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.

[ml1954]

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.

I am not versed in the latest in cosmology, physics, string theory, quantum theory, etc, so I'll stick my neck out and argue from the practical and hope to learn something. Human beings became aware of time through change (events) in the other three dimensions. And then measured time as change in the other three dimensions. Time is relative and is defined by the change in the other three dimensions. Without change in the other three dimensions, there is no time.

In what way does an expanding universe create anything, other than a way for us to measure the four dimensions?

[hosepipe]

[ The problem is that the kinds of god-like entities one arrives at this way are not particularly compatible with the basic Christian conception ]

Most/many christians don't have a good view of God either until they have walked in Jesus' mocasins for awhile.. going from atheist to agnostic to believer can be a walk through a desert.. Depending on how hard headed you are.. The hard headed ones seem to be more mule than horse.. and horses more "spirited" than donkeys.. must be why Jesus rode into Jerusalem on a donkey and not a horse or mule.. Some earthy creatures need a 2x4 to get their attention..

[hosepipe]

[ 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? ]

Exactly.. It may be found that even our "vision" of dimensional reality is scewed.. and that the current 4D axiomatic paradigm(on dimensions) is primitive and hypothetically weighted with arrogant presuppostions with a shamanistic character.. And at least part of our scientific jujubag of bones and chicken feet is whisling past the cemetary..

Sorry.. you punched a button.. I'll take my meds.. and I'll be better after that...

[betty boop]

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.

IMHO Rand was a notably bad epistemologist. For demonstrably she was of the "man is the measure of all things" persuasion. (E.g., the Sophist persuasion that Socrates/Plato ever waged war against in order to defend and protect the truth of reality.)

No matter how useful her epistemology may appear to the concerns of science, it is a mistake to think that "man is the measure" -- which is the core of Randian philosophy. For the truth of reality preexists man's arrival in the world, and survives his passing away from it. How can man be the measure of that which effectively is the "measure" of him?

Quite aside from the problem of existential truth, Rand's epistemological conception precludes any firm foundation for moral truth. For that also preexists the arrival of any concrete individual, and survives him when he passes away.

Perhaps the hardest thing for a thoughtful person to confront in this world is the idea that he has no role, no choice whatever in coming into it, and nothing to say about his eventual passing out of it.

But of course, these are not "scientific questions."

But they are perenniel, universal questions that every generation of man born has struggled with. Which arguably is why human beings still need the total episteme, not just that subsection of it that we call science (which basically is all that Rand wanted to consider), if we are to grasp the unfolding (evolving) truth of reality in all its dimensions.

In short, pace b_sharp -- who notes that God "shrinks" as science "expands" (and seems quite pleased about this) -- truth either has a divine origin, or there cannot be any truth in the world. For it preexists the world, and from it the world takes its order.

And the world is "truthful." Aristotle thought it was thoroughly pervaded by truth, which is why the universe is accessible by reason, which is the necessary basis for intelligent human beings acquiring valid knowledge about it. If it had no truth, no reason, no logos; and if man did not himself possess reason (which he evidently does), then the world would be unknowable on principle; and science would have nothing to do.

Science is very practical in its approach. You are a scientist -- and I gather a very eminent one. Just don't forget that you are ever so much more than a scientist: You are a man....

Thank you so very much for writing, Physicist.

[caffe]

Perhaps I should clarify: i'm talking about the scientific method. Has this altered too? If you review the post that sparked your response, it is dealing with naturalism vs. the scientific method. It is not stated as such but if you had followed the conversation...

[betty boop]

Even in its theoretical form [mathematics] is utilitarian.

Tell that to Reimann, to Dirac -- or maybe even go back to Pythagoras, why don't you? -- and see what they have to say about that!

[betty boop]

...you'll never look at a tesselation on the wall of the Alhambra the same way again.

The tesselation on the wall of the Alhambra is a real system; group theory a formal system that gives a plausible description of it. The two are distinct: You conflate the two only at your peril.

