Introduction: The Illusion of Design [Richard Dawkins]

Natural History Magazine ^ | November 2005 | Richard Dawkins

[snarks_when_bored]

Introduction: The Illusion of Design

By Richard Dawkins

The world is divided into things that look as though somebody designed them (wings and wagon-wheels, hearts and televisions), and things that just happened through the unintended workings of physics (mountains and rivers, sand dunes, and solar systems).

Mount Rushmore belonged firmly in the second category until the sculptor Gutzon Borglum carved it into the first. Charles Darwin moved in the other direction. He discovered a way in which the unaided laws of physics—the laws according to which things “just happen”—could, in the fullness of geologic time, come to mimic deliberate design. The illusion of design is so successful that to this day most Americans (including, significantly, many influential and rich Americans) stubbornly refuse to believe it is an illusion. To such people, if a heart (or an eye or a bacterial flagellum) looks designed, that’s proof enough that it is designed.

No wonder Thomas Henry Huxley, “Darwin’s bulldog,” was moved to chide himself on reading the Origin of Species: “How extremely stupid not to have thought of that.” And Huxley was the least stupid of men.

Charles Darwin discovered a way in which the unaided laws of physics could, in the fullness of geologic time, come to mimic deliberate design.

The breathtaking power and reach of Darwin’s idea—extensively documented in the field, as Jonathan Weiner reports in “Evolution in Action”—is matched by its audacious simplicity. You can write it out in a phrase: nonrandom survival of randomly varying hereditary instructions for building embryos. Yet, given the opportunities afforded by deep time, this simple little algorithm generates prodigies of complexity, elegance, and diversity of apparent design. True design, the kind we see in a knapped flint, a jet plane, or a personal computer, turns out to be a manifestation of an entity—the human brain—that itself was never designed, but is an evolved product of Darwin’s mill.

Paradoxically, the extreme simplicity of what the philosopher Daniel C. Dennett called Darwin’s dangerous idea may be its greatest barrier to acceptance. People have a hard time believing that so simple a mechanism could deliver such powerful results.

The arguments of creationists, including those creationists who cloak their pretensions under the politically devious phrase “intelligent-design theory,” repeatedly return to the same big fallacy. Such-and-such looks designed. Therefore it was designed.

Many people cannot bear to think that they are cousins not just of chimpanzees and monkeys, but of tapeworms, spiders, and bacteria. The unpalatability of a proposition, however, has no bearing on its truth.

To pursue my paradox, there is a sense in which the skepticism that often greets Darwin’s idea is a measure of its greatness. Paraphrasing the twentieth-century population geneticist Ronald A. Fisher, natural selection is a mechanism for generating improbability on an enormous scale. Improbable is pretty much a synonym for unbelievable. Any theory that explains the highly improbable is asking to be disbelieved by those who don’t understand it.

Yet the highly improbable does exist in the real world, and it must be explained. Adaptive improbability—complexity—is precisely the problem that any theory of life must solve and that natural selection, uniquely as far as science knows, does solve. In truth, it is intelligent design that is the biggest victim of the argument from improbability. Any entity capable of deliberately designing a living creature, to say nothing of a universe, would have to be hugely complex in its own right.

If, as the maverick astronomer Fred Hoyle mistakenly thought, the spontaneous origin of life is as improbable as a hurricane blowing through a junkyard and having the luck to assemble a Boeing 747, then a divine designer is the ultimate Boeing 747. The designer’s spontaneous origin ex nihilo would have to be even more improbable than the most complex of his alleged creations. Unless, of course, he relied on natural selection to do his work for him! And in that case, one might pardonably wonder (though this is not the place to pursue the question), does he need to exist at all?

The achievement of nonrandom natural selection is to tame chance. By smearing out the luck, breaking down the improbability into a large number of small steps—each one somewhat improbable but not ridiculously so—natural selection ratchets up the improbability.

Darwin himself expressed dismay at the callousness of natural selection: “What a book a Devil’s Chaplain might write on the clumsy, wasteful, blundering low & horridly cruel works of nature!”

