Introduction: The Illusion of Design [Richard Dawkins]

Natural History Magazine ^ | November 2005 | Richard Dawkins

[snarks_when_bored]

Introduction: The Illusion of Design

By Richard Dawkins

The world is divided into things that look as though somebody designed them (wings and wagon-wheels, hearts and televisions), and things that just happened through the unintended workings of physics (mountains and rivers, sand dunes, and solar systems).

Mount Rushmore belonged firmly in the second category until the sculptor Gutzon Borglum carved it into the first. Charles Darwin moved in the other direction. He discovered a way in which the unaided laws of physics—the laws according to which things “just happen”—could, in the fullness of geologic time, come to mimic deliberate design. The illusion of design is so successful that to this day most Americans (including, significantly, many influential and rich Americans) stubbornly refuse to believe it is an illusion. To such people, if a heart (or an eye or a bacterial flagellum) looks designed, that’s proof enough that it is designed.

No wonder Thomas Henry Huxley, “Darwin’s bulldog,” was moved to chide himself on reading the Origin of Species: “How extremely stupid not to have thought of that.” And Huxley was the least stupid of men.

Charles Darwin discovered a way in which the unaided laws of physics could, in the fullness of geologic time, come to mimic deliberate design.

The breathtaking power and reach of Darwin’s idea—extensively documented in the field, as Jonathan Weiner reports in “Evolution in Action”—is matched by its audacious simplicity. You can write it out in a phrase: nonrandom survival of randomly varying hereditary instructions for building embryos. Yet, given the opportunities afforded by deep time, this simple little algorithm generates prodigies of complexity, elegance, and diversity of apparent design. True design, the kind we see in a knapped flint, a jet plane, or a personal computer, turns out to be a manifestation of an entity—the human brain—that itself was never designed, but is an evolved product of Darwin’s mill.

Paradoxically, the extreme simplicity of what the philosopher Daniel C. Dennett called Darwin’s dangerous idea may be its greatest barrier to acceptance. People have a hard time believing that so simple a mechanism could deliver such powerful results.

The arguments of creationists, including those creationists who cloak their pretensions under the politically devious phrase “intelligent-design theory,” repeatedly return to the same big fallacy. Such-and-such looks designed. Therefore it was designed.

Many people cannot bear to think that they are cousins not just of chimpanzees and monkeys, but of tapeworms, spiders, and bacteria. The unpalatability of a proposition, however, has no bearing on its truth.

To pursue my paradox, there is a sense in which the skepticism that often greets Darwin’s idea is a measure of its greatness. Paraphrasing the twentieth-century population geneticist Ronald A. Fisher, natural selection is a mechanism for generating improbability on an enormous scale. Improbable is pretty much a synonym for unbelievable. Any theory that explains the highly improbable is asking to be disbelieved by those who don’t understand it.

Yet the highly improbable does exist in the real world, and it must be explained. Adaptive improbability—complexity—is precisely the problem that any theory of life must solve and that natural selection, uniquely as far as science knows, does solve. In truth, it is intelligent design that is the biggest victim of the argument from improbability. Any entity capable of deliberately designing a living creature, to say nothing of a universe, would have to be hugely complex in its own right.

If, as the maverick astronomer Fred Hoyle mistakenly thought, the spontaneous origin of life is as improbable as a hurricane blowing through a junkyard and having the luck to assemble a Boeing 747, then a divine designer is the ultimate Boeing 747. The designer’s spontaneous origin ex nihilo would have to be even more improbable than the most complex of his alleged creations. Unless, of course, he relied on natural selection to do his work for him! And in that case, one might pardonably wonder (though this is not the place to pursue the question), does he need to exist at all?

The achievement of nonrandom natural selection is to tame chance. By smearing out the luck, breaking down the improbability into a large number of small steps—each one somewhat improbable but not ridiculously so—natural selection ratchets up the improbability.

Darwin himself expressed dismay at the callousness of natural selection: “What a book a Devil’s Chaplain might write on the clumsy, wasteful, blundering low & horridly cruel works of nature!”

As the generations unfold, ratcheting takes the cumulative improbability up to levels that—in the absence of the ratcheting—would exceed all sensible credence.

Many people don’t understand such nonrandom cumulative ratcheting. They think natural selection is a theory of chance, so no wonder they don’t believe it! The battle that we biologists face, in our struggle to convince the public and their elected representatives that evolution is a fact, amounts to the battle to convey to them the power of Darwin’s ratchet—the blind watchmaker—to propel lineages up the gentle slopes of Mount Improbable.

