Turtles all the way down

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Turtles all the way down.
Turtles all the way down.

"Turtles all the way down" refers to an infinite regression belief about cosmology, the nature of the universe.

Contents

[edit] Origin

The most widely known version today appears in Stephen Hawking's 1988 book A Brief History of Time, which begins with an anecdote about an encounter between a scientist and an old lady:

A well-known scientist (some say it was the philosopher Bertrand Russell) once gave a public lecture on astronomy. He described how the Earth orbits around the sun and how the sun, in turn, orbits around the centre of a vast collection of stars called our galaxy.
At the end of the lecture, a little old lady at the back of the room got up and said: "What you have told us is rubbish. The world is really a flat plate supported on the back of a giant tortoise."
The scientist gave a superior smile before replying, "What is the tortoise standing on?"
"You're very clever, young man, very clever," said the old lady. "But it's turtles all the way down!"

It is possible that the lady's comment came after Russell's 1927 lecture Why I Am Not a Christian where, in discounting the "First Cause" argument intended to be a proof of God's existence, he comments:

If everything must have a cause, then God must have a cause. If there can be anything without a cause, it may just as well be the world as God, so that there cannot be any validity in that argument. It is exactly of the same nature as the Hindu's view, that the world rested upon an elephant and the elephant rested upon a tortoise; and when they said, "How about the tortoise?" the Indian said, "Suppose we change the subject."

The origins of this story are uncertain. In J. R. (Haj) Ross's 1967 linguistics dissertation, Constraints on Variables in Syntax, the scientist is identified as the Harvard psychologist William James. Of the story's provenance, Ross writes:

I have been unable to find any published reference to it, so it may be that I have attributed it to the wrong man, or that it is apocryphal. Be that as it may, because of its bull's-eye relevance to the study of syntax, I have retold it here.[1][2]

Henry David Thoreau, in his journal entry of 4 May 1852,[3] writes:

Men are making speeches… all over the country, but each expresses only the thought, or the want of thought, of the multitude. No man stands on truth. They are merely banded together as usual, one leaning on another and all together on nothing; as the Hindoos made the world rest on an elephant, and the elephant on a tortoise, and had nothing to put under the tortoise.

[edit] Citation

The story can also be found in Bernard Nietschmann's "When the Turtle Collapses, the World Ends," Natural History, 83(6):34 (June-July 1974). A version of the story also appears in Clifford Geertz's, "Thick Description: Towards an Interpretive Theory of Culture," in his 1973 book The Interpretation of Culture, with the scientist and old woman replaced by an Englishman and an Indian respectively. This version may be a reference to various Hindu beliefs, including the myth that Vishnu's second avatar was Kurma, a tortoise on whose back the Mandara mountain rested, or that the tortoise Chukwa supports the elephant Maha-pudma who upholds the world. A whimsical allusion to this myth appears in Wilfrid Sellars' 1956 Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind:

authoritative nonverbal episodes... would constitute the tortoise on which stands the elephant on which rests the edifice of empirical knowledge.

Justice Antonin Scalia of the U.S. Supreme Court discussed his "favored version" of the tale in a footnote to his plurality opinion in Rapanos v. United States (decided June 19, 2006):

In our favored version, an Eastern guru affirms that the earth is supported on the back of a tiger. When asked what supports the tiger, he says it stands upon an elephant; and when asked what supports the elephant he says it is a giant turtle. When asked, finally, what supports the giant turtle, he is briefly taken aback, but quickly replies "Ah, after that it is turtles all the way down."[4]

[edit] Interpretations

The differences between the two forms of the anecdote point to the difference in its intended meaning.

For Hawking, the turtle story is one of two accounts of the nature of the universe; he asserts that the turtle theory is patently ridiculous, but admits that his own theories may be just as ridiculous. "Only time will tell," he concludes.

For Geertz, however, the story is patently wise, teaching us that we will never get to the bottom of things.

