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.

[snarks_when_bored]

if it's not a fable and no sin (no matter how small or finite) can be in the presence of the living God, then you're in trouble.

If that's what the Bible says—and you would know that better than I—I must say, so much the worse for the Bible. Everything I know about what it means to be reasonable and what it means to be merciful and what it means to be just tells me that no infinitely reasonable, infinitely merciful and infinitely just deity would decree infinite punishment for a finite transgression. In my view, if the Bible says this, the Bible has got it wrong.

But—as you might say—"That's your view." And—should you say that—you would be correct, sir!

Best regards...

[Virginia-American]

You associated revelation with neurosis.

Not precisely; I associated it with epilepsy, brain damage, and psychosis.

Specifically, I was responding to AG's claim the "divine revelation" is a reliable source of knowledge. I pointed out that the "observer problem" exists in this case as well as all others. I used the examples of Mohammed, Joseph Smith, Baha'ullah, and a friend of mine who hears the BVM. I gave the prophets the benefit of the doubt with respect to their sincerity.

But the truth is, I don't know of any reliable way of distinguishing madness or epilepsy from "divine revelation" except to give the affected person medical treatment and see if it stops or not. The "known by their fruit" test seems to say that Mohammed was not revealing divine stuff but was mad or epileptic, but that Smith and Baha'ullah were in fact true prophets, because the Mormons and Bahai seem to be good people who respect their neighbors and worship their God. (Personally, I think Smith was quite mad; can't say about Baha'ullah)

That is a one-sided characterization because it fails to explain the beauty of Western Civilization.

I wasn't addressing the beauty of Western Civ., but here's my opinion.

There is very little of "divine revelation" that has made any difference to our civilization: St Paul and Constantine are the only two that come to mind (Mohammed too, in a way). Absent the former there would be no Christianity; that would certainly change civilization as we know it, but there's no way to say how. My guess is we'd still have Mithraism.

If Constantine had remained true to the faith of his fathers, again, things would be different, but it's impossible to say in what way. My guess is that we'd still have polytheism.

The worth of the individual is not a uniquely Western or Christian thought; Confucius was part-way there, and the Eastern Orthodox didn't go there at all. The technologcal inventions are also not uniquely western; printing, paper, and gunpowder came from China and zero from the Hindus. Trial by jury is from the pagan Germans. Limited governmant can be traced back to a bunch of power-hungry barons at Runnymeade.

There has been speculation that the reason technology took off in Europe and not China (or Rome) was the lack of strong central government to suppress it.

But my main point still stands: "divine revelation" had little to do with forming out civilization, compared to hard work, courage, inventiveness, and just plain luck.

[cornelis]

I don't know of any reliable way of distinguishing madness or epilepsy from "divine revelation"

Do you even care to? I simply say again that madness and epilepsy don't create a civilization.

[aNYCguy]

In retaining an identity we are necessarily a part of something that transcends the periodicity of material change.

Periodicity means recurrance at equal time intervals. I'm not sure what you means by "the periodicity of material change."

[cornelis]

Periodicity I would think also includes aspects of nature which have some continual recurrence that is not exclusively equal in time.

[caffe]

I just wanted to address my post to a friendly guy. LOL
Not only is Dawkins arrogant: he's an idiot!

[aNYCguy]

Periodicity I would think also includes aspects of nature which have some continual recurrence that is not exclusively equal in time.

Not in my experience with the word, or according to the dictionary. In any case, we're getting a bit afield of your statement about a necessary implication of identity retention after death.

[betty boop]

You're dangerous..

I know. :^)

[betty boop]

I knew you would choose the elegant option.

LOLOL!!! Thanks for the chuckle, YHAOS!

[caffe]

Athiestic Atomic Theory? Could you please give me an example?

And can't you do better?

[betty boop]

did the people who painted the cave know the relationship between sex and birth? I remember reading that there are some modern hunter-gatherers who were unclear on the concept, but I might be misremembering.

Yes, we moderns are ever so much superior to these rubes, who putatively were incapable of drawing the connection between sex and the rather regular arrival of children, nine moons later. Like these brutes couldn't even count, for God's sake.

Notwithstanding these rubes created some world-class art that continues to speak to us today, from perhaps as much as 27 millennia ago. Go figure.

If you doubt my claim, just go Google on "Lascaux" and fire up the first link. Then you can take it from there.

Who has interpreted the Dead Man of Lascaux as "the shaman with a bird mask in a trance" such that I need credit him? Any why — what theory does he expound? And why should I find that intrinsically valuable?

Sorry for venting. I'm just getting sick and tired of the arrogance of the modern-day intelligentsia. [May God help you if you are in that party.]

[betty boop]

The phenomenon you mentioned is very common.

Oh? How so, RightWhale? Give me an example please.

[hosepipe]

[ Sorry for venting. I'm just getting sick and tired of the arrogance of the modern-day intelligentsia. [May God help you if you are in that party.] ]

LoL....

[js1138]

... because the Mormons and Bahai seem to be good people who respect their neighbors and worship their God.

I personally think Mormonism is loony, but as people go, I've never met a badly behaved Mormon. This is quite a contrast to my experience with people of other denominations. Perhaps my sample is not representitive.

They also have the only TV channel that plays good music.

[Virginia-American]

[relation between coition and pregnancy]

Heavens to Betsy, BB, it was an honest question.

Here's The Straight Dope discussing it.

[Is the Lascaux figure a shaman?]

Discussion by Leakey of shaman interpretations

Last sentence:

The place is imbued with meaning, but we can't decipher what is being said. The potency is palpable, but we are culturally blind to its content. In seeking to understand our origins, we come away from a place like Lascaux with a deep conviction of connectedness, and a humility at the power of the human mind....

Another discussion

Google Lascaux and shaman for more.

[js1138]

Like these brutes couldn't even count, for God's sake.

You really think counting is "built in" and isn't a fairly recent invention? How about reading and writing?

[Virginia-American]

I personally think Mormonism is loony, but as people go, I've never met a badly behaved Mormon

Pretty much my experience as well. I've met a few who were into alternatative healing, homeopathy, etc., but they took their kids to standard doctors when anything serious came up, in contrast to eg. Christian Scientists.

[js1138]

I'm pretty much into self-healing unless something serious comes up. I have a pretty clear picture of when medicine is necessary and when it's hand-holding, with three MDs and a registered nurse in my immediate family. Any time a doctor says they have a pill, but it will get better by itself, I choose itself.

[Virginia-American]

Any time a doctor says they have a pill, but it will get better by itself, I choose itself.

You and me both. AS far as I'm concerned, homeopathy is "itself".

[cornelis]

Check out #817, if you like.