The misapplied argument from improbability is not the only one deployed by creationists. They are quite fond of gaps, both literal gaps in the fossil record and gaps in their understanding of what Darwinism is all about. In both cases the (lack of) logic in the argument is the same. They allege a gap or deficiency in the Darwinian account. Then, without even inquiring whether intelligent design suffers from the same deficiency, they award victory to the rival “theory” by default. Such reasoning is no way to do science. But science is precisely not what creation “scientists,” despite the ambitions of their intelligent-design bullyboys, are doing.

In the case of fossils, as Donald R. Prothero documents in “The Fossils Say Yes” [see the print issue], today’s biologists are more fortunate than Darwin was in having access to beautiful series of transitional stages: almost cinematic records of evolutionary changes in action. Not all transitions are so attested, of course—hence the vaunted gaps. Some small animals just don’t fossilize; their phyla are known only from modern specimens: their history is one big gap. The equivalent gaps for any creationist or intelligent-design theory would be the absence of a cinematic record of God’s every move on the morning that he created, for example, the bacterial flagellar motor. Not only is there no such divine videotape: there is a complete absence of evidence of any kind for intelligent design.

Absence of evidence for is not positive evidence against, of course. Positive evidence against evolution could easily be found—if it exists. Fisher’s contemporary and rival J.B.S. Haldane was asked by a Popperian zealot what would falsify evolution. Haldane quipped, “Fossil rabbits in the Precambrian.” No such fossil has ever been found, of course, despite numerous searches for anachronistic species.

There are other barriers to accepting the truth of Darwinism. Many people cannot bear to think that they are cousins not just of chimpanzees and monkeys, but of tapeworms, spiders, and bacteria. The unpalatability of a proposition, however, has no bearing on its truth. I personally find the idea of cousinship to all living species positively agreeable, but neither my warmth toward it, nor the cringing of a creationist, has the slightest bearing on its truth.

Even without his major theoretical achievements, Darwin would have won lasting recognition as an experimenter.

The same could be said of political or moral objections to Darwinism. “Tell children they are nothing more than animals and they will behave like animals.” I do not for a moment accept that the conclusion follows from the premise. But even if it did, once again, a disagreeable consequence cannot undermine the truth of a premise. Some have said that Hitler founded his political philosophy on Darwinism. This is nonsense: doctrines of racial superiority in no way follow from natural selection, properly understood. Nevertheless, a good case can be made that a society run on Darwinian lines would be a very disagreeable society in which to live. But, yet again, the unpleasantness of a proposition has no bearing on its truth.

Huxley, George C. Williams, and other evolutionists have opposed Darwinism as a political and moral doctrine just as passionately as they have advocated its scientific truth. I count myself in that company. Science needs to understand natural selection as a force in nature, the better to oppose it as a normative force in politics. Darwin himself expressed dismay at the callousness of natural selection: “What a book a Devil’s Chaplain might write on the clumsy, wasteful, blundering low & horridly cruel works of nature!”

In spite of the success and admiration that he earned, and despite his large and loving family, Darwin’s life was not an especially happy one. Troubled about genetic deterioration in general and the possible effects of inbreeding closer to home, as James Moore documents in “Good Breeding,” [see print issue], and tormented by illness and bereavement, as Richard Milner’s interview with the psychiatrist Ralph Colp Jr. shows in “Darwin’s Shrink,” Darwin’s achievements seem all the more. He even found the time to excel as an experimenter, particularly with plants. David Kohn’s and Sheila Ann Dean’s essays (“The Miraculous Season” and “Bee Lines and Worm Burrows” [see print issue]) lead me to think that, even without his major theoretical achievements, Darwin would have won lasting recognition as an experimenter, albeit an experimenter with the style of a gentlemanly amateur, which might not find favor with modern journal referees.

As for his major theoretical achievements, of course, the details of our understanding have moved on since Darwin’s time. That was particularly the case during the synthesis of Darwinism with Mendelian digital genetics. And beyond the synthesis, as Douglas J. Futuyma explains in “On Darwin’s Shoulders,” [see print issue] and Sean B. Carroll details further for the exciting new field of “evo-devo” in “The Origins of Form,” Darwinism proves to be a flourishing population of theories, itself undergoing rapid evolutionary change.

