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]

Link

Causes and effects are discovered, not by reason but through experience, when we find that particular objects are constantly conjoined with one another. We tend to overlook this because most ordinary causal judgments are so familiar; we've made them so many times that our judgment seems immediate.

So what happens when experience, as in carefully controlled experiment, demonstrates an absence of causation?

[spunkets]

"time will be found to be particulate. "

It's been found to be smooth. There is no granularity to time.

[js1138]

Do you have an example where you want a cause IDed?

Radioactive decay, the precise moment of.

[spunkets]

The distribution of outcomes and the cause for the outcome are independent. In general outcomes appear at random, even for such things as shooting holes in paper. Does the appearance of random holes in someone's target mean the holes are w/o cause?

[ml1954]

I am going to put a different spin on time. I think, based on absolutely no evidence whatsoever, that time will be found to be particulate.

It makes for interesting contemplations.

Like time and anti-time particles?

[js1138]

More specifically, given two atoms of the same isotope, what causes one to decay before the other?

[js1138]

Are you suggesting quantum theory is wrong? Have you applied for your Nobel Prize?

[cornelis]

The distribution of outcomes and the cause for the outcome are independent. In general outcomes appear at random, even for such things as shooting holes in paper.

This is covered a bit on this thread: The word “random” as used in science does not mean uncaused, unplanned, or inexplicable; it means uncorrelated. My children like to observe the license plates of the cars that pass us on the highway, to see which states they are from. The sequence of states exhibits a degree of randomness: a car from Kentucky, then New Jersey, then Florida, and so on—because the cars are uncorrelated: Knowing where one car comes from tells us nothing about where the next one comes from. And yet, each car comes to that place at that time for a reason. Each trip is planned, each guided by some map and schedule. Each driver’s trip fits into the story of his life in some intelligible way, though the story of these drivers’ lives are not usually closely correlated with the other drivers’ lives.

[b_sharp]

"Er, the point we have raised which I suspect you are missing (or refuse to accept) - is that there must be a cause of physical causation.

"There is no physical causation in the void.

Let me get this straight.
The physical realm our bodies exist in, these 4 dimensions of time\space, events, or phenomena if your prefer, have always had and will always need an external (at least to themselves) cause. Each cause in turn needs its own cause back through time to the birth of those 4 dimensions.

However, the void as you call it, because it is not part of our physical environment does not follow the same need for a 'physical' cause. The void contains, or encapsulates, or is part of the designer/God/uncaused cause that, if I read your's and BB's posts right, is responsible for or is the initial cause necessary in our physical space\time realm.

Is this correct?

[snarks_when_bored]

wotan, here are some comments (in bold green) on your comments (in bold black) on what you called Dawkins's "tripe" (blockquoted):

_{* * * *} 1 _{* * * *}

He [Darwin] 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.

Not true.   Darwin hypothesized that the laws of physics could lead to the great variety of living forms in the fullness of "geologic" time.  He did not discover that they "could" or "did".

You're quibbling. Darwin did discover a way for the diversity and the appearance of design of organisms to arise out of the workings of physical laws. Whether it's the correct way or the only way, it's a way. The fact that it was a discovery is attested by the forehead-smacking moment experienced by Huxley.

_{* * * *} 2 _{* * * *}

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.

And still no one has shown this can lead to life as we know it in "geologic" time.  

That's an open problem, being worked on as we write by many researchers around the world. I feel confident in saying that almost all of these researchers are working on the problem from within the framework of (some version of) evolutionary theory.

_{* * * *} 3 _{* * * *}

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.

But, then, "true" design is also not by design, hence, not true.   Is this a contradiction?

You seem to be trying to argue that if the human brain was not designed and the human brain designs a jet plane, then the jet plane was not really designed. This argument is fallacious, of course; the properties of 'being designed' or 'not being designed' are not transitive.

_{* * * *} 4 _{* * * *}

Paradoxically, the extreme simplicity of what the philosopher Daniel C. Dennett called Darwin’s dangerous idea may be its greatest barrier to acceptance.

Dennett is the kook who thinks that not only do you not exist, neither do your thoughts.

Ad hominem alert.

_{* * * *} 5 _{* * * *}

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.

This is painting with a very broad brush indeed.   More accurately:  some who reject the Darwinian and neo-Darwinian theories of evolution have argued that living structures of the complexity existing could not have evolved in "geologic" time by random variation and natural selection

Michael Behe began his recent New York Times Op-Ed piece on Intelligent Design by making remarks of the type that Dawkins mentions. Furthermore, IDists who desire to be taken seriously as empirical scientists are going to have to do a lot more than argue that complex living structures couldn't have evolved in the manner described by evolutionary theory; they're going to have to present an alternative account that stands up to critical scrutiny while accounting for all of the phenomena that evolution accounts for. "Well, God did it" won't hack it.

