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.

[Alamo-Girl]

Thank you for your post!

me: Were it not for time, events would not occur. That is an unequivocal statement.

you: Or if it weren't for events, time would not occur.

Because we know space/time is created as the universe expands - one can look at the physical realm (4 dimensions) in one of two ways: either energy/matter creates space/time or space/time expansion creates energy/matter.

Geometric physics suggests the latter and I agree (geometry gives rise to strings, etc.). The issue is causality: "were it not for A, C would not be."

[Alamo-Girl]

Thank you for your reply!

Actually, if the only thing in the universe were a point, there's no way to know if it's moving, even if we try to define its motion as occurring in a one-dimensional direction. So we can rule out time. I guess we can rule out all dimensions for such a limited universe.

Indeed, the point cannot move without a temporal dimension. A single spatial dimension universe is stationary.

[Alamo-Girl]

Thank you oh so very much for your excellent reply, Quark2005 and yours, Spunkets!!!

Both of you are hitting on the very point I've been trying to explain to Right Wing Professor - which incidentally appears to be yet another point later raised in a sidebar between betty boop, tortoise and edsheppa.

There are certain mathematical constructs which are very useful but do not translate well to physical systems. Inversion geometry "in" RWP's single spatial dimension universe is one. Infinity is another construct which is very useful in mathematics but leads to problems in physics.

These are exceptions - ordinarily mathematics is unreasonably effective vis-à-vis physics (and vice versa). In fact, mirror symmetries and dualities are great examples of the unreasonable effectiveness of math. But in the extremes - such as a single spatial dimension universe, infinite past, etc. - we can and do run into problems.

Moreover, there is an observer problem in the inversion of RWP’s single spatial dimension universe – for any observer “in” the universe but not to RWP, because as the "creator" of his universe he is not bound to the spatial/temporal restrictions of his "creation".

RWP, for a great explanation please read again Quark2005’s post at 521 and Spunket’s at 522!

[Alamo-Girl]

Er, if you don't mind I'd like to slip in a comment in your sidebar...

spunkets: Randomness is a property of event occurance in the system. It does not refer to causation. You said uncaused events happen. There are no uncaused events.

So very true! The causation statement "if not for A, C would not be" would apply. For instance, were it not for space/time, virtual particles would not be.

The vacuum is not the void which marks the beginning of space/time. In the void, there can be no space, no time, no energy/matter, no physical causation, etc.

[Alamo-Girl]

Thank you for your reply!

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?

That is very close, but to be thorough I'll repeat here some of what I posted earlier:

One way to look at the issue is that all cosmologies - whether big bang, multiverse, multi-world, cyclic, ekpyrotic, imaginary time, hesitating, etc. - require geometry for physical causation. Time is geometric. It is a dimension. Were it not for space/time, events (including physical causation) would not be.

The measure of cosmic microwave background radiation in the 60's established that there was a real beginning of space/time in this universe. Prior big bang cosmologies deal with the geometry of expanding space/time which can have no past infinity thus the prior to prior big bang cosmologies must always regress to the void of "no thing".

In the void of the beginning there is no space, no time, no energy/matter, no physical laws, no physical constants, no mathematics, no logic, no universals, no forms, no autonomy, no qualia, no physical causation. There is no physical causation in the void - the first cause must be uncaused and the only candidate for uncaused cause is God.

Chaos theory applied to physical systems presumes pre-existence of physical causation and geometry. IOW, even origins of physical laws and constants cannot avoid the fact that without space/time, they could not be.

Symmetry (or order) cannot rise from the void (or chaos) without a guide to system. That the physical universe is intelligible at all is also evidence of a guide. Moreover, that the physical universe is unreasonably mathematical (Wigner, Vafa) is evidence of a guide.

[Alamo-Girl]

Thank you so much for your caution!

Indeed, the Hebrew term for God as Creator (in the void) is Ayn Sof which means "no thing" - One without end from which all being emerges and into which all being dissolves.

It seems like whenever we get into discussions of time - whether on science or religion threads - we end up with the issue of whether God is transcendent or immanent. God is both.

[Alamo-Girl]

Thank you for the ping to the sidebar you may be starting with aNYCGuy!