As the generations unfold, ratcheting takes the cumulative improbability up to levels that—in the absence of the ratcheting—would exceed all sensible credence.

Many people don’t understand such nonrandom cumulative ratcheting. They think natural selection is a theory of chance, so no wonder they don’t believe it! The battle that we biologists face, in our struggle to convince the public and their elected representatives that evolution is a fact, amounts to the battle to convey to them the power of Darwin’s ratchet—the blind watchmaker—to propel lineages up the gentle slopes of Mount Improbable.

The misapplied argument from improbability is not the only one deployed by creationists. They are quite fond of gaps, both literal gaps in the fossil record and gaps in their understanding of what Darwinism is all about. In both cases the (lack of) logic in the argument is the same. They allege a gap or deficiency in the Darwinian account. Then, without even inquiring whether intelligent design suffers from the same deficiency, they award victory to the rival “theory” by default. Such reasoning is no way to do science. But science is precisely not what creation “scientists,” despite the ambitions of their intelligent-design bullyboys, are doing.

In the case of fossils, as Donald R. Prothero documents in “The Fossils Say Yes” [see the print issue], today’s biologists are more fortunate than Darwin was in having access to beautiful series of transitional stages: almost cinematic records of evolutionary changes in action. Not all transitions are so attested, of course—hence the vaunted gaps. Some small animals just don’t fossilize; their phyla are known only from modern specimens: their history is one big gap. The equivalent gaps for any creationist or intelligent-design theory would be the absence of a cinematic record of God’s every move on the morning that he created, for example, the bacterial flagellar motor. Not only is there no such divine videotape: there is a complete absence of evidence of any kind for intelligent design.

Absence of evidence for is not positive evidence against, of course. Positive evidence against evolution could easily be found—if it exists. Fisher’s contemporary and rival J.B.S. Haldane was asked by a Popperian zealot what would falsify evolution. Haldane quipped, “Fossil rabbits in the Precambrian.” No such fossil has ever been found, of course, despite numerous searches for anachronistic species.

There are other barriers to accepting the truth of Darwinism. Many people cannot bear to think that they are cousins not just of chimpanzees and monkeys, but of tapeworms, spiders, and bacteria. The unpalatability of a proposition, however, has no bearing on its truth. I personally find the idea of cousinship to all living species positively agreeable, but neither my warmth toward it, nor the cringing of a creationist, has the slightest bearing on its truth.

Even without his major theoretical achievements, Darwin would have won lasting recognition as an experimenter.

The same could be said of political or moral objections to Darwinism. “Tell children they are nothing more than animals and they will behave like animals.” I do not for a moment accept that the conclusion follows from the premise. But even if it did, once again, a disagreeable consequence cannot undermine the truth of a premise. Some have said that Hitler founded his political philosophy on Darwinism. This is nonsense: doctrines of racial superiority in no way follow from natural selection, properly understood. Nevertheless, a good case can be made that a society run on Darwinian lines would be a very disagreeable society in which to live. But, yet again, the unpleasantness of a proposition has no bearing on its truth.

Huxley, George C. Williams, and other evolutionists have opposed Darwinism as a political and moral doctrine just as passionately as they have advocated its scientific truth. I count myself in that company. Science needs to understand natural selection as a force in nature, the better to oppose it as a normative force in politics. Darwin himself expressed dismay at the callousness of natural selection: “What a book a Devil’s Chaplain might write on the clumsy, wasteful, blundering low & horridly cruel works of nature!”

In spite of the success and admiration that he earned, and despite his large and loving family, Darwin’s life was not an especially happy one. Troubled about genetic deterioration in general and the possible effects of inbreeding closer to home, as James Moore documents in “Good Breeding,” [see print issue], and tormented by illness and bereavement, as Richard Milner’s interview with the psychiatrist Ralph Colp Jr. shows in “Darwin’s Shrink,” Darwin’s achievements seem all the more. He even found the time to excel as an experimenter, particularly with plants. David Kohn’s and Sheila Ann Dean’s essays (“The Miraculous Season” and “Bee Lines and Worm Burrows” [see print issue]) lead me to think that, even without his major theoretical achievements, Darwin would have won lasting recognition as an experimenter, albeit an experimenter with the style of a gentlemanly amateur, which might not find favor with modern journal referees.

