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.

[betty boop]

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

I think primitive man was, if anything, far more sensitive to the rhythms of nature than we are. After all, he's smack-dab IN IT in a way we moderns virtually never are. Where there is a sense of periodicity, can counting be far behind? Why would you consider the "invention" of counting as "a fairly recent innovation?" I see it as an ability that naturally emerges from a man's self-understanding of his own experiences.

Reading and writing are seemingly comparatively late developments, if I had to guess, 6th to 5th century B.C. Writing seems to be an invention; but it is based on articulating human experiences, so it is rooted in the natural. That is, it is not a totally "free" invention. And writing implies reading.

[Alamo-Girl]

Just finished watching PollyAnna and am in a mood.. Pity the fool that would hurt one of my kids, or grand children.. it would not be nice.. a mother bear would seem tame..

I can imagine. Thank you so much for sharing your insights! I must watch Pollyanna ...

[betty boop]

Revelation restored to man the unity that was himself . . . This unity was achieved as a reality both personal and corporate for a period of time in that small segment of the globe known as Western Europe.... Human unity was gradually lost, and a new man came into being. This man has his life neither in the rooted things of the world nor in a heaven beyond. Nor is he Christian Man, man reconciled to himself. This new man looks neither outward and above nor outward and round about him. He looks within, and attempts to find salvation by a penetration and purgation of the hidden depths of his own personality. This is Modern Man....

Yes, Modern Man: who puts his trust in "self-salvation," which implies a sort of "self-divinization"....

These are simply marvelous passages, cornelis. I can see I'm going to have to get Wilhelmsen's book.

Thank you so much for pinging me to this!

[betty boop]

Hello Virginia-American!

Somehow or other, so far I have managed to be spared The Clan of the Cave Bear!

Thanks for writing!

[grey_whiskers]

And writing implies reading.

Or at least secret decoder rings.

Two more bits of grist for the mill, see Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's The Adventure of the Dancing Men (Sherlock Holmes) and G.K. Chesterton's The Noticable Conduct of Professor Chadd:

Did language appear gradually by consensus and grow organically, or did it start with a few "gifted" individuals and spread either by imposition or imitation?

Cheers!

[Alamo-Girl]

Thank you so much for sharing your discernments concerning the difference between Spiritual revelation, awareness, epiphany and vision.

Indeed, there is quite a difference between them --- and Spiritual revelation is progressive as you say. Even Paul who had an astonishing Spiritual revelation, didn't get it all at once. And he did not first confer with flesh and blood. (emphasis mine)

But when it pleased God, who separated me from my mother's womb, and called [me] by his grace, To reveal his Son in me, that I might preach him among the heathen; immediately I conferred not with flesh and blood: Neither went I up to Jerusalem to them which were apostles before me; but I went into Arabia, and returned again unto Damascus.

Then after three years I went up to Jerusalem to see Peter, and abode with him fifteen days. But other of the apostles saw I none, save James the Lord's brother. - Galatians 1:15-19

Christian Spiritual revelation begins with "Jesus Christ is Lord". Further Spiritual revelations build on that foundation.

IMHO, some people confuse reasoning with revelation. That leads to pointless traditions and doctrines of men which Christ warned us about:

Howbeit in vain do they worship me, teaching [for] doctrines the commandments of men. - Mark 7:7

[betty boop]

How does one know that the artwork with phallic adornment was part of the piece as originally designed and executed?

One does not know that for a certainty, but perhaps one can know that "beyond a reasonable doubt." For one thing, the elements of the piece — the dead man and the bull — appear to be strongly correlated: The artist gives us the bull in full "murderous" charge, which entails the lowered head and the tail, which is rigidly extended outwards from the bull's body, which is characteristic of charging behavior.

In the second place, by now practically every square inch of this large suite of caves has been gone over in excruciating detail by several generations of scientists. The pigments used have been identified and analyzed; and all are seemingly contemporaneous.

If graffiti were involved, it would have had to take place before the discovery of the cave complex in the 1940s. Since that time, the French Government, via its Ministry of Culture, has done a superlative job of protecting, maintaining, and preserving the site. It is no longer open to the public (because of carbon dioxide-caused degradation of the paintings occasioned by vistors' breath). Instead a facsimile has been constructed: visitors go there.

Plus the pigment dating seems to preclude a graffiti scenario prior to the 1940s.

There's nothing we can know in life with absolute certainty, other than we are some day going to die. Oh, and also that the government will tax us while we live. :^) If we had to wait for certainty before we could do anything, or draw reasonable conclusions, then we would not be able to do much at all, and there would be little if anything to reason about.

Thanks for writing, grey-whiskers!