[snarks_when_bored]

wotan, I'm going to let others decide for themselves whether your blue responses to my green comments on your black bold retorts to Dawkins's

blockquoted statements

are satisfactory.

Best regards...

[hosepipe]

[ 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. ]

I see, so culling the flock for the betterment of the flock is NOT GOOD.. i.e. culling out the sick and diseased..

I'm speaking spiritually here.. culling out spirits because of some spiritual disease or spiritual weakness.. On the otherhand you may not of thought this through thoughly.. or at all.. Proving my point.. Thanks you made this point clearer to me.. I appreciate it..

[snarks_when_bored]

I see, so culling the flock for the betterment of the flock is NOT GOOD.. i.e. culling out the sick and diseased..

I'm speaking spiritually here.. culling out spirits because of some spiritual disease or spiritual weakness.. On the otherhand you may not of thought this through thoughly.. or at all.. Proving my point.. Thanks you made this point clearer to me.. I appreciate it..

I'm not sure what point you're referring to since I was addressing Snowbelt Man.

But now that you mention it, what is the origin of these diseased spirits of which you speak? Is the maker really that incompetent?

And you might want to consider addressing the disproportion between the finite and the infinite that I mention, rather than passing over it in silence.

[AndrewC]

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

No. I'm pretty sure that generalization requires inference unless you have all of something. But, of course, the discussion is about inference, a design inference.

[furball4paws]

Would there be a God if there were no people?

Anybody know what the signing Chimps and Gorillas have to say about a God?

[longshadow]

Axiomatic placemarker

[caffe]

I'd have to review all my posts..but I believe my point was that science (mathematics) does allow for the supernatural , Some true theorems can never be proven true and scientists now call these Supernatural Theorems. I believe I was initially responding to Naturalism versus Science. Godel's proof is only one modern result showing the limitations of science. Many scientists believed any problem could, in principle, be solved by computers. They believed that given enough time a powerful computer could solve any problem Alan Turing used this idea of self-reference to solve the Halting Problem. Remember how this showed there are interesting questions that have definite answers (simple yes or no) but whose answers are forever unsolvable (uncomputable)
There have been many similar results which have changed our idea of what is knowable by finite means. They have changed our concept of knowledge and on our vision of science. Anotherwords, they eliminate the notion that everything , in principle, may be known by the scientific method.
So my point being that many scientists feel science can only study the natural and can never hope to determine anything about the supernatural, the natural and supernatural spheres being separate and unbreachable. So Godel proved the existence of unprovable truths. So, it could be possible for scientists to prove the existence of causes and effects that they are unable to study directly (supernatural agents).

---

Self-reference changed our conceptions of sets, arithmetic, consistency, computablity, solvability and true and false. Evolutionists claim that science must understand nature in terms of nature. This is a task of self-reference, Precisely because of this self-reference, we can expect paradoxes and contradictions. When science tries to "explain nature by reference to nature" we see inconsistencies and self-contradictions.
One example, the origin of a supernatural agent, is a clasic problem .The classic answer by evolutionists is: Perhaps there is no origin to be explained - perhaps the entity in question is, in some sense, timeless, or without origin.
But The Big Bang and Thermodynamics are obstacles to explaining away origins. So to resolve it, the cosmologists proposed many untestable speculations. And even though their ideas break the Laws of Thermodynamics, gravity, general relativity, quantum mechanics and the Big Bang, they insist they are being scientific. This is , to unscientific devotion to naturalism.

[hosepipe]

[ Human beings became aware of time through change (events) in the other three dimensions. ]

Time became important to humans when they saw stuff DIE.. And being human wondered how long would they live.. Voila!.. Time became important.. studied, measured, words(language) was made up for gradations of it, even cultural habits were made to use it more fully.. Eternal beings care little about time.. Timing is what they are interested in.. All past and future is made up of moments.. Whether eternal or mortal your time is made of moments.. Did I time this post right.?.. Handle the moments correctly and the past and future will take care of themselves..