As for his major theoretical achievements, of course, the details of our understanding have moved on since Darwin’s time. That was particularly the case during the synthesis of Darwinism with Mendelian digital genetics. And beyond the synthesis, as Douglas J. Futuyma explains in “On Darwin’s Shoulders,” [see print issue] and Sean B. Carroll details further for the exciting new field of “evo-devo” in “The Origins of Form,” Darwinism proves to be a flourishing population of theories, itself undergoing rapid evolutionary change.

In any developing science there are disagreements. But scientists—and here is what separates real scientists from the pseudoscientists of the school of intelligent design—always know what evidence it would take to change their minds. One thing all real scientists agree upon is the fact of evolution itself. It is a fact that we are cousins of gorillas, kangaroos, starfish, and bacteria. Evolution is as much a fact as the heat of the sun. It is not a theory, and for pity’s sake, let’s stop confusing the philosophically naive by calling it so. Evolution is a fact.

Richard Dawkins, a world-renowned explicator of Darwinian evolution, is the Charles Simonyi Professor of the Public Understanding of Science at the University of Oxford, where he was educated. Dawkins’s popular books about evolution and science include The Selfish Gene (Oxford University Press, 1976), The Blind Watchmaker (W.W. Norton, 1986), Climbing Mount Improbable (W.W. Norton, 1996), and most recently, The Ancestor’s Tale (Houghton Mifflin, 2004), which retells the saga of evolution in a Chaucerian mode.

[Dimensio]

Do you actually have an argument to make, or are you just going to branch off into meaningless tangents in lieu of a rational response?

[Aquinasfan]

Don't forget that it was Galileo's arrogance and refusal to swallow Aristotelian physics (as filtered through Aquinas, mostly) that really started modern physics.

But don't forget Galileo's contemporary Copernicus, whose research several cardinals were funding.

You're right about Aquinas promoting some of Aristotle's errors. But it's important to remember that Aristotle was the greatest philosopher in history, at least up to St. Thomas' time, so Aquinas' adoption of some of Aristotle's flawed theories regarding the natural world is understandable.

[Dimensio]

Excellent reply.

Indeed. Completely ignore the substance of the work, attack it all for one little off-the-cuff remark. Very creationist.

[snarks_when_bored]

I was just making a sarcastic remark about how scientists pluck numbers from the air and then try to back them up.

Well, that number wasn't picked entirely at random, as I recall. It's related to the number of possible values of parameters in certain string theory scenarios, with the idea that each choice of parameters might correspond to a possible universe (the vast majority of which would be unable to support life as we know it, of course). Still, it's highly speculative, which I why I used the expression 'bandied about'.

[CarolinaGuitarman]

" But don't forget Galileo's contemporary Copernicus, whose research several cardinals were funding."

But none of them really thought the Copernican system was REAL; they just saw it as useful fiction that enabled better calculations of certain orbits. If Copernicus had ever insisted that his system was more than a mathematical model, he would have been silenced.

[Aquinasfan]

You didn't answer the question I asked,

#33?

These statements of the teaching authority of the Church expressed an atmosphere in which faith in God had penetrated the medieval culture and given rise to philosophical consequences. The cosmos was seen as contingent in its existence and thus dependent on a divine choice which called it into being; the universe is also contingent in its nature and so God was free to create this particular form of world among an infinity of other possibilities. Thus the cosmos cannot be a necessary form of existence; and so it has to be approached by a posteriori investigation. The universe is also rational and so a coherent discourse can be made about it. Indeed the contingency and rationality of the cosmos are like two pillars supporting the Christian vision of the cosmos.

[sauropod]

mark

[snarks_when_bored]

...it's important to remember that Aristotle was the greatest philosopher in history, at least up to St. Thomas' time...

Now you've stepped in it! I'm going to have to drag out one of my favorite Alfred North Whitehead quotes:

"Aristotle dissected fishes with Plato's thoughts in his head."