This comparison also reveals a difference between the positivist and interpretive, or hermeneutic approach to the interpretation of myths. Positivists read myths literally and find them false and foolish; interpretivists read them metaphorically or allegorically and find them true and profound.

The phrase "turtles all the way down", or sometimes simply "a turtle problem" are often used to describe other infinite regressions. For instance, the question of "who polices the police" may be regarded as a turtle problem.

The turtle problem also often arises in debates pertaining to creationism, for instance in the debate over intelligent design and its postulated intelligent designer. By raising the question of the need for a designer for objects with irreducible complexity, intelligent design also raises the question, "what designed the designer?" according to critics. Richard Dawkins has argued that "If complex organisms demand an explanation, so does a complex designer. And it's no solution to raise the theologian's plea that God (or the intelligent designer) is simply immune to the normal demands of scientific explanation,"[5] since such an answer would be unscientific. With religious creationism, the question "what created God?" can be answered with theological arguments, but in intelligent design, the chain of designers can be followed back indefinitely in an infinite regression, leaving the question of the creation of the first designer dangling. As a result, intelligent design does not explain how the complexity happened in the first place; it just moves it.[6]

[edit] Veracity

The anecdote has achieved the status of an urban legend on the internet, as there are numerous versions in which the name of the scientist varies (e.g., Arthur Stanley Eddington, Thomas Huxley, Linus Pauling, or Carl Sagan) although the rest is the same.

[edit] In culture

  • In the popular Discworld comic fantasy books by Terry Pratchett, the Discworld is a flat disc that rests on the backs of four huge elephants which are in turn standing on the back of an enormous turtle as it slowly swims through space. In the book Small Gods, the question "what does the turtle stand on?" is asked, and gets the reply "It's a turtle, for heaven's sake. It swims. That's what turtles are for." In his introduction to The Discworld Companion, Pratchett uses the phrase in a different sense, describing the recurrence of the Earth on a turtle in myth as "turtles all the way".
  • Stephen King in The Dark Tower series makes several references to a turtle holding up the earth, in various metaphors. Later in the series, he makes it clear that the origin of this metaphor is a play on the incident with the woman declaring that it's "turtles all the way down". The appearance of a palm-sized scrimshaw turtle likewise makes allusions to Pratchett's Small Gods when described as a "tiny god".
  • Dr. Seuss's children's story Yertle the Turtle, according to the fictional television cartoon character Lisa Simpson, is "possibly the best book ever written on the subject of turtle stacking."
  • Charles Stross's science fiction collection Accelerando: "Up or down, is it turtles all the way, or is there something out there that's more real than we are?"

[edit] See also

[edit] References

[edit] Footnotes

  1. ^ Ross, John R. (1967). Constraints on variables in syntax. (Doctoral dissertation, Massachusetts Institute of Technology). Available at MIT Theses. See page iv of the ms., page 4 of the electronic file.
  2. ^ William James published a different version in his book The Will To Believe (1898), specifically in the essay "The Sentiment of Rationality" (p. 104 of The Will To Believe in the Dover reprint):
    Like the old woman in the story who described the world as resting on a rock, and then explained that rock to be supported by another rock, and finally when pushed with questions said it was rocks all the way down, -- he who believes this to be a radically moral universe must hold the moral order to rest either on an absolute and ultimate should, or on a series of shoulds all the way down.
  3. ^ http://www.sniggle.net/Experiment/index.php?entry=excerpts04#04May52
  4. ^ Antonin Scalia. RAPANOS v. UNITED STATES. Cornell Law School Legal Information Institute's Supreme Court collection.
  5. ^ "If complex organisms demand an explanation, so does a complex designer. And it's no solution to raise the theologian's plea that God (or the Intelligent Designer) is simply immune to the normal demands of scientific explanation. To do so would be to shoot yourself in the foot." Richard Dawkins and Jerry Coyne. 1 September 2005. The Guardian [1]
  6. ^ Claudia Wallis. Evolution Wars. Time Magazine, 15 August 2005 edition, page 32 [2]
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