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.

[Rudder]

Yeo, I agree, but the awkwardly literate person to whom I was posting seems differ.

[Aquinasfan]

And therefore his statements regarding to biological science are false?

Not necessarily, but with a high degree of probability, mainly because evolutionary theory is more philosophy than biological science, and immoral people make very poor philosophers. There is a tremendous amount of empirical data supporting this theory...

[Rudder]

put a 'to' in there, please.

[Dimensio]

Not necessarily, but with a high degree of probability, mainly because evolutionary theory is more philosophy than biological science,

Ah, okay. Your argument is based upon a false premise then.

[Rudder]

...evolutionary theory is more philosophy than biological science

Nah, not true. Apparently you do not have a grasp of evolution.

[wallcrawlr]

In case you didnt see this followup:


http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1535627/posts

[TChris]

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!

Or unless, of course, that Designer has always been.

[Ghost of Philip Marlowe]

The fact that he mentions his sex life has less to do with the hypothesis of a physicist and more to do with the study of the Self that is so typical of those with ulterior motives.

Ulterior motives are an excellent reason to doubt the wisdom of any individual, as the quest for truth, whether scientific or philosophical or religious must first begin with a pure heart and an open mind.

Unfortunately, what you Darwinists refuse to admit is precisely that which you condemn in the ID'ers, that you've diluted a great deal of the "science" aspect of evolution with philosophy. By so doing, you've injected as much "faith" into your beliefs as Creationists.

And just so you know, I don't exclude either belief. I believe in evolution within the genetic profile of a species but not in evolving from one species to another. I don't believe evolution explains the origin of all life, but does, perhaps, trace segments of the path of individual species.

What set it all in motion and how and what was the detailed path of each species? Only God knows for sure. And if there is no God, I seriously doubt science will ever be able to answer these questions definitively.

[Aquinasfan]

science is not incompatible with Christianity

Was Copernicus Catholic? Buridan? (Bishop) Oresme? Were the cardinal and bishop funding Copernicus' research Catholic? Did science only become self-sustaining in the Catholic West?

[Right Wing Professor]

By this statement, I can only conclude that Mr. Ruse has extremely low morals and extremely poor judgement. Simply stated, he gives every indication of being a scumbag.

Your sexual frustration is making you bitter.

:-)

[Aquinasfan]

Are you trying to say that the laws of physics have some goal in mind? Are they intelligent in and of themselves?

Not any more than any other laws. No, of course not. But human laws have authors, which is my point. So why when we observe laws in nature do we presume that they have no author? This is contrary to other lived experiences. The presumption should be otherwise.

"I don't know of any un-authored laws"

Stop anthropomorphizing natural occurrences.

I'm not.

The 'laws' of nature are human descriptions of natural consistencies. We observe something that occurs the same way every time and can be modeled mathematically so we call them 'laws'.

Is the "Law of Gravitation" a law or a consistency, that is, is it a statistical probability? My understanding is that the law admits of no exceptions.

Yes. The question is, do we presume that these laws are the result of a law-giver, as are all other laws? Or do we presume otherwise, against all other experience with law?

Some people will do anything, including play semantic games, to make it look like there 'has to be' an intelligent designer.

It is rational to assume that where there is a law there is a law-giver, and where there is design there is a designer. No one's forcing you to take the side of irrationality. You have chosen it freely.

[Right Wing Professor]

Is the "Law of Gravitation" a law or a consistency, that is, is it a statistical probability? My understanding is that the law admits of no exceptions.

Maybe you could state for us what you think it is.

[Aquinasfan]

So are you saying that science owes Christianity free reign

I don't know what that means, so I can't answer your question.

...simply because it lorded its power over the great thinkers during its medieval heyday?

By funding their research, as in the case of Copernicus? The evidence you present is selective.

[Right Wing Professor]

The question is, do we presume that these laws are the result of a law-giver, as are all other laws?

You mean, like common law? The laws of grammar?

[snarks_when_bored]

I might as well add some additional fuel to the fire:

September 12, 2005

Clash in Cambridge

Science and religion seem as antagonistic as ever

By John Horgan

In the very first lecture of the Templeton-Cambridge Journalism Fellowship in June, a University of Cambridge biologist assured the 10 journalists in his audience that science and religion have gotten along much better, historically, than is commonly believed. After all, scientific pioneers such as Kepler, Newton, Boyle and even Galileo were all devout Christians; Galileo's run-in with the Church was really a spat between two different versions of Catholicism. The notion that science and religion have always butted heads is "fallacious," declared Denis Alexander, who is, not coincidentally, a Christian. Other lecturers, who included four agnostics, a Jew, a deist and 11 Christians, also saw no unbridgeable chasm between science and their faith.

As the two-week meeting unfolded, however, conflict kept disrupting this peaceable kingdom. Lecturers and journalists argued over a host of questions: Without religion, would humanity descend into moral chaos? Are scientific claims in some sense as unprovable as religious ones? Can prayers heal, and if so, is that evidence of the placebo effect or of God's helping hand? Why does God seem to help some people and ignore others? By the end of the conference, the gulf between science and religion--or at least Christianity--seemed as wide as ever.