[Alamo-Girl]

Thank you so much for including me in this fascinating sidebar about Lascaux!!!

In my last post, I was attempting to refocus the discussion to the first point you made - the only image of a man captured at Lascaux was the image of a dead man.

That is most significant to me - the background for exploring the meaning of the erect phallus drawn on the dead man. Seems to me the artist intended to convey that the dead man is not completely dead, that there must be more to the man than the beast who killed him.

[betty boop]

Amazing (once you get used to it) that a human mind could be transported to another place "not on your own".. "not on purpose". Other than that it could be scary.. I would say revelation is progessive.. Some revelation needs other relevation as foundation.. Because without a proper foundation the revealment of the revelation would not be emergent.. Inspiritation is only revelation if it is spiritual..

Personally, I don't know if this is something that one can ever quite "get used to." :^)

Thank you, dear hosepipe, for your magnificent testimony and witness.

[betty boop]

Seems to me the artist intended to convey that the dead man is not completely dead, that there must be more to the man than the beast who killed him.

That's my "takeaway" too, Alamo-Girl. The artist could have chosen to depict living men. He did not, for then his seeming point could not have been made: that there is life in death, or beyond death. There seems to be an authentic spiritual recognition in play here. And that is what makes the dead man "more than" the beast that killed him.

Lascaux is a kind of epiphany. It is an amazing discovery to realize just how "sophisticated" these "primitives" were, at such an early point in human history. The ideas of a common humanity, of a common human condition, of a common human destiny, emerge from these caves....

Thank you so much for writing, Alamo-Girl!

[Alamo-Girl]

There seems to be an authentic spiritual recognition in play here. And that is what makes the dead man "more than" the beast that killed him.

So very true! And I also am quite amazed that primitive man had such a significant understanding about the human condition.

As always, you and I are on the same wave length!!!

[spunkets]

"There seems to be an authentic spiritual recognition in play here. And that is what makes the dead man "more than" the beast that killed him."

Or, this is what happens when testosterone rules.

[hosepipe]

[ Lascaux is a kind of epiphany. It is an amazing discovery to realize just how "sophisticated" these "primitives" were, at such an early point in human history. ]

Yeah.. my thought too.. So easily people use the term "primitive".. Must mean more "primitive" than myself.. in most cases.. a kind of subtle arrogance.. Some "cave man" grunting and scribbling "primitive" art.. that don't even own a microwave oven to heat up their frozen dinner they must mean..

And that that primitive creature probably bludgeoned some hapless other creature to death with a rock, and was heating steaks, very rare on some fire.. is the image I get..

Logical to me, since I have done that very thing myself, sans the art part.. but boiling some King Crab on a fire and consumeing it was, well, better.. Surf and Turf, I think, is a very old concept.. Originated by some OTHER primitive type living by some seashore.. What 37 millinia ago.?.. Who knows what went through their mind digesting such a meal.. Defameing "cave people" should be a hate crime.. LoL..

[spunkets]

Sorry, I haven't had time to answer 680. I'll be out for awhile and post after a check.

[RightWhale]

I don't want to get too descriptive on this matter. If you read some of the literature on the vampire in Ireland and east Europe, you may find what you seek.

[ChessExpert]

Your Dawkins summation seems about right to me.

The posted article has a lot of "attitude." I don't think it's intent was to encourage reasoned discussion.

[RightWhale]

To say this is not that and that is not this is also a bald assertion. If we posit the first question we determine the geometry of the inquiry, but using the geometry is reasoning by metaphor. Each word is an incomplete philosophy: the ergod and the void together are a moral unity. Only the original word was a unity in itself, and there was no word for that: the word was. The word--singular, a singularity. Reality is a metaphor, a division of the word, an illusion.

There are 100 billion neurons in the human brain. There are 100 billion stars in the Milky Way. One star per neuron. 25 thousand neurons can fly the F-22, one of the most complex, awesome machines we have ever created. The F-22 is an illusion, a division of reality, not natural--something imagined and only a function of a few neurons: a pattern with its own laws. There are no laws, no patterns in nature. Laws and patterns are only the workings of our ergodic imaginings. The ergod is the tao--a word, but not the word.

[hosepipe]

[ There are no laws, no patterns in nature. Laws and patterns are only the workings of our ergodic imaginings. The ergod is the tao--a word, but not the word. ]

The "Tao" is a grumpy person whineing about whineing..

[betty boop]

Or, this is what happens when testosterone rules.

LOLOL!!!! You'd be the expert on that, spunkets! :^)

Thanks for the chuckle!

[betty boop]

Defameing "cave people" should be a hate crime

LOLOLOLOL!!!!!!! Hilarious, hosepipe! I agree!!!!!