Introduction: The Illusion of Design [Richard Dawkins]

Natural History Magazine ^ | November 2005 | Richard Dawkins

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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.

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This is Richard Dawkins's introduction to the November, 2005, "Darwin & Evolution" issue of Natural History Magazine.

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Ping

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And here's a link to Michael Ruse's review of the book, Darwin: Discovering the Tree of Life, by Niles Eldredge:

In the U.S., Darwin still needs defending

[BelegStrongbow]

And for at least one good reason: we can elucidate laws of physics. Does this say that the set of laws we observe to operate are the only possible set and that the universe must necessarily have been?

I think not, thus Dawkins draws a distinction where there is only difference in appearance: Mount Rushmore's etching is the result of the action caused by physical properties imposed, which could have been otherwise.

[PatrickHenry]

Evolution Ping The List-O-Links

A conservative, pro-evolution science list, now with over 320 names. See the list's explanation, then FReepmail to be added or dropped. To assist beginners: But it's "just a theory", Evo-Troll's Toolkit, and How to argue against a scientific theory.

[snarks_when_bored]

I'm not quite sure I take your point. Care to elaborate?

[aculeus]

Milner, a pal of Gould and the long-time editor of NH magazine. Now he hires Dawkins (Gould's bete noir) to write an article.

Guess he/they are evolving.

[BelegStrongbow]

Simply this: Dawkins is taking the laws of physics to be immutable and assumes they are as they must be. In fact, we have inferred the laws of physics by watching and measuring the operations we see occurring around us. We first infer such 'laws' as theorems, suggesting that they are probably true. As evidence continues to mount, we then harden our opinion about them all say thay always operate and are thus 'laws'.

So, let's stipulate that physical laws really are fundamental are really do operate the same way everywhere.
Now, what authority do we have to state that the physical laws we have inferred to exist are the only possible set of physical laws that could be. It seems to me that we can't eliminate such a possibility, just that only one set of physical laws appears to operate. That's not the same thing but is very much what Dr. Dawkins does not want to talk about. There is no illusion about intelligent design, it amounts to higher intellectualized trash talk. It certainly reassures those who don't bother to think these things through and confirms their lack of intellectual inquiry, but it does not contribute to the discussion, save to call those who disagree with his opinion about the source of physical law delusional.

I find his own position to be short-sighted and I consider him intelligent enough to have to come up with what source he believes physical laws have, rather than to simply pass in silence over the whole question.

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I'm afraid I don't see Dawkins asserting (even implicitly) the immutability of physical laws as we know them. Nor do I think he saw it as part of his job in this essay to address the questions of the origin of physical laws or whether the physical laws we experience could be different. Why would you think he should have done that in this particular essay devoted to introducing readers to some elementary facts about Darwinism and evolution, and also to referring readers to other articles in the magazine?

[Rudder]

Now, what authority do we have to state that the physical laws we have inferred to exist are the only possible set of physical laws that could be.

I don't know who gave you the authority. But, scientists do not have that authority and do not make such ludicrous presumptions.

Case in point: This one was recently posted here at FR, but I've not got the time right now to search it out. A physicist at Harvard proposes that gravity may leak from a fifth dimension into the known four dimensions. Such a phenomenon, if verified, would radically alter our understanding of the "physical laws."

There are many other examples, some related to Einstein's theories on gravity, but the point is made.

[BelegStrongbow]

I see it as intellectual totalitarianism to publicly call out your intellectual opponents with ad hominems suggesting no sane person even listens to them when the issue which is really at point, what is the source for the basis of one's own theory, is utterly ignored. I didn't say he said what he said, I said he didn't say it and his utter silence doesn't make it go away.

[Publius6961]

Nonbelievers make me laugh. Their obsession with attacking believers is right up there with the obsession of really ugly lesbians attacking motherhood and embracing killing babies.

It makes as much sense as a quadriplegic dog skier...

[Publius6961]

Nonbelievers make me laugh. Their obsession with attacking believers is right up there with the obsession of really ugly lesbians attacking motherhood and embracing killing babies.

It makes as much sense as a quadriplegic dog skier...

[Rudder]

Check these two examples:

Fifth Dimension

Quantum Cat States

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I suppose I'd say that an essay is not a treatise. And it's a question still being investigated by physicists and cosmologists whether our cosmic bubble (with its physical laws and conditions) is the only one or whether perhaps it's only one of myriads (the number 10⁵⁰⁰ gets bandied about by 'landscape' folks like Susskind).

But the question whether intelligent design is really science or not (Dawkins and many others, myself included, say it isn't) doesn't depend on the precise character of our physical laws at the deepest level or whether those laws are unique in the wider universe.

[Rudder]

Second attempt to correct the link:

Fifth Dimension

[shuckmaster]

Thanks for a great new tagline!

[dhuffman@awod.com]

Thanks for the reminder of Dawkins, whom I haven't read that I recall.

On your 'immutability of physical laws' corespondent; I reccommend some reading on 'the Science Wars'. From the 'left', Norman Levitt writes Prometheus Bedeviled. Paul R. Gross and Levitt edited The Flight From Science and Reason that introduced me to this genre that I have found very satisfying. Alan Sokal's essay Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity is a bright spot in the war against unreason.

[Gumlegs]

Alan Sokal's essay Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity is a bright spot in the war against unreason.

Subtle.

[snarks_when_bored]

Thanks for a great new tagline!

It's a good 'un...