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.

[dread78645]

"Dubito, ergo cogito; cogito, ergo sum" placemark

[hosepipe]

Prof. Erwin Cory.. answer the curtesy phone please..
You're need at the Physics Triage Center..

[caffe]

Perhaps your point could be made clearer. I confess, I have'nt a clue as to your point. It sounds as though your trying with veiled non-specifics to re-define science. You've managed to bring some confusion to perfectly clear comments.

[Alamo-Girl]

Thank you so much for sharing your views!

It's what a theist must do to justify his own spiritual syrupy goodness. "God exists!" they say. I'm sorry...God what? Yeah, I thought as much. God can't exist unless existence exists. "Why is there God and not just nothing" is no deeper a question than "why is there something and not just nothing".

I, of course, see things quite differently - that existence which must causally be for a beginning in the void or "no thing" is singular and transcendent per se. That existence is God. Further, there is nothing of which anything can be made in the void but Himself - thus He is immanent as well.

These are merely complementaries in nature and reason of what I already know to be true by direct Spiritual revelation.

Some (Plato comes to mind) have arrived at the conclusion that God must exist "beyond" through reason. Nevertheless, I am compelled by direct Spiritual revelation that noone could arrive at that conclusion by reason - including Plato - if he did not have spiritual "ears to hear".

[Alamo-Girl]

LOLOL! Thanks for the chuckle!

[js1138]

I'm not re-defininging anything. Science changes all the time. New evidence frequently requires modifications in our understanding -- sometimes drastic changes.

[snarks_when_bored]

I suppose that you would concede that the power of a human being to do good or evil is finite. (If not, you'll need to provide an argument to the contrary.) So here's my question: what could a finite human being do that would ever merit infinite (that is, eternal) punishment? The disproportion between the finite and the infinite is...infinite.

My view is this: no just deity would condemn one of its finite creatures to infinite punishment, no matter what the finite creature had done, and so if a deity were to mete out infinite punishment for what are essentially finite transgressions, that deity would be unjust and therefore worthy neither of respect nor fealty.

[snarks_when_bored]

Yes, I liked those passages you quoted, too. Stenger is providing those Kansas IDists the rope they need to hang themselves...

[js1138]

No bragging intended, but I argued these same points when the trial started. Good to see them in the hands of a competent writer.

[snarks_when_bored]

Nice quote from Barrow, A-G. Here's what I would say to a couple of parts of it:

All our surest statements about the nature of the world are mathematical statements, yet we do not know what mathematics "is" ...

I agree.

... and so we find that we have adapted a religion strikingly similar to many traditional faiths. Change "mathematics" to "God" and little else might seem to change.

I disagree. Attributing to mathematics the characteristics commonly attributed to a deity makes little sense to me.

[snarks_when_bored]

Don't doubt you for an instant. They're good points, too.

[betty boop]

Wittgenstein himself said that the fundamental problem of philosophy is "why is there something, and not just nothing," but admitted that no answer was possible. IMHO, the only solution is to take a cue from Ayn Rand, taking "Existence Exists" as an axiom and having done with it.

Forgive my barging in; but I have a disagreement with Wittgenstein. He is recapitulating the first of Leibnitz's two great questions: "Why is there something, why not nothing?"; the second being, "Why are things the way they are, and not some other way?"

Leaving the second question aside for now, his answer to the first is: "no answer is possible." Wow. Talk about foreclosing the quest for truthful understanding of reality, of the "all that there is," right from the get-go. Are such questions really that worthless?

To me it seems that all Wittgenstein is saying here is that the scientific method, by itself, can give us no answer. Which is not the same thing as saying "no answer is possible."

I probably belabor this point ad nauseam, but to reduce reality to the methodologies of science leaves us with no recourse but an axiom of the type stated by Rand. In effect, what this maneuver does is to make man "the measure of all things," for it says that the universe is merely what the human mind in the mode of intentionalist consciousness can conceive. It is an attempt to reduce the "all that there is" to observables.

But not all things that exist are "observables." This stance basically says that the observer himself constructs a reality that is confined to three dimensions of space and one of time. It effectively says that no other dimensions, either of space or time, are possible, because man cannot (yet) conceive of them.

In an earlier post you were speaking of the problem of causation, and related an instance (entangled Beta decays) where things "happen" that seemingly have no "proximate" cause. Yet how can you definitively say that there was no proximate cause? Is it not at least (hypothetically) possible that there are proximate causes that may arise in a yet-unidentified "extra" dimension -- "extra" to the four we readily recognize -- that may yet impinge and become effective within the known 4D block?

"Existence exists" is simply a tautology; yet you dignify it by turning it into an axiom. It does not satisfy regardless of what you call it, however, for it does not help us to know more than we already do about the nature and meaning of "existence."