My apologies to you, aNYCGuy, I meant to ping you to post 645 to see if that could help bootstrap a discussion.

The bottom line is that physical causation relies on geometry (space/time) which is physically, finite past.

[snarks_when_bored]

Indeed, the Hebrew term for God as Creator (in the void) is Ayn Sof which means "no thing" - One without end from which all being emerges and into which all being dissolves.

In Greek, it's ouden, 'nothing', from ou de hen, 'not at all one'.

But, A-G, why would one imagine that there are distinctions of form within the void, distinctions which are vital to the existence of intellect? That is, why would one suppose that the void can think?

[Alamo-Girl]

Thank you for your reply! I shall have to make this brief because it's so late and I must sleep, but I'd love to discuss it further tomorrow.

But, A-G, why would one imagine that there are distinctions of form within the void, distinctions which are vital to the existence of intellect? That is, why would one suppose that the void can think?

There is neither form nor autonomy in the void. There is only existence, and (because there is no autonomy in the void) - only the single existence, which can only be God. We know there must be existence because there was a first cause that was not caused. Thus we know God is transcendent.

He is also immanent, because there is in the void nothing of which anything can be made other than His own existence, or will.

Again with the Jewish mystics (who have been at this for a long time obviously) - the concept is that Creation (both heaven and earth, spiritual and physical) is God revealing Himself - hence the contrasts. The mechanism of good v evil, light v. darkness, truth v. lie, health v sickness, life v death, etc. reveal His properties by contrast to what are not His properties (to the extent He wishes to reveal Himself).

When the revelation is complete (Rev 21-22) this Creation (heaven and earth) is replaced with the perfect one which does not have those contrasts.

[snarks_when_bored]

There is neither form nor autonomy in the void. There is only existence, and (because there is no autonomy in the void) - only the single existence, which can only be God. We know there must be existence because there was a first cause that was not caused. Thus we know God is transcendent.

He is also immanent, because there is in the void nothing of which anything can be made other than His own existence, or will.

Bertrand Russell, who loved mathematics dearly, once said that "mathematics may be defined as the subject in which we never know what we're talking about, nor whether what we're saying is true." Replacing the word 'mathematics' by the word 'metaphysics' in Russell's statement also makes some sense, I regret to say. And let's not forget F. H. Bradley's famous aphorism: "Metaphysics is the finding of bad reasons for what we believe on instinct...." I'll leave it to you to find the rest of the quote...you'll like it.

Best regards, as always...

[Virginia-American]

An old joke:

Mathematics is the cheapest of the sciences - all you need is paper, a pencil, and a wastebasket.

Philosophy is even cheaper, as you don't require the wastebasket.

[Quark2005]

Upon closer reflection, some of my info may have been erroneous (by ommision). RWP points out (correctly) that spatial inversion only leaves an object changed in an odd number of dimensions - he is right. (Been a while since I did any problems involving parity inversion.)

In any case, the consideration of symmetries of space & time with regard to inversion of coordinates, etc. is a very important consideration in theoretical physics (see especially Noether's Theorem) - a very useful concept in higher-dimensional field theories.

[tortoise]

in fact, any algorithm that purported to predict the result to better than 50% accuracy would violate the uncertainty principle.

True enough. But the uncertainty principle does not make any assertions about the underlying nature of the process. It only asserts that it is unpredictable which is a relatively cheap assertion; all systems have this property in some context, and many processes will have this property in all contexts in this universe.

Violation of the uncertainty principle is not a theoretical problem IF we figure out how to peek inside the box, which may never be possible. It is a trivial exercise to duplicate the results of the two slit experiment in the abstract with a computer and an algorithm you could write on a cocktail napkin. I guess my only real point is that for every source of "randomness" there exists some cheap and tiny algorithm (several actually) that will generate every result we've every measured. The mathematical intractability of discerning even the most simple algorithms for generating "randomness" is problematic on many levels. Consequentially, I tend to be very cautious about the notion of randomness with respect to the randomness being impenetrable. Such assertions tend to reflect our ability to measure and compute more than anything.