In any developing science there are disagreements. But scientists—and here is what separates real scientists from the pseudoscientists of the school of intelligent design—always know what evidence it would take to change their minds. One thing all real scientists agree upon is the fact of evolution itself. It is a fact that we are cousins of gorillas, kangaroos, starfish, and bacteria. Evolution is as much a fact as the heat of the sun. It is not a theory, and for pity’s sake, let’s stop confusing the philosophically naive by calling it so. Evolution is a fact.

Richard Dawkins, a world-renowned explicator of Darwinian evolution, is the Charles Simonyi Professor of the Public Understanding of Science at the University of Oxford, where he was educated. Dawkins’s popular books about evolution and science include The Selfish Gene (Oxford University Press, 1976), The Blind Watchmaker (W.W. Norton, 1986), Climbing Mount Improbable (W.W. Norton, 1996), and most recently, The Ancestor’s Tale (Houghton Mifflin, 2004), which retells the saga of evolution in a Chaucerian mode.

[js1138]

"The" scientific method is something of a fiction attempting to describe what scientists do. Actual methodology is often invented specifically to solve a specific problem. The acceptance of a new method is left for review and followup.

If you think you can force working science to conform to a dictionary set of rules, you are wrong. In science as with the rest of life, it's easier to get forgiveness than to get permission.

[js1138]

Even in its theoretical form [mathematics] is utilitarian.

I didn't say that or imply that. Go back and read what I said and put the correct word in the brackets.

[js1138]

But, of course, the discussion is about inference, a design inference.

I have no objection to inference, even design inference, as long as it suggests research or makes predictions about yet undiscovered data.

Someone on a recent thread asserted that abiogenesis is impossible and should not be researched.

That attitude is unacceptable to me. I can accept the possibility that we might never solve the problem, but I will not accept the notion that we should not try. The same holds for the so-called irreducible structures.

What I find unacceptable about ID is not the hypothesis, but the implied opposition to empiricism.

[YHAOS]

Hey, Boop!

"But then I'm so "old-fashioned" that you'd probably regard me as some species of dinosaur."

Is that with, or without, feathers?

[grey_whiskers]

At one time God was wholly responsible for tornadoes, science decided tornadoes would be an interesting thing to look into, so they did. What they found were causes that were natural in origin. For this not to hold you have to make God personally responsible for all those causes.

Too many simplifications in your cosmology there.

The crux of the matter (as touched on earlier by a quote from Russell or Whitehead earlier in the thread) is that you have either an infinite regression of causes, or you go back so far (say the Higgs Boson), or God.

At least those are some of the "popular choices" :-)

The difficulty is that if you allow (even for the sake of argument) the existence of God, and the ability of God to interact with the physical world by whatever means, then it becomes impossible (unless you catch God in the act so to speak) to prove or disprove that God happened to intervene at any one specific point. Because as soon as the event happens, and God "turns his back" on whatever he influenced, the ordinary laws of nature kick in and the subsequent history of whatever God did will become indistinguishable from natural events.

And since God is --for lack of a better word -- "sentinent", (therefore not subject to repeatable mathematical laws which are beloved of physics), the only way to investigate God is not to experiment on Him (even if we know for sure he'd allow it...), but to get to know Him.

And the problem their for the skeptic, the agnostic, the atheist alike, is, all the tools for investigation which perform so dearly when you have known, natural phenomena, suddenly fall to the ground useless.

Hence you have an atheist countering "Pascal's wager" with a counter-dilemna of higher multiplicity: so I go to Hell if I don't believe in God, you say. But I can posit an infinite number of gods, so which one should I believe in...

And it doesn't help the situation that science / empiricism tend to rely on Occam's razor, the null hypothesis, etc.--for the whole ansatz is that it's better to throw away or miss out on things by being too picky, instead of being "taken in" by being too trusting.

But if God is interested personally in human affairs, such trust and willingness to be made a cosmic fool of seem to be required or demanded...

Cheers!

[grey_whiskers]

I'll stipulate that existence exists.

Thank you oh so very much for your reply and your stipulation! That is the point.

Brings to mind a certain Deity whose followers always seem to get wrapped up in these crevo threads...

"Before Abraham was, I AM" :-)

Cheers!

[grey_whiskers]

My reading list grows exponentially faster than my ability to read.

Can we all at least agree with a hearty "AMEN!" on that point from all the regulars on these threads?

Cheers!

[grey_whiskers]

In science as with the rest of life, it's easier to get forgiveness than to get permission.

Great. Even on a crevo thread, you just summarized the Fall of Man and the Redemption :-)

[js1138]

I know. Isn't it wonderful.