[ml1954]

Time became important to humans when they saw stuff DIE..

And when they made the connection between being hungry and eating. As in I better find something to eat before I get hungry because eating now prevents me from being hungry later. There are many more such examples.

[hosepipe]

[ But now that you mention it, what is the origin of these diseased spirits of which you speak? Is the maker really that incompetent? ]

A "spirit" must be tested so that spirit can see for itself that it don't qualify for some spiritual "jobs" for the future.. Qualifying of spirits is why humans were born.. Why YOU were born.. Theres much work in the future to do.. Only qualified spirits will be used for that.. What does this have to do with the present conversation.?... EVERYTHING..

What am I a prophet.?.. Yeah..

[betty boop]

Oh my. Good times!

My word, what a charming fellow you are!

I really wanted to get in touch with Professor; but can't find his post on the subject I wish to reply to. So I'll do it here if you don't mind, since you referenced it in your last to me.

RWP questioned my dates regarding the inception of "God knowledge" in the human race. I said indications of such were to be found at Lascaux, France, which date back some 39 millennia. He disputed this. So I did a little more research into the question, and found a great disparity of dates have been applied to this settlement, regarded as paleolithic on the timescale. Expert opinion on the matter seems to differ widely: The earliest date I found was 37,000 B.C.; the latest, 13,000 B.C. Wikipedia puts it as early as 25,000 B.C.

What is a layman to do, regarding such conflicting testimonies? Answer: Find some consensus among the experts -- the cultural anthropologists -- who, though they might differ over dates, agree about what Lascaux may signify.

What is evident therefrom is that Lascaux is considered as evidence of the transition from homo erectus to homo sapiens. The consensus view holds that the cave paintings -- and the way the layout of the cave itself was exploited -- strongly suggests a ceremonial and sacred purpose was being served there by these earliest of "modern" men.

So I say to myself, hmmmmmmmm: Homo sapiens plus sacred activities seem to be in close correlation. Which to my way of thinking strengthens my original argument that man has "always" known about God, from the very earliest of times of human rational activity that we can document.

In my earlier post to RWP, I even went so far as to suggest that man was "programmed" with knowledge of God. This, of course, is a highly controversial point of view. Yet if evidence of human conceptualizations of the sacred can be dated to the emergence of homo sapiens, then I think my argument might well have some substance to it. Maybe that is the principle distinguishing "difference" between homo erectus and homo sapiens.

And it seems this eventuality is also closely correlated with the emergence of human self-consciousness: For one of the great paintings at Lascaux is a figure of a dead human being. This suggests to me that the artist(s) was fully aware of his own mortality.

Do you suppose that animals have such awareness? Or homo erectus, for that matter?

FWIW.

Thanks for writing, aNYCguy!

[Doctor Stochastic]

I don't think the existence of a strong PRNG is enough. That gives unpredictability; what seems to be needed is a computation that gives the QM correlations. I actually did write a program (on 2 8x5 cards, about the size or a napkin) that duplicated Aspect's results for any fixed setting of his polarizer. However, I think it's impossible to reproduce such QM systems for every angle setting. Similarly, for Physicist's example.

[snarks_when_bored]

A "spirit" must be tested so that spirit can see for itself that it don't qualify for some spiritual "jobs" for the future.. Qualifying of spirits is why humans were born.. Why YOU were born.. Theres much work in the future to do.. Only qualified spirits will be used for that.. What does this have to do with the present conversation.?... EVERYTHING..

What am I a prophet.?.. Yeah..

Do you have not even an ounce of respect anywhere in your body for the idea of evidence? You're telling a fairy story as if it were settled fact, but there's just no evidence for it. And even if it were true, how could you possibly know that it's true?

Wake up...hone your critical faculties a bit...ask for a little evidence before you commit yourself to believing something...