue. But the appearance of figures like Richard Dawkins and anti-evolution Christian fundamentalists may indicate what is to come.

In reglious and scientific circles alike, the ideas that we hold currently are the result of a selection, a mechanism that enforces the "survival of the fittest" if you will. Like biological evolution, the definition of the "fittest" is one dependent on the environmental stress. During the Spanish inquisition, the fittest is defined as practicing the Catholic Religion. During the turmoil of the British "Jam and Cheese sandwich" (1603 - 1688), depending on the year, the fittest maybe Catholic or Puritan, with a mix of others thrown in. While these two examples tie together the fitness of the intellectual idea with the life-expectancy of the holder of said idea, it is not necessarily the case. Consider the controversy between Leibniz and Newton. While it is in generally now accepted that the two men developed calculus independently, with Newton having perhaps a slight edge in temporal primacy, the progenitor of the modern calculus--its symbolic notations, its terminology--is undisputably Leibniz. There was no earthly authority that dictated that the philosophy of Leibniz should be used rather than that of Newton. No, instead, the proliferation of the German's ideas simply boils down to what determined the survival of simple organisms--the wide spreading of seeds. Newton was a reserved individual, who cared not to hold discourse with fellow scientists. Leibniz, on the other hand, not only conversed but converted, having as students the famous Bernoulli brothers. Is it any surprise that almost all mathematicians alive today trace their genealogical roots to Leibniz, the same way a not-insignificant portion (around 0.5% of world population or 8% of Asian population) of modern men have patrilineal ancestry in Genghis Khan?

The synthesis of ideas can be thought of as a sort of genetic mixing. The occurrence of truely new insights injects new material into the gene pool much the same way a mutation would biologically.

Then what is speciation? Taking a Hegelian worldview, knowledge comes in the thesis, antithesis, and synthesis triad. To have genetic mixing (synthesis) requires resolving the conflict between two genetic bases (the thesis and the antithesis) by reconciling their common truths. The keyword here is "common truths". A proper dialectic requires the presupposition that the participants share something common, from which the dialogue can start. Or, in mathematical language, a common set of axioms must be jointly accepted by the participants. When this common set gets sufficiently small compared to the differences that are trying to be resolved, a resolution becomes impossible. Compare this to biological speciation. Two individuals are determined to be in different species if it is impossible for them to produce an offspring capable of breeding. The synthesis of two conflicting ideals is comparable to, perhaps uglily, the union of two humans of different racial background. A new individual carrying characteristics of both parents emerges. On the other hand, when two ideas becomes sufficiently disjoint, while it maybe possible to for a person to simultaneously accept both ideas, it becomes impossible to combine them into a coherent whole, just like how it is possible to produce an animal from mixing a tiger and a lion, but the offspring, carrying still the genetic material of both parents, can no longer contribute its unique genetic mix into the gene pool. It is a union of two halfs, instead of a whole. And of course, if the two ideas becomes even further separated, then the production of offsprings is not even possible. The two ideas can contain so much inherent contradiction amongst themselves that it is impossible for one person to accept both ideas at the same time.

Early in history, when science, religion, and philosophy were all a murky whole, there was free flowing of ideas and, perhaps one could say, the world of ideas has one large species. Yet in the recent centuries, science and religion has each grown to a point where some rejection of each other's axiomatic principles are necessary to maintain the self-consistency of the ideas in each realm. At some point, speciation occurred. There is no longer a free exchange of ideas between the two spheres.

This, I think, is what marks the current "debate" on evolution. It is already at the point where the main players involved can no longer synthesize the two ideas into one. Discourse at this point is futile. And I think this is something that Richard Dawkins has realized, and also something that the big anti-evolutionary think-tanks have realized. The question now, really, is not one about assimilation, but one about cohabitation: is it possible for two species to survive on limited resources without driving each other to extinction?