But again, even if such phenomena were simple and deterministic, it does not mean they would ever look anything but "random" in all contexts inside this universe. Which for now, is good enough. :-)

[PatrickHenry]

In short, an algorithm never generates a new algorithm, only a lower order expression of the same algorithm. But if we observe that lower order expression, it is nearly impossible to discern the higher order algorithm that generated it even in toy cases where very little information is involved. As a point of reference, an algorithm with 256 bytes of information can easily generate a low order expression with an apparent complexity the size of our universe -- even if we observed that universe for a million years, we would never be able to divine the 256 bytes of state that generated what we were observing as a mathematical fact.

One of the most intriguing posts I've seen in a long time. Can you recommend any websites (for the math novice, if possible) that explain this in greater detail?

[wotan]

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

Thanks for your reply and I want to congratulate you on avoiding the kind of snottiness that always comes out the nose of Right_Wing_Prof, who, I suspect, is really a Left_Wing_Prof in masquerade.   Incidentally, I'm into blue today.

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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.

I disagree.   Darwin did not make such a discovery.   Dawkins speaks as though Darwin came up with a model and demonstrated that from it within a certain period of time measured in the low billions of years, life could have evolved as it has.   Darwin did not do that at all.   He had no grasp of how long it would take life to evolve by random variation and natural selection, precisely because he had no model.   He had an idea of how life might have evolved.  We are still waiting for the model that would render it plausible.   For quantum mechanics, we have a model, the Schroedinger equation.   For General Relativity, we have the field equations.   Now, I don't expect a similarly simple and, so far as we know, perfectly accurate mathematical description for evolution, but I suspect something more than something like "it must be, because we can't think of anything else".   There is a very real problem of demonstrating that the kinds of changes that have occurred could really have occurred in the time in which they took place based on the laws of physics alone.

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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.

Yes, and that is a very, very important issue.   It is at the root of the uneasiness many of those who support intelligent design have about Darwinianism.  

What the Darwinians are saying is the universe is closed under the laws of physics, about as we know them, and that our philosophical framework which says everything must happen by law or pure randomness is correct.    Maybe that's the wrong philosophical framework.   Maybe that's why they can't come up with a model.

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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.

If you believe that what we are follows from physics by law and chance alone, why would you believe that what we do does not also do so?    The argument is not fallacious.   If you are admitting a shortcoming in your philosophy by accepting that what humans do is not just molecules bouncing around in their partly lawful, partly random way, then you have identified an x-factor (let's call it) that has something to do with what happens that is not by law and chance alone.  

If a human can design a jet, he can design his life, by, for example, exercising his judgment about where he goes and whom he mates with.    Such design affects evolution in an obvious way.   Moreover, it is obviously intelligent. 

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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.

It's a comment on Dennett, which expresses, pithily, the attitude of many philosophers toward Dennett, though they are too polite to call him a kook.    Dennett's position on consciousness (as the term is ordinarily used in philosophy), that it does not exist, is at the heart of what's wrong with ascribing evolution to law and chance alone.

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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.

Michael Behe is one guy IMHO.   The key difference between the ID people and the Darwinians is that the former think that law and chance alone cannot explain evolution and the latter think they can.  You cannot expect those that don't believe a model can explain evolution to come up with a model.   There program is necessarily a negative one of trying to convince others that their must be some additional x-factor operating that has not been modeled.   Darwinian theory doesn't account for anything, because they don't have a model.

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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.

You got it!   The IDers think that something is going on that science can't explain.   Some of them attribute this to God, although I would not claim that they all do so.

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"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.

Biologists should not be teaching Darwinianism as fact, but as a theory without a model.   If you were a principal, would you allow a physics teacher in your high school to teach that gravity doesn't exist?   Would that make you a bullyboy?

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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?

There is nothing fallacious about it once you recognize that what ID is basically saying is that there is no model for how life evolved.   Until there is, Darwinian theory is just, well, not really even a theory.   It's an idea looking for clarification.   Also, I don't demand that the explanation be complete, only that there be a plausible model, not just a lot of "well, it could have happened this way within the required time frame, we think". 

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“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.

I believe people are behaving in a much more amoral manner than previously in this country.   Where do you think all the liberals come from?

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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.