Whitehead had a real gift for the apposite (slight) exaggeration. Here's another famous one which is relevant in the present context:

"The safest general characterization of the European philosophical tradition is that it consists of a series of footnotes to Plato."

I stand with Whitehead on this question.

[Aquinasfan]

If Copernicus had ever insisted that his system was more than a mathematical model, he would have been silenced.

So the cardinals wanted to fund a mathematical model that had no relationship to reality?

Galileo's mistake was in demanding that the Church endorse his theory. At that point, their theories were unprovable scientifically.

Regardless, the finding regarding Galileo was that of a fallible tribunal, so I don't know what purpose it serves for evolutionists except to supposedly prove that the Church has always been opposed to science. This is ridiculous, since it was the Catholic West that gave birth to science, as Stanley Jaki ably attests.

[Aquinasfan]

I beg to differ with Albert North Whitehead...

[RightWingAtheist]

Mount Rushmore belonged firmly in the second category until the sculptor Gutzon Borglum carved it into the first.

Don't tell Cher.

[Antonello]

So are you saying that science owes Christianity free reign simply because it lorded its power over the great thinkers during its medieval heyday?

[shuckmaster]

So a chicken IS just an egg's way of making another egg.

I'm a believer!

[RightWingAtheist]

Galileo could have gone even further if his own devout Catholicism-which was unwavering in spite of his being persecuted by those he trusted the most-held him back from coming up with a theory of gravitation. Similarly Cuivier, the greatest biologist between Linnaeus and Darwin, might have come up with the theory of evolution if his own pious Christianity hadn't prevented him from doing so.

[snarks_when_bored]

Good points. And, as a young man, Darwin was himself a pious believer; had his curiosity and his intellect been weaker, he might never have recognized what his eyes and his notebooks were telling him during and after the voyage of the Beagle.

[Gumlegs]

Premature encapsulation?

[BelegStrongbow]

Excellent apologetic. That's the meat of what I was allusively and without citation trying to say.

[BelegStrongbow]

You have an interesting pantheon, snarks. Would Alfred North Whitehead be a major prophet or just one of the twelve, so to speak (so long as you feel content to make poetic allusion suffice for critical analysis, which is all ANW is adding so far).

I don't take Dawkins or Darwin as infallible (and I don't take St. Thomas as infallible either, just less likely to err).

Dawkins steps well over the bounds of discourse in this and, by denying the contingency of the cosmos we occupy, severely damages intellectual inquiry. If Darwin has anything right, it will be within the context of a theory which provide some kind of cosmological basis for the rules of development he enunciates to work.

I can accept just one infinite unbounded system: a creating transcendant Being, to whom (can't be to which) the plane of reality we jointly occupy is completely subject.

Whether there is also need for that Being to provide the means for our reality to subsist is a further question, but I don't want to push you past your endurance in this.

[CarolinaGuitarman]

" So the cardinals wanted to fund a mathematical model that had no relationship to reality?"

If it helped them to better predict the movements of the planets and stars, absolutely.

"Galileo's mistake was in demanding that the Church endorse his theory. At that point, their theories were unprovable scientifically."

He demanded the Church endorse his theory? When? His *problem* was the Church's initiation of force on anybody who deviated from their positions. He was tried for heresy, not for being a nag.

"This is ridiculous, since it was the Catholic West that gave birth to science, as Stanley Jaki ably attests."

When it wasn't trying scientists for heresy for saying things it didn't like. BTW, it was the pagan Greeks who gave birth to science.

[BelegStrongbow]

You are of course not suggesting that his notebooks were writing themselves are you, because they would only reflect what he himself thought, and would therefore only be of independent interest to those wishing to trace his thought from origin to final formulation. They would be of zero value to him independently of what he came to think and basically as aids to remembering points he had made but could have otherwise forgotten.

For myself, I am quite content with a theory of evolution as directed by the transcendant powers of a living Being superior to the created order and its rightful and just Lord. A directed evolution makes eminent sense...

...but again, only as a theory. Despite Dawkins, evolution is still not a fact, though it has a congeries of facts to assemble with speculation and outright guess.

I admire your faith in him, though, it's perversely admirable.