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.

[hosepipe]

Oh! Snarky.. your tie, well, you know..

[hosepipe]

#980 [ Considering these views of reality, I don't really see where we have anything to explore. ]

LoL...

[snarks_when_bored]

Oh! Snarky.. your tie, well, you know..

It's these danged wings, you know...can't use 'em to tie a double Windsor to save my life...

[ChessExpert]

Great photo! That duck is quite evolved.

Now, could you explain what this has to do with Al Gore?

[don asmussen]

a point in time when two species of men existed together --

I'm sure that would be a most interesting speculation, don. But I confess my real interest in this question is the succession, or transition, of one to the other, and why that transition was successful.
We do not get that sort of information from the consideration of biological data alone. Or so it seems to me.

Hmmm, -- are you suggesting that we can surmise why our species survived without using scientific data?

Why do we need such data, when we clearly and readily see that we have "survived?"

You're the one who suggested -- "interest in this question --", not I.. Forget my comment.

(Otherwise you wouldn't be around to ask this question, nor me to reply to it.)

btw.. What would be your reaction if were proved that Neanderthal genes live on in modern humans? That hybrid vigor contributed to our 'successful transition'?

If Neanderthals were actually protohuman (which designation seems to cover a whole lot these days), that wouldn't surpise me at all. And it seems they were.
Are these "trick questions," don?

Nope, not from my view Betty.. What about them give you that idea?

[snarks_when_bored]

Great photo! That duck is quite evolved.

Now, could you explain what this has to do with Al Gore?

That was a hosepipe comment...you'll have to ask him!

[RightWhale]

I don't really see where we have anything to explore

Of course we do, not so much exploration as discovery and invention. We create patterns and laws; these things do not exist in nature until we create them. It's what we do. Man the Engineer. Most of our laws are discovered in our own machines, in our own creations, and in a few simple cases we can find an example in nature. Nature itself has very little by way of pattern and law; nature including man has all the pattern and law--work in progress.

It might be said that God created the universe, but it might equally be said the He does not manage it. That is our job, and we are having trouble managing even this speck of dust where we find ourselves. If we are otherwise alone in the universe, and so far it appears so, we are slacking off. Somebody else can discuss the nature of reality until they stumble across a clue; the rest of us are working quite hard, if ineffectively, doing things.

[spunkets]

This reply is addressed to js1138 and physicist who commented, those that where pinged and all.

"Consider: the B and anti-B are entangled. Until one of them decays--thereby "picking" a flavor--the other one doesn't know how it is supposed to decay. The "second" one to decay will subsequently oscillate back and forth between being a B^o and an anti-B meson: effectively, it has two decay rates, one in its role as a B^o and one in its role as an anti-B^o)."

The 2 particles were in causal contact during the the initial decay, with each other and the original Y(4S) they came from. That's the point where the entangled state was established. It's within the light cone, the region where all the info is passed out at. The Y(4S) is a particle containing 2 quarks, b and anti-b. When it decays, each b will get a newly generated d quark eventually, as follows:

B^o = d,anti-b
anti-B^o = anti-d, b

The decay mechanism on one of the particles is stabilized by by raising the activation energy for the normally available decay paths as follows. The 2 components that make up the particle are oscillating back and forth with their own anti-particle with a high enough frequency, that before any path can be taken, it changes to the wrong particle and that path is unavailable then.

The b quark can't oscillate alone, or a net charge would be seen magnets and the "delay clock" could be seen running. The net result is that it is neither B^o, nor anti-B^o. This oscillation is called a CP eigenstate, f. f looks like:

d anti-b <=> anti-d, b

I said one of the particles would begin as an f, but there's no reason, that I know of to constrain it that way. I'm not too familiar with the Std Model. Both particles could begin in that state, with one more likely to have a short life as such. It will become the tag. It seems the flavor symmetry takes some time to develop and One of the particles gets a head start in the region of the original decay. No particle in particular becomes a tag as far as I know.

"you can't say that it was pre-informed about the decay fate of the "first" meson because that doesn't help: such a scheme will necessarily obey Bell's inequality

I looked, but was unable to find, or access any description of the technique and data. Page 4 of the second ref. contains statements I can't construct a picture of. They also name the states differently. In that paper, it seems to me that they're referring to some initial decay, before particle decay begins. Others gave me the impression that they used the first decay to tag both particles ID and then extract curves. I think the 2nd particle's decay curve contains the t_tag/decay. ?

Suppose someone pokes their finger in the detector and pokes at random particles giving them enough activation energy to decay. The probability is 1/2, that anyone poked will be an f. The f must decay to the correct particle even though it never saw the tag. The quantum correlations for the finger experiment must match those for the tag run.

Regardless of the details of where t_tag/decay ends up in the second particles decay curve. Flavor is a symmetry and if t_tag/decay defines t_o for the second particles decay, then all I see is a phase change(shape) in the fields, Higgs and EM. Phase velocities do exceed c. In this case, the CP eigenstate is maintained by the field between the particles. The finger experiment has the same effect as t_tag.