The justification he found, however, sounds sort of Darwinian.  Hitler goes on to explain how this improves the species, incidentally.   It's difficult to imagine a Western politician making such a public argument prior to Darwin and Wallace (the curiously neglected man).   And, what makes you think Hitler's outlook was not formed partly from the various intellectual offshoots of Darwinism?

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... 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?

I was sort of pretending I didn't get why he said it.  Actually, I do know why.   He recognizes what everyone recognizes: once you accept that there's nothing going on but molecules bouncing around (so to speak) there are no moral constraints because you have no control over what happens.   Jesus happened just because of molecules bounding around and Hitler happened just because of molecules bouncing around with no moral distinction between the two, because moral distinctions are just God-blather.    People he likes don't like the idea of Hitler, so Dawkins wants to assure them of how noble and really opposed to life working the way he says it must.   That it's a hopeless contradiction doesn't bother him, because that's how liberals are.   All that matters is whether you can hide the contradictions under sufficient verbiage.

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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.

The problem is that you don't see the plain connection between the philosophy that underlies Darwinianism with the amorality that has become increasingly apparent throughout developed Western countries.   If what we do is by law and chance alone, then how can there be any morality?   If I can't be guilty for what I must do and I can't be guilty for the outcome of the celestial roulette wheel, then Hitler (or Stalin or Marx) can't be guilty either.

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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!

It is you who is short on logic here.   How can Dawkins oppose a physical law?  Are you opposed to the law of gravitation? Lots of luck doing anything about it.

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Evolution is a fact.

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

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

I guess you disagree that the Darwinian Theory of evolution is a theory!  That's surprising!  Incidentally, I must admit I made a mistake here.   The "Darwinian Theory" is not a theory, but a misnomer.   It is, in fact, an idea in search of clarification, as I noted earlier.

[dread78645]

AristotleDidit placemark

[js1138]

From your link:

I wonder if those on the Kansas Board and elsewhere who want to accompany evolution with a discussion of the creator hypothesis in science classes realize the implications. They surely don't expect teachers to present just the case against evolution while ignoring the case against the alternatives. Do they really want to open science classes to presentations of the evidence for and against a creator and other supernatural beliefs?

Why stop at evolution and creation? Why not "teach the controversy" over the existence of any nonmaterial element in the universe, including God? Presentations could discuss the experiments that have so far failed to provide any significant evidence for the efficacy or prayer or a dual nature of mind and matter.

Why should religion be exempt from science classes, at least in those areas where it makes statements about the nature of the universe and life on this planet that have empirical consequences? If this is what the majority of people want, then scientists and science teachers should give it to them. They could compare, for example, the Genesis story of creation with that of modern cosmology and see which one is in better accord with observations.

[js1138]

My point is that the evidence is mostly "appearance" and all inferential.

And can you name or describe any empirical generalization that is not inferential?

[js1138]

So what is your response to 598?

http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1535529/posts?page=598#598

[chronic_loser]

You assume the quantum world is deficient in some way, but physics assumes that the rest of the world, including relativity, will be assimilated into QM.

So, if at the "core" of material reality, the world is chaotic and irrational, how are you sure that the keystrokes that comprise your answers will get to me and that they will be ordered, coherent, function in this Newtonian illusion of a world that assumes uniform cause and effect? Forgive me if that is not what you are saying. My physics was just what I needed to get thru Pchem. However, if the QM world is really one of uncaused activity, then by definition the rest of the structure of reality must be like the illusory world which "appears" to be designed (the favorite whipping boy of the anti-ID crowd). How do you escape the charge that QM physicists are just insisting that the appearance of a world that incorporates causality is "appearance" only? Although my question is a challenge, to be sure, it has more question than challenge in it. I am genuinely confused by what seems to be the assertion of two radical different dimensions of reality coexisting with different rules in each. While that is theoretically possible, it makes more sense to me to assert:

"QM seems to say this about the behavior and nature of matter/energy on this level, but we believe that the laws of behavior are universal and that our understanding of how QM complies with these laws are, at present deficient"

than

"We believe there are two sets of rules for behavior of ......."(crap, I don't even know what to call "it" that is behaving!)"or maybe there is one set of rules that incorporates 'uncaused' behavior of matter/energy."

The former seems far more reasonable to me, a mere layman.