Take the exchange between biologists Simon Conway Morris of Cambridge and Richard Dawkins of the University of Oxford. Morris contended that intelligence is not a freak occurrence but a recurring theme in evolution, appearing in dolphins, parrots and crows as well as in primates. He speculated that any of these species might be capable of discovering God, but we had help--from Christ, whom God sent to Earth for our benefit. Dawkins, by far the most antireligious lecturer, praised Morris's evolutionary views but called his Christianity "gratuitous." Morris retorted that he found Dawkins's atheism "archaic" and asserted that the resurrection and other miracles attributed to Christ were "historically verifiable." After more give-and-take, Morris, crossing his arms tightly across his chest, grumbled, "I'm not sure this conversation can go any further."

Dawkins also challenged the faith of physicist John Barrow, an Anglican. Like several other speakers, Barrow emphasized how extraordinarily "fine-tuned" the universe is for our existence. Why not just accept that fine-tuning as a fact of nature? Dawkins asked. Why do you want to explain it with God? "For the same reason you don't want to," Barrow responded drily. Everyone laughed except Dawkins, who protested, "That's not an answer!"

Disagreement divided believers as well. Physicist John Polkinghorne, a winner of the $1.4-million Templeton Prize, given annually to those who "advance spiritual matters," contended that physicists' understanding of causality is "patchy" and hence allows for a God who answers prayers and carries out the occasional miracle, such as parting the Red Sea. Another physicist and Templeton Prize winner, Paul Davies, discerned tentative evidence of design in the laws of nature but added, "As a physicist, I feel very uncomfortable with a God who intervenes" in human affairs.

Tension was evident not only between speakers but also within individual minds. Nancey Murphy, a philosopher at the Fuller Theological Seminary in Pasadena, Calif., described herself as a materialist who does not view the soul as a "spirit" separate from the body. Yet she believes in phenomena that many scientists might find hard to swallow, such as the resurrection of Christ and, at the end of time, of all humans. When a journalist pressed her to explain how resurrection might work, Murphy acknowledged that at times the discussion between science and religion "breaks down" because they involve "incommensurable schemes" for understanding reality.

Peter Lipton, a Cambridge philosopher, spoke of his struggle to be a practicing Jew in spite of his lack of belief in a supernatural God. "I stand in my synagogue and pray to God and have an intense relationship with God, and yet I don't believe in God," Lipton confessed with a rueful grin. He compared his religious experience with that of someone who gets pleasure and meaning from a novel even though he knows it is not literally true. "Are you having your cake and eating it, too?" asked journalism fellow Shankar Vedantam of the Washington Post. "I'm certainly trying to," Lipton replied.

Half the journalists considered themselves religious, at least when the fellowship began. By the end, the infidels were all holding firm, while at least one believer's faith was wobbling because of the arguments of Dawkins.

Whether the program was all that its sponsor, the Templeton Foundation, hoped for is unclear. Created by investor Sir John Templeton in 1987, the foundation has spent $225 million on publications, conferences and other programs aimed at finding common ground between science and religion. The participants here may not have found that common ground, but they all agreed that spending two weeks on the River Cam pondering the meaning of life--or lack thereof--was jolly good fun.

[Aquinasfan]

he might never have recognized what his eyes and his notebooks were telling him during and after the voyage of the Beagle.

Like the "evolution" of finch beak size?

[js1138]

Can we conclude from Aquinasfan's remark that he only has sex with non-citizens or that he has never had sex with an American citizen? Assuming he is not she.

[snarks_when_bored]

Darwin did take note of the variation among finch beaks, that is true.

But, Aquinasfan, with reference to two of our earlier topics:

1. with regard to this matter of 'laws of nature', I don't understand your insistence on grabbing onto the word 'law' and insisting that it implies a 'lawgiver'. In some contexts it does, in others it doesn't. If you're truly a fan of Aquinas, you should be able to make such distinctions.
    
2. with regard to this question of Professor Ruse's sex life, that's the question you never answered (referring to our earlier exchange): How could you possibly know what sort of attitudes Ruse and his partners had towards one another? Your willingness to condemn the man without evidence is disturbing and calls into question your judgment. Moreover, even if he were a libertine (which I don't grant), his personal habits are irrelevant to the truth or falsity of the scientific and philosophical claims he makes. You should know this.

[chronic_loser]

I have had a break for several months from the crevo threads. Took Dawkins to pull me back in, at least for this one. I think Richard Dawkins is:

1) an unbearable pompous ass
2) not nearly as bright as he thinks he is
3) president of a worldwide Richard Dawkins fan club (one member)
4) victim of the idea that scientific debate consists of sitting in the corner shrieking "all of the smart people are over here with us, and you are an idiot if you aren't with the smart people over here with us...., and oh yeah, what you say is wrong, and I don't have to prove it because all the smart people already believe it (you blithering idiot)!

I did research for a while with a Brit, and they can have an icy wit sometimes, but Dawkins is just an asswipe.

I think he is Carl Sagan's separated at birth twin.

[snarks_when_bored]

Can we conclude from Aquinasfan's remark that he only has sex with non-citizens or that he has never had sex with an American citizen? Assuming he is not she.

(smile) I've been trying to give Aquinasfan the benefit of the doubt, but it's getting more difficult as s/he continues to dig a deeper hole.