"what about non-EPR correlated nuclear decays?"

A decay here is simply a high energy state of a system falling to a lower energy state with the release of equivalent energy. The system has an inherent stability and an activation energy for any decay path available. Nuclear and particle decays are normally considered with the concept of half life and the equation,

N = N_oe^-t/t_1/2.

Nuclear decays around room temperature are relatively insensitive to temperature, until T times Boltzmann's constant approaches the activation E. In short, in terms of energy, decay(non tunneling) is generally proportional to,

e^{(-E_act(or delta E)/kT})
, or is the sum of terms containing this factor.

In addition to activation energy driven processes, there is tunneling. One of the first verifications for QM was Gamow, Condon, and Gurney's calc of predicting the number of alpha particles emitted per second in alpha decay. They considered the problem as tunneling through a barrier. The calculated the transmission coefficient and took the number of trials per second, N, as:

N = 1/2 v/R, where v is the velocity of the particle and R is the radius of the nucleus.

The eq for the number of particles/sec, n, is,

n=v/2R*e^{-2*integral from R to infinity of U},

where U = (2m/hbar²)((zZe²/r-E)dr

E is the energy of the particle. z and Z are the charges of the alpha particle and nucleus respectively. e is the electron charge and m is the mass of the alpha particle.

The following were calculated for n.

n(U²³⁸) = 5*10^-18 events/sec
n(Po²¹²) = 2*10^-6 events/sec

The reference values are.

n(U²³⁸) =7.05 *10^-18 events/sec
n(Po²¹²) = 3.04*10^-7 events/sec

Here's a web calc within a factor of 2. Here's a paper that shows more detail. Stability against decay in isotopes depends on binding energy/nucleon(protons and neutrons). The binding energy represents the height of the potential well. Iron has the highest binding energy.

"Occam's Razor leads us to conclude that all subatomic decays have a random, causeless element, somewhere."

The driving force, or cause, is simply the fact that the system has a path to a lower energy configuration. Even if that path is over an intermediate higher energy hill, or by tunneling. The path over the hill simply requires an activation E. Tunneling simply requires a successful attempt. Even with tunneling, there are underlying fluctuations, that effect "wall height" and particle E. Random just refers to the distribution of events that amount to, "a path has been taken."

I pulled some results from some CLEO B factory analysis here.

The average lifetimes for the 2 particles are, B^o = 1.55ps and anti-B^o = 1.49ps.

¹ CP Violation in B Meson Decays

² Time-Dependent CP Asymmetries in b --> s qbar q Transitions and sin2phi1 in B0 --> J/psi K0 Decays with 386 Million BBbar Pairs
Authors: The Belle Collaboration: K. Abe, et al

[Physicist]

I'm afraid I didn't understand much of what you were trying to say, and some of the statements sounded wrong. Can you summarize your point, and how it differs from mine?

[spunkets]

My reply was essentially to js1138, who I had a discussion with regarding cause. I don't have any disagreement. Most of what I wrote regarding your reply was a restatement of how I understood it. I also posed some questions, since I was unclear on the decay details and not very familiar with the STD Model. I did leave a dangling error in there, but that was to js1138.

If anything sounded wrong, go ahead and comment.

As far as the action at a distance trick, I would appreciate your comment on this.

all I see is a phase change(shape) in the fields, Higgs and EM. Phase velocities do exceed c. In this case, the CP eigenstate is maintained by the field between the particles. The finger experiment has the same effect as ttag.

[Quark2005]

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.

Once again, everybody, for the 10¹⁵⁰ time, there is absolutely NOTHING about evolution that breaks the Laws of Thermodynamics. Every time someone claims so, somewhere a physicist or engineer dies laughing. Please stop it. Learn what thermodynamics actually is and how it is actually applied before postulating such absurd assertions.

BTW, the Big Bang is a prediction of general relativity and has nothing to do with evolution, either.

How about, one, just one, testable prediction that can be made with a supernatural assumption?

[Quark2005]

Quantum theory posits there is no distinction between atoms. Could be wrong, but QM has not been wrong yet.

My 2¢ (if anyone still cares):

Not exactly true. QM theory posits there is no distinction between particles with the same quantum numbers. For example, two free electrons in a positive spin state are truly indistinguishable.

Nuclei are a bit more complex. There can be several spin states (and thus energy levels & quantum numbers) of the protons & neutrons, for example (although still a limited number of states). This can (and will) affect decay rates; but you would have to isolate and identify which atoms had which spin states (by separation with a magnetic field, for example) to get this information. Problem is, such an apparatus would have the effect of changing some of the quantum numbers (some of the spins would "realign" with the magnetic field). There would thus be some "smearing" of the original identity of the nuclei caused by the mere fact that you are trying to isolate them - an effect that is totally unavoidable. This blurry zone is statistical in nature; one can only be sure within a statistical certainty of which original particles they are looking at. With lone neutrons (the simplest decaying "nucleus"), you have no certainty at all; with plutonium nuclei, where there are many more quantum numbers to work with, you can (in theory) separate them with less alteration to the initial identities.