[betty boop]

Beautiful, grey_whiskers! Thank you.

[Alamo-Girl]

Thank you for your reply, snarks!

Barrow: ... 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.

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

Perhaps it would be helpful to consider Barrow’s remarks in light of Eugene Wigner’s ”The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics in the Natural Sciences.

The original article is online here. A more current view of the phenomenon by Cumrum Vafa is here.

My personal favorite example is Riemannian geometry which Einstein was able to pull “off the shelf” to describe general relativity.

Barrow’s observation is that mathematics exists, the mathematician or geometer comes along and discovers it. Pi is true everywhere in space/time. And because it transcends the human creative process, it has a mystical quality – or as Wigner and Vafa observe, it is unreasonably effective.

In my view, the unreasonable effectiveness of math - like the fact of a beginning and that the universe is intelligible at all - declares that God exists. Order cannot rise out of chaos in an unguided physical system.

[js1138]

I prefer the Concerto for Horn and Hardart. I still remember the place from 1957, my first trip to the big city.

[betty boop]

Is that with, or without, feathers?

Oh, definitely with feathers!!!

Thanks for asking, YHAOS. :^)

[Alamo-Girl]

Thank you so much for including me in this fascinating sidebar discussion you are having with Physicist!

I am quite thrilled with Physicist's remark at 736: epistemology, which after all is the realm where quantum physics and evolution reside.

Physicist once again is living proof (at least in my book) that physicists are more epistemologically zealous than investigators in other disciplines of science.

As you have asserted several times, science is a part of - not the sum of - knowledge.

However, the certainty of knowledge should be hierarchical in the same sense as "being". Context is lost and contradictions occur when the order is turned on its head and especially when all other forms of knowledge are subordinated as less certain to science which is constrained by methodological naturalism.

[Alamo-Girl]

Thank you for your reply!

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.

Again, there are two basic worldviews concerning the physical realm. One sees the physical realm as three spatial dimensions evolving over time. The other sees the physical realm as four dimensions - three of space, one of time. There are many extensions of the second view for multiple spatial and temporal dimensions, e.g. string theory.

Relativity is based on the four dimensional space/time continuum. Here's a link to an introduction to Special Relativity with helpful graphics.

General relativity can be viewed as special relativity allowing for warping of space/time. Gravity, for instance, should be viewed as indentations of space/time.

Further, the equivalence principle which derives from the Newtonian notion that all objects fall with the same acceleration shows that how fast an object accelerates (inertial mass) and gravitational mass are the same. Thus falling towards gravity, indentations of space/time (general relativity) and velocity are equivalent. In the strong version, even gravitational “self-energy” must follow the same rule.

The net result is that (for instance) while a week passes in the vicinity of a black hole, simultaneously 40 years may pass on earth. And if you traveled through space at the speed of one earth’s gravity, while 25.3 years elapsed on your voyage, 5x10¹⁰ years would elapse on earth.

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

Space/time does not pre-exist. It is created as the universe expands. The expansion of space/time (as in the big bang) causes fields to exist. A field is defined as existing in all points of space/time and there are four fundamental forces related to quantum fields: gravitational, strong atomic, weak atomic and electromagnetic.

[betty boop]

Physicist once again is living proof (at least in my book) that physicists are more epistemologically zealous than investigators in other disciplines of science.

I'd "make book" on that too, Alamo-Girl!

Good night, dear sister.

[Alamo-Girl]

Some earthy creatures need a 2x4 to get their attention..

LOLOLOL! No kidding!

Truly, one cannot become a Christian by reasoning. The only way is to be born again:

But as many as received him, to them gave he power to become the sons of God, [even] to them that believe on his name: Which were born, not of blood, nor of the will of the flesh, nor of the will of man, but of God. - John 1:12-13

[Virginia-American]

js1138: In science as with the rest of life, it's easier to get forgiveness than to get permission.

g_w: Great. Even on a crevo thread, you just summarized the Fall of Man and the Redemption :-)

I was told Adm. Grace Hopper used that saying in a graduation speech at William and Mary.

[AndrewC]

What I find unacceptable about ID is not the hypothesis, but the implied opposition to empiricism.

That is a philosophy not a science.

[Virginia-American]

Order cannot rise out of chaos in an unguided physical system.

There are a bunch of convective cells off the coast of Africa and next thing you know there's a hurricane. So the Coriolis effect is "guidance"?