Introduction: The Illusion of Design [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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

"Jeepers, b_sharp, you seem quite disappointed that anything can be conceived that is beyond the realm of science -- and that you actually appreciate/approve the aim of scientific materialism: to reduce God to "nothing" because God is (a) outside spacetime; (2) not physical; and (3) therefore not properly an object for science at all. But because God does not reduce to your method does not mean that God does not exist.

My statement was an observation. Throughout the history of science, the realm of God has been shrinking. At one time God was just above our heads and was the direct cause of everything of any real influence in human lives. He was responsible for the wind, the rain, the snow, even drought. Since then his residence has receded farther and farther from the physical domain of Earth and his control of physical events has decreased dramatically in number. We no longer consider God to be the cause of the wind, or rain or any other event science has been able to explain. Whether I want this to happen is irrelevant, it is what is happening. In response, theists have placed God farther from direct view and contact, so he is just out of reach of science. Note that I am not saying science is attempting to find, threaten or replace God, nor that science can necessarily even test for God. It is the theists that are moving God, not science. Science simply investigates those areas that God used to inhabit and finds nature inhabiting the area instead.

"By now we have something like 39 millennia of human testimony/experience that God exists. That testimony (in some form or other) seems to be universal to all human cultures, at all times and places, throughout human history.

I will ignore the appeal to popularity. Your contention is that since past peoples have always believed in God this implies that the concept of God is somehow innate in humans. I suspect you believe the innateness, since God is the prime mover\initial cause\uncaused cause, was placed by God in our genetic make up.

What does seem to be innate in our make up is the need to explain events around us. If we have no method of determining the true cause, we make up causes. We assume that since we can make things happen, we can be the cause of events, albeit not as impressive as a hurricane for example, the thought occurs to us that someone or something very much like us, but more so, must be causing those events for which we have no explanation. What I find interesting in your universal concept of God, is that most cultures have created a multitude of Gods, not just a single cause as looks to be required by your 'uncaused cause'.

"If you were a half-decent empiricist, I think you'd have to qualify such testimony as directly admissible in the evaluation of the question of whether God exists.

The implication being that if I don't agree to your little appeal to emotion, I'm less than a half-decent empiricist. This is silly. An empiricist would not accept such anecdotal evidence on its face, he/she would require much more than a fuzzy idea many people adhere to. Should astrology be considered true simply because most humans have believed in it, or something similar, for thousands of years?

"To do otherwise amounts to the claim that humanity has been totally irrational, the whole human race just a gang of superstitious morons, easily misled, prior to the Enlightenment.

You do have the appeal to emotion down well, but it isn't convincing. Refusal to accept your appeal to poularity does not imply that I believe humanity has been irrational or that they have been suckers, simply that I know they did not have the information available to them to believe anything else. The innate need to be able to explain things is a result of our need to explain that scary rustle in the leaves that could mean some animal desires to make us its dinner, or that it may be the death throws of a tree about to collapse on us. Nothing mystical about it.

"And then -- and only then -- did humankind acquire the habits of reason and start to get things "right" -- for the first time in the history of Homo sapiens sapiens.

See above.

"Instead, because you can't stick God under the microscope and subject him to direct empirical tests, or observe him through a high-power telescope, you simply say he does not exist.

Here comes some 'Tit for Tat'.
Simply because you fear there is no God, you invent some void to place him in and powers beyond the physical limits of our universe to give him. Simply because you fear science makes your faith questionable you desire to change science to something unable to do so.

"And you accuse me of telling "just-so stories!" It is inconceivable to me that something outside of spacetime that is not physical can have a physical cause that arises in spacetime. And I gather that "physical cause" is what you mean by "cause."

I'll ignore the argument by incredulity this statement presents. I find it inconceivable that something that is outside of spacetime and that is not physical can affect our physical world and yet be unaffected by same. I find it inconceivable that some force within that non-physical world cannot have been designed and created by another force outside that non-physical world.

Remember this is all about your insult to atheists implicitly claiming they don't have the courage to examine the origin of the laws of nature.

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