If you consider large molecules, there are so many possible quantum states that you start to approach the limit of a classical (i.e. normal) system; they are almost certain to retain their "original" identity upon observation. Nuclei sort of ride that "middle zone" of being truly indistinguishable and distinguishable; they can be properly said to have a limited number of distinguishable states which can be observed on an individual basis with a limited certainty.

(Hope I got all this right; I'm a much newer player to this game than Physicist et.al. QM can really give you a headache.)

[js1138]

So returning to the original question, will two nuclei having the same spin state decay at the same time? Is there any property of an atom that predicts decay time?

[Physicist]

That's all fine. The way I think about atoms is that, while indentical particles will mix their wavefunctions, you can in practice "mark" one of a pair of otherwise identical atoms by adding or subtracting a neutron or electron. (Easier to visualize than a spin state.) Throw the two of them into a box together and their wavefunctions almost won't mix. I say "almost" because there's a finite probability the spare neutron or electron can "tunnel" from one atom to the other.

[spunkets]

"For example, two free electrons in a positive spin state are truly indistinguishable."

If they're in a free state, they can be distinguished. Consider Milliken's experiment and spacial separation. In systems, distinguishability depends on spin, as you were describing. A beam energy of electrons(Fermions) with net spin, is higher than a random spin beam. A polarized photon(Boson) beam has the same energy as an unpolarized one. That's the idea in your post.

On these threads it's common to find the belief that random processes have no cause, or that random is a cause. In this subthread, the former was the topic. Random refers to the process itself, is evidenced by the outcome and at any point in the process. If all processes in Nature weren't random, the probability of a real photon "hv" being absorbed by an harmonic oscillator would be zilch, because the linewith was zero and every trial would fail. ie. the tolerance is too tight.

[RightWingAtheist]

Continuing this off-topic discussion, I was wondering if I could ask a question which has been on my mind lately. It is my understanding that the wavelength of a particle is inversely related to its momentum, and that therefore, in an accelerator, where both the velocity and the mass of the particles are continualy increasing, the wave aspect of the particle becomes less noticeable. But is there any way in which the wave nature of matter has been or potentially can be exploited in HEP experiments?

[Quark2005]

But is there any way in which the wave nature of matter has been or potentially can be exploited in HEP experiments?

The answer is yes and no, depending on the context of your question. In the broad setting of the lab, particles in HEP behave very specifically like particles, as their wavelength is so small. Remember, though, that high-energy particles are used to probe tiny distances in collisions, where the wave properties of matter are inextricable from the particle properties. (Actually, relativistic QM, or quantum field theory, is used to understand the properties of these collisions. QFT calculations are very esoteric; the quantum mechanical "structure" of particles is inherent in it and the "wave" and "particle" aspects can't really be explicitly extricated.)

In low-energy physics (a whole other equally important, though less sensationalistic) subfield, approximating particles in scattering experiments as waves is done using partial wave analysis all the time.

[Quark2005]

So returning to the original question, will two nuclei having the same spin state decay at the same time?

No, they have a fixed half-life, but the decay time is governed by probability.

Is there any property of an atom that predicts decay time?

Exact decay time, no. You're right on the $$$, there. There are properties that predict half-lives (probable decay times), but not actual decay times.

[Quark2005]

If they're in a free state, they can be distinguished.

True. I implicitly assumed free localized electrons with similar momenta when I made my statement (something I shouldn't have done).

Keep in mind though, that from a QM point of view, even unlocalized electrons are considered identical until a measurement is made, at which time they are placed into a position and/or momentum eigenstate (one of an infinite possible allowed number when in free space) - this imparted quantum "number" then gives a unique identity to the particle. You are right in this - free particles do not have discrete position/momenta spectra.

On these threads it's common to find the belief that random processes have no cause, or that random is a cause.

QM (Bell's inequality, etc.) only shows that random processes have no localized, physically measurable cause. It says nothing about globally hidden variables. (Then again, this starts getting us into the realm of the metaphysical and unmeasurable.)

[spunkets]

" QM (Bell's inequality, etc.) only shows that random processes have no localized, physically measurable cause. It says nothing about globally hidden variables. (Then again, this starts getting us into the realm of the metaphysical and unmeasurable.)"

All processes are random. With such phenomenon as EPR, all such system states began in causal contact. The spacelike "comm" between the 2 particles is simply due to phase shifts in an existing field. No energy exchange is necessary, because that was done when the field was established. The field and it's properties are the cause. I see local as defined by the boundary of the system, in these cases of spacelike separation of bound particles. That's, because the state isn't a function of distance, only E.