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.

[js1138]

Right. I was addressing the classical First Cause issue.

But in this century it is important to put aside flat earth thinking. Simply asserting that everything has a cause because that's the way thing look is equivalent to asserting that the sun revolves around the earth.

In the current world of science, the overwhelming evidence is that some things do not necessarily have causes.

We should not allow people to get away with asserting axioms that contradict evidence.

[betty boop]

You're entirely welcome to your opinion, aNYCguy. I do confess, however, I prefer Aristotle's.

[aNYCguy]

You're entirely welcome to your opinion, aNYCguy.

And you yours, but this isn't a matter of opinion. Any response of substance to my refutation of your argument?

[r9etb]

Simply not true. We observe the opposite at the quantum level. We are surrounded by uncaused phenomena.

Are you sure about that? Are you sure that there's no cause for a specific quantum event?

Or are you merely saying that you cannot predict the occurrence of a specific quantum event, which is an entirely different thing.

[betty boop]

Any response of substance to my refutation of your argument?

I didn't realize you had refuted it. :^)

[js1138]

If the classical philosophers had known of this, and their view of the world were that "some things are caused and some aren't," then I wonder if they would have ever come up with the concept of a First Cause.

I'm more interested in the FReepers who have been pinged on this over and over, and who ignore the question.

I never really thought of quantum randomness as an act of creation until the Platonists among us started harping on first cause.

I don't really think this solves any great mysteries, but it shifts the focus of creation from some ancient mystery lost in time, to something that can be observed and studied in the here and now. And oddly enough, something with regular properties.

[betty boop]

By the way, what was the substance of your argument? That you outright deny nonphenomenal reality?

[cornelis]

some things do not necessarily have causes.

You sound like Aristotle, who thought there must be at least 50 some unmoved movers.

But we'll let him say it, because we believe freedom includes the freedom to be wrong.

[Dimensio]

Ya know, dimmie, it's easy to dismiss those you disagree with as "wicked." It's also profoundly dishonest. You should be ashamed of yourself.

So people who deliberately lie repeatedly, even when caught out in their lies, are not wicked? People who, when the false premises of their arguments are exposed, engage in personal attacks against those who exposed the false premises are not wicked?

When I said that they were wicked, I did at least try to explain why I believe them to be wicked. Your disagreement should be upon the specific accusations that I lay against creationists -- their outright dishonesty, primarily. For you to completely ignore that and to call me out only on calling them "wicked" as if I never offered any explanation as to why I make the charge is fundamentally dishonest of you. You should be ashamed of yourself.

[js1138]

Or are you merely saying that you cannot predict the occurrence of a specific quantum event, which is an entirely different thing.

I am saying that the existence of a local cause is inconsistent with observed phenomena. Whether there is a cause outside our universe pulling the strings we cannot say.

The possibility of "hidden variables" has been ruled out by experiment.

[Dimensio]

To make, however, a blanket statement as Dimensio did, is in fact dishonest.

Blanket? I said "many". I did not say "all".

[aNYCguy]

I didn't realize you had refuted it. :^)

I suppose I should give you credit for using such a novel tactic to avoid examining your flawed thinking. I'll Christen it the "Where am I?" approach.

[r9etb]

You are equating motion with time. No doubt you understand all this at a much deeper level than do I. The best I have been aware of equates motion with causality, which is a separate dimension from time, and treats space as a single dimension that can be subdivided as often as needed.

You can't do that. For example, placing an atomic clock in an accelerated frame causes it to "shift" with respect to a non-accelerated clock. Acceleration in three-dimensional space causes time to be altered -- hence, an example of "space-time" as a coherent 4-D structure.

[r9etb]

Blanket? I said "many". I did not say "all".

Uh huh. You're doing the DU now. Perhaps you should debate like a man, rather than a coward.

[betty boop]

The best I have been aware of equates motion with causality, which is a separate dimension from time, and treats space as a single dimension that can be subdivided as often as needed..

I don't see causality as a "separate" dimension, and I don't necessarily equate it with motion. Anything that is susceptible to change is subject to causality, and the change will often observably involve a change in motion. But all such things are events; and events considered as an indefinite sequence of subdivided space or time "units" cannot have any meaningful relatedness to one another absent the unifying context in which the events unfold.

At least that's how my thinking goes these days....

Thanks for writing, RightWhale!

[RightWhale]

So goes the illusion of relativity.

[betty boop]

I suppose I should give you credit for using such a novel tactic to avoid examining your flawed thinking.

Just point to the flaw in my thinking, and spare me your ad hominum beef!

[spunkets]

"We observe the opposite at the quantum level. We are surrounded by uncaused phenomena."

I don't know of any examples of that.

[RightWhale]

All change is motion. I can think of no change that is not motion, but I am doubtless unaware of all possibilities. Perhaps you can present an example of change that does not involve motion.

[PatrickHenry]

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