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.

[js1138]

My understanding is that the law admits of no exceptions.

The inverse square law does not hold under all conditions. What is it that you think admits of no exceptions?

[b_sharp]

"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?"

I'm sure you feel this is a rebuttal of some sort to my point, but I suspect you are alone in this.

Science became self-sustaining, despite the environment it developed in, because it increased the speed and reliability of research into the natural world.

[chronic_loser]

agreed. If i could train an asshole to fart out pythagoras, it would not be any less true. It is, however, etremely tendentious and obnoxious to have to put up with the means of transmission. Dawkins is bright, but not nearly so bright as he imagines himself to be. One would think an Oxford don knows the meaning of "obstreporous" In his "dialogue" with Steven Pinker from MIT, titled "is science killing the soul," Dawkins is honest enough to state that reductionism cannot apply reductionist principles to build a comprehensive model of the human psyche (he would probably add the faith based qualifier "yet"):

Now, there are, of course many unsolved problems, and scientists are the first to admit this. There are aspects of human subjective consciousness that are deeply mysterious. Neither Steve Pinker nor I can explain human subjective consciousness -- what philosophers call qualia. In How the Mind Works Steve elegantly sets out the problem of subjective consciousness, and asks where it comes from and what's the explanation. Then he's honest enough to say, "Beats the heck out of me." That is an honest thing to say, and I echo it. We don't know. We don't understand it.

He then rightly states that just because there is no deterministic model which cannot explain it, this does not "prove" that some supernatural theorem is true. All this is true enough.

My problem with Dawkins is that he makes a wild jump from this "God of the gaps" charge to inferring that this firmly anchors "true science" as being done within a mechanistic, or materialistic framework, and that anything else is mystical hocum, a step away from bringing in the witch doctor to chant and dance away the evil spirits.

While I can understand that coming from some first year biology student, that kind of silly horseshit is precisely what does NOT belong in science. It is philosophy masquerading as science. Dawkins is smart enough to see that, but his unreasoning hatred for all things religious pushed him into an arbitrarily defined universe where he blithely pronounces his philosophical presuppositions concerning the natural universe as "science" itself. It is not only arrogant, it is fundamentally dishonest.

And...., did you miss the fact that I thought him a wee bit arrogant?

[balch3]

Mega Barf alert.

[Right Wing Professor]

The laws of grammar correspond to universally recognized first principles of reason, such as the law of non-contradiction

Oh dear. So why does double negation result in an affirmative in English, but a negative in Russian, if these correspond to universal principles?

Basically, what you're doing is assigning whatever you can't assign to an identifiable person to God, and then deducing from that, that all laws must have a giver.

[Right Wing Professor]

The inverse square law does not hold under all conditions. What is it that you think admits of no exceptions?

My understanding too. The statement you quote was not mine.

[frgoff]

I don't know what you mean by this. Plenty of organic compounds have been spotted floating around in space. You're not suggesting that they're alive, are you?

Organic simply means the compound contains carbon, and there are not plenty of organic compounds floating around in space. There are some very simple organic molecules. Methane, some alcohols, formaldehyde, the simpler amino acids.

We're talking about the real moleclues of life, if you will. How about the protein chains required for the Krebbs cycle? What about ATP or ADP?. These molecules cannot exist outside of living organisms. The intermediates are unstable outside of very specialized conditions and the presence of specific enzymes to catalyze the reactions.

And the geometry of the proteins is essential, too. They have to form in such a way with the proper helper enzymes so that they fold into the correct shapes, otherwise they are usless or even harmful. These compounds simply cannot form or exist outside of living organisms; the physical laws governing the formation of their chemical bonds prevents it.

[chronic_loser]

There are actually statements of some sort of religious belief long after the publication of "Origin." However, he announced that the reason he dropped out of divinity school was the rejection of some of the seminal tenets of orthodox Christianity. So, maybe he was a "believer" of something related to orthodoxy. Not to try to get a measuring stick out to see who knew more about Darwin (I am sure that you do!)..., just stating what little bit I am familiar with.

[CarolinaGuitarman]

Dawkins doesn't think that evolution deals with the origins of life either. He, unlike you, understands that abiogenesis is a separate field.

[caffe]

Dawkins is the illusionist. Remember all his computer simulations? He used many unrealistic assumptions that favor evolution. His simulations assumed away everything that could prevent evolution.

They did not allow extinction, which normally would terminate all further evolution
They did not allow error catastrophe, which normally would cause a degeneration away from any target sequence
They did not allow canyons and hills in the fitness terrain (which BTW is never defined) which normally would prevent evolution
In short, they assume naive natural selection - that evolution is upward, ever upward.

So having artificially disallowed all possible failure modes, it is not surprising that the evolutions simulations worked.

Dawkins' readers got the impression he casually threw the computer simulation together and speedy evolution just happened automatically.
So Dawkins, in his computer simulation aids the ILLUSION that evolution is simple in concept, inevitable, and fast.

One could go on and on and on about the ab surdity of this THEORY, but the cultists refuse to leave the plantation.

[js1138]

Ooops.I pinged the wrong post. Sorry.

Doesn't matter much. The actual target is room temperature.

[Aquinasfan]

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'.

It's a cause and effect thing. I don't know of anything, aside from God, that is uncaused. Similarly, I know of no law that has no "law-giver" or creator, etc.

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.

What's your point?

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?

From his own words. Let me put it to you this way. If some dude at work mentioned something like this at coffee break, would you question his character? I sure as hell would.

Your willingness to condemn the man without evidence...

Publicly declaring, without prompting, that he sleeps around, doesn't constitute evidence of a lack of morals? I suspect that your confusion regarding his character would evaporate if he was dating your sister.

...is disturbing and calls into question your judgment.

Oh dear.

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.

But the issues which he positions himself to judge the truth or falsity of will determine whether his promiscuity is the result of matter in motion or a sinful character.

He has a vested interest in the debate and should recuse himself.

[MeanWestTexan]

No, merely noting that, per evolutionary theory, the first-whatever-we-now-call a chicken had parents who were not-quite-yet-what-we-call-chickens.

Hence, the egg came first.

[chronic_loser]

e and o in obstreperous. sorry, dyslexia of the fingers

[Aquinasfan]

That's very classical, and there are exceptions. General relativity is a more general way of treating gravity, and it's a theory. So did God give us GR, or was it Einstein?

God, ultimately. Basically, my point is that this orderly and intelligible universe reflects an orderly Intelligence.

[puroresu]

#####....and then deducing from that, that all laws must have a giver.#####


Do you know for a fact that there is no giver to the laws of physics or chemistry?

[RobbyS]

Well, Mr. Dawkins, is there objective truth or is everything a matter of perception ? If the latter why do you insist so vigorously on the truth of what you say?

[don asmussen]

Aquinasfan wrote:

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.

Dawkins answers:

"-- 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. --

-- 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? --"

Can you [or anyone here] answer the resulting rational question? -- Who designed the Designer's "spontaneous origin"?

[Aquinasfan]

Oh dear. So why does double negation result in an affirmative in English, but a negative in Russian, if these correspond to universal principles?

Because both English and Russian speakers recognize the underlying principles of negation and affirmation. The specifics are irrelevant, otherwise English speakers and Russian speakers would be unable to communicate the notions of affirmation and negation, and you would be unable in principle to pose your problem.

[BelegStrongbow]

However, it is a comfort to know that the evolutionary curia has representatives here in Freep to make sure that orthodoxy is maintained. Personally, I'll stand with Cranmer and urge Ridley to make such a blaze as shall ignite all Christendom!!