Actually the great Greeks have imagined some extraordinarily helpful clues in this regard in recognizing that existence is a participation in being. Which to a scientist probably sounds like a huge pile of gobble-de-gook.

But to me, there are extraordinarily useful clues here. Plato, for instance, regarded Being, ousia, as the context in which all existents have their "becoming." It is also that into which the becoming things, the existents, finally pass away. Being and becoming (existence) imply different time orders that are synergistically coupled.

Working through some of the implications of classical metaphysics helps to prepare the way for conceptualizations of higher dimensionality that might actually prove useful in theoretical physics. Call me nutz, but I really believe that.

Intuition tells me -- FWIW -- that the answers to Leibnitz's two questions may well be found in extradimensionality/supersymmetry. So I think it's premature to say, with Wittgenstein, "no answer [is] possible."

Certainly an answer is impossible, if we settle for axioms of the Randian type, and just stop there.

Again, FWIW. Thank you, Physicist, for your informative posts.

[tortoise]

I'd like to see such an algorithm. Similarly for Aspect's experiment.

Just to be clear, I'm not talking about generating the physical result, just a blackbox that will generate the same data result virtually.

The direction I am coming from is that of strong PRNGs. Given some description of the computational parameters of the universe, it should be a (relatively) simple exercise to create a small algorithm that will generate perfectly random data for any computer in that universe that does not have access to the internal state of that algorithm. A slightly weaker version would be an algorithm that will be perfectly random over some unimaginably long interval to any computer in that universe.

I guess my only point is that for any apparently random process, a "cheap" deterministic solution exists. That does not mean by any measure that one is in fact observing a non-random phenomenon or a non-random phenomenon that is discernable as such in this universe. In other words, my discrete systems bias peeking through. :-)

[js1138]

Leaving the second question aside for now, his answer to the first is: "no answer is possible." Wow. Talk about foreclosing the quest for truthful understanding of reality, of the "all that there is," right from the get-go. Are such questions really that worthless?

Someone posted the other day that mathematics is the second cheapest science because all you need is a pencil, paper and a wastebasket. Philosophy is the cheapest, because you don't need the wastebasket.

[tortoise]

You may say that logical self-consistency has no impact on science..are you sure?[...snip...]

Your post did not make much sense, and you are ignoring the point I made: that science is non-axiomatic. Godel's Incompleteness theorem applies to axiomatic systems.

This is why it is not possible to prove anything in science, as one can only assign a probability distribution to some set of hypotheses but no assertions can be made regarding correctness. In axiomatic systems, you can prove things. To put it another way, in non-axiomatic systems like science, you only make assertions about the relative probability of correctness, not correctness itself.

For non-axiomatic systems like science, the limits of knowledge follow from Bayes Theorem, not Godel's Incompleteness theorem. The ramifications are very different.

[Physicist]

Leaving the second question aside for now, his answer to the first is: "no answer is possible." Wow. Talk about foreclosing the quest for truthful understanding of reality, of the "all that there is," right from the get-go. Are such questions really that worthless?

Well, Wittgenstein didn't think the question was worthless; the unobtainability of the answer didn't diminish its philosophical usefulness for him. (Reflect on how much brilliant mathematics came out of the failed attempts to prove Fermat's last theorem, and how that fountainhead ran dry with the Wiles proof.) But I'm already over my head in defending him: I've read more about Wittgenstein's ideas than I've read by him, I'm afraid, so don't take my word for it. My reading list grows exponentially faster than my ability to read.

As for Rand, her ideas were more focussed on epistemology, which after all is the realm where quantum physics and evolution reside. Wondering about the existence of existence is a distraction when wrestling with such concrete questions.

[tortoise]

True.. makes me think that a smart honest atheist would/should at least say; "If there is no God, well, there ought to be one".."

The problem is that the kinds of god-like entities one arrives at this way are not particularly compatible with the basic Christian conception, so I'm not sure how this would be constructive toward instilling Christian belief. At best, it might support belief in some other God with more reasonable hypothetical properties (which may or may not have a major religion attached to it).

[tortoise]

I'll have to think about this one for a bit. I'm not running on all cylinders at the moment...

[betty boop]

Someone posted the other day that mathematics is the second cheapest science because all you need is a pencil, paper and a wastebasket. Philosophy is the cheapest, because you don't need the wastebasket.

Yes, I saw that, js1138. I thought it was a delightfully amusing comment.

All the same, it seems to me that if you have "internalized" this attitude, it will not help you very much in the quest for truth, nor in the ordering of your existence in truth. For the simple reason that the universe does not reduce to "observables" only. Neither are you so "reducible."

But if you think you can get along just hunky-dory all the same, good luck to you.

[js1138]

I think mathematics and philosophy are tools, not ends in themselves. Although there are lots of "pure" scientists, I think science is closer to being a product. Even in its theoretical form it is utilitarian.