In the original Cosmos
, Carl Sagan
sagely intoned that: "If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch
, you must first invent the Universe
." (This can be seen done to music in the Symphony of Science version
.) That observation, as I recall, made me fall in love with both Cosmos
and apple pie. Apple pie is a metaphor which simply keeps on giving. There's a lot packed into it; and I aim to unpack it.
Food and Science
for a moment that you do indeed wish to bake an apple pie. A key component of this delicious dessert dish
is the crust
, but a scratch-made crust won't bake itself. You must know how long
to bake your pie, and execute that baking accordingly. If the recipe demands one hour at 400 degrees, rest assured that you will not achieve an equally satisfactory result by baking your pie for six minute at 4000 degrees. But we may look at a fresh baked pie and, by our knowledge of how long specific chemical reactions take and how they look when they're done, we can tell within reason how long and how hot that pie was baked. Indeed, we need not examine the entire pie; a narrow slice will do; even a "core sample" obtained by injecting a hollow needle through the pastry and examining the contents drawn from that needle.
And if you are able to do so simple a thing as look at a pie and know that it isn't
just six minutes old, but in fact sixty or more, congratulations, you are a scientist
!! A food scientist perhaps, but applying the same relative tools as one who specialized in chemistry
. You are examining a physical object and applying known characteristics of comparable objects to this observation. And it may well be that if you take an uncooked pie and cook it for just a few minutes, you will be able to observe how much it has changed in those few minutes and extrapolate from that the amount of time it will take to fully cook (or how much time a different pie has to have been cooking relative to it).
Intelligently Designed (but not Omnipotently)
And what else can you tell about that pie from thorough examination? You might deduce from its pleasant appearance (what with those crosshatched strips) and its assembly of flavors
that it was made by an intelligent being
-- and for the purpose of being eaten. There are many other things in this world which take as much or greater effort to make, and yet which are inedible (much less tasty) -- a sneaker
, a solar panel
, a life-sized painting
of an apple pie. Make no mistake, the discovery of a lone freshly made apple pie on any planet
would be a surefire sign of intelligent life on that planet. and it would simultaneously tell us that this life almost certainly has the capacity to taste and smell food, and a need
to engage in processes of harvesting ingredients and painstakingly assembling and preparing and measuredly mixing and cooking them in order to obtain something useful to it. This would most likely not be any omnipotent race, for an apple pie would serve no purpose for such beings.
A human being is a prime example. A human being is powerful enough and intelligent enough to take a bunch of ingredients and an oven and transform these resources into a pie. But the ability to do so doesn't somehow make the piemaker immortal, omnipotent, omniscient. No finite thing can be observed to require capacities beyond the finite capacities needed to make a finite thing. Even a vast an enormous pie, a pie the size of a city, or a world, could be made by a sufficiently powerful finite being. And the very fact of the making of the pie tells us that it has needs which must be fulfilled through effort, and not simply through, well, omnipotence
Our Pie-Hostile Universe
Lastly, one might look at the pie and contend that it must be here by accident because our Universe is clearly not made to accommodate pies. Most of our Universe is frozen vacuum where the pie would get a more serious case of freezer burn
than you've ever seen; or alternatively be cooked to a crisp by radiation. One might claim the same as to the apples which went into it. An apple tree, one might argue, can't possibly exist for the purpose of producing edible delights, because the vast majority of the trees bulk is inevitable, tasteless bark and gritty roots and leaves and stems and such. And yet from the standpoint of evolutionary biology, we know that the entirety of the apple tree is indeed geared towards making apples -- or more specifically, tiny apple seeds nested within them, which carry its DNA
out into the next generation.
The apple is delicious because that baits animals to eat them, which spreads the seeds. Perhaps a more accurate way to frame that would be that all of us complex organisms require certain chemicals for fuel
, for example -- and that in order to ensure the intake of these chemicals, such organisms have thusly come to reward themselves by experiencing them as tasting good
when ingested some plants have thusly come to wrap their seeds in modified cellulose injected with high doses of these chemicals in enticing combinations, to get the tasters to carry them off. At some point, apple trees got very, very clever and realized that if they especially appealed to one species, that species would cultivate them all over the world and bake their fruit into pies.
And so, in closing, we can learn a lot from an apple pie. We can learn about the age of our planet and our Universe, and about the purposes for which it might exist and the characteristics of the sort of pastry chef who would need to bake it, and our own role as seeds carrying, perhaps, something even more deeply intertwined in our beings than our DNA. Blessings!!
lizardinlaw informs me as well that A was once an Apple Pie....