_{* * * *} 6 _{* * * *}

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 He has always been around.   Then, you don't need an explanation of where He came from.

Correct, but then you're also not doing science at that point.

_{* * * *} 7 _{* * * *}

"intelligent-design bullyboys"

No propaganda here!   Just rational argument!

Descriptive terminology. Some IDists have decided that what biologists teach ought to be decided by politicians and courts rather than by the biologists themselves. Those are bullyboy tactics.

_{* * * *} 8 _{* * * *}

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.

The absence of a testable model for Darwinian evolution is evidence for intelligent design.   The essence of intelligent design seems to be that the Darwinians have no model for how life could have evolved by random variation and natural selection.   What does that leave?

"If evolutionary theorists can't right this minute explain fully and to my satisfaction how life evolved by random variation and natural selection, Intelligent Design must be true." This is what passes for an argument in your household, wotan?

_{* * * *} 9 _{* * * *}

“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.

It's just a coincidence that children, after 150 years of Darwinism, are now behaving much more like animals.

Humans have been doing awful things to other humans since time immemorial. And as for today's kids, some are well-behaved, some are not, just like always.

_{* * * *} 10 _{* * * *}

Some have said that Hitler founded his political philosophy on Darwinism.

Does the following from Mein Kampf sound more like it came from a Catholic or a Darwinian? 

"The struggle for the daily livelihood leaves behind everything in the ruck that is weak or diseased or wavering, while the fight of the male for the female gives the strongest the right, or at least the possibility, for the propagation of its kind."

At any time in history, a Hitler would've found some sort of specious justification for the monstrous crimes he intended to commit.

_{* * * *} 11 _{* * * *}

... 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.

So, what is your point?

That's my question to you. Dawkins said what he thought. Do you disagree with what he said?

_{* * * *} 12 _{* * * *}

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.

Dawkins is opposed to physical law!   What a mass of contradictions he is!

You don't help your case by ignoring the plain sense of what was written.

_{* * * *} 13 _{* * * *}

Science needs to understand natural selection as a force in nature, the better to oppose it as a normative force in politics.

And just what in the heck is a normative force, Mr. Dawkins?  Is it a physical force or some other kind?   If it's not physical in origin, how can you blithely ascribe everything that happens in evolution to physical forces?

Even if Dawkins were to concede that what he colloquially calls a 'normative force' isn't physical (which I don't think he would), it wouldn't follow that he shouldn't describe evolution as being the result of physical forces. Try some logic, wotan...you might like it!

_{* * * *} 14 _{* * * *}

Evolution is a fact.

Yes, but the Darwinian Theory of Evolution is a theory.

You had us at the "Yes, but"...

[cornelis]

colors_when_bored?

[chronic_loser]

Careful there, js. If you are saying that because we cannot observe causal relationships in activity on a certain level, next thing you will be saying is that gaps in transitional fossil records is a proof that those changes never happened.

See what I mean? Absence of proof or absence of observable evidence is not the same thing as proving the obverse. That was where my earlier quip about shooting pool with Hume came from. The fact that no one "observes" causality doesn't mean it is not there. It is just not observable. If this is true in one area of data collection and observation it is true in the others. We know a LOT more about activity on a subatomic level than back when I was in school, but there is also alot we don't know. It is safer to say with Heisenberg that we disturb stuff simply by observing it so that no clear causal links can be observed on a quantum level. Just my opinion.

[ml1954]

More specifically, given two atoms of the same isotope, what causes one to decay before the other?

It must be the work of the Intelligent Designer. We can know no more than that.

[aNYCguy]

Just point to the flaw in my thinking

I think I pointed it out quite clearly in 460. Your cosmological argument for the existence of a god can be entirely reduced to "Everything which exists needs a creator, and the creator of the universe is God, but God doesn't need a creator because when I said 'everything' I wasn't talking about him."

[snarks_when_bored]

Poser-mandated Ann Coulter pic (she's a natural selection, so she's fit for this environment):

[snarks_when_bored]

Yup, that, too.

[aNYCguy]

It's been found to be smooth. There is no granularity to time.

Planck Time?

[js1138]

It is safer to say with Heisenberg that we disturb stuff simply by observing it so that no clear causal links can be observed on a quantum level. Just my opinion.

I'm not claiming to have TRUTH here. I am claiming that given the current state of physics, it is not reasonable to say that all phenomena are caused. It is up to skeptics of quantum theory to demonstrate causation.

[js1138]

Here's one for the designer: Given a single atom with a half-life of 10 minutes, what is the probability that it will decay within the next ten minutes? Assuming it does not decay in the next ten minutes, what is the probability it will decay in the following ten minutes?

Lather, rinse, repeat.

[ml1954]

It was a joke.