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.

[Dimensio]

One could go on and on and on about the ab surdity of this THEORY,

You can always tell when a creationist lacks a fundamental understanding of science when they emphasize the word "theory". They only emphasize the word because they don't understand what a "theory" is in the context of science.

[edsheppa]

The fact that all people recognize the natural moral law as binding on all people at all times...

Not true. Sociopaths do not. Young children do not. IMO it is questionable whether a "normal" adult not raised in a culture that inculcates this concept would. Further, to speak of "natural more law" is not warranted given the range of moralities we have observed. For example, I consider slavery and cannibalism and human sacrifice to be immoral. And yet they have been practiced, some of them commonly, throughout history. Either these are not prohibited by natural moral law or the people of those cultures did not recognize them as universally binding.

I also take exception to your other claims about the need for a "timeless moral authority" unless you would include a person himself as such an authority. One can choose to behave morally for a variety of reasons, e.g. by seeing the consequences of not doing so or an evolved predisposition. But allowing a person to be his own timeless moral authority would render your point empty.

As long as I'm at it, you're also wrong that only a "mind" can reason (assuming you're playing fair and using the common meaning of that term). People write computer programs that reason but no one would impute minds to the ones we can write at this time.

[js1138]

I don't know of anything, aside from God, that is uncaused.

A number of quantum events are uncaused. Radioactive decay of the nucleus is uncaused.

[Antonello]

>So are you saying that science owes Christianity free reign

I don't know what that means, so I can't answer your question.

I apologize for any confusion. Let me try to rephrase: Are you saying that Christianity deserves to be a part of science now simply because they had a powerful influence over men of science in ages past?

>...simply because it lorded its power over the great thinkers during its medieval heyday?

By funding their research, as in the case of Copernicus? The evidence you present is selective.

That would certainly be a part of what gave them power over anyone that wished to pursue scientific interests. Controlling the purse strings granted control over the research. Add to that the means to politically quash and physically penalize those they disagreed with provided a significant grip over these scientific pioneers, to say the least. That doesn't mean the Church can claim to be the basis for scientific advances, though. Just that those that did form this basis were bound by the limitations such control put on them.

[CarolinaGuitarman]

"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."

From a taxonomic standpoint, the question is not answerable. The new species would only be evident after the fact, when the population that was speciating was at a point we could confidently call *chicken*. There would not be one member of that population though that you could point to and say, "This is the first chicken!". The entire population would be moving toward *chicken-hood*. This talk is making me hungry. :)

[Right Wing Professor]

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

I know that way of looking at them is neither useful nor meaningful. Where were the laws before we figured them out? What happens when we find a law, that we thought was universal, in fact isn't, like the law of conservation of matter? Were we given a defective law, or did we think we had a law that wasn't a law? If the latter is true, how do we know there are any laws at all?

[MeanWestTexan]

Well, my line would be drawn where we could take a current chicken, have it mate with the ancestor, and if they have a viable offspring (that can itself reproduce), the ancestors's still a chicken.

The generation(s) before that, where you don't have viable offspring in such a time-machine mating, would be the not-quite-a-chicken.

Or, we could just cook it, to see if it tastes like chicken. :)

[Right Wing Professor]

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.

So the law of grammar that says that a double negation is an affirmation is not a universal law, although it is a law of English grammar. So did God give us the laws of English grammar?

[js1138]

Being serious for a moment, what would Chomsky say about this? (Not a rhetorical question.))

[Senator Bedfellow]

He might very well sign on to something like an ID interpretation - he's dropped hints about it before, IIRC. They can have him :)

[CarolinaGuitarman]

"Or, we could just cook it, to see if it tastes like chicken. :)"

I think that's the most logical course of action. :)

[snarks_when_bored]

There are some very simple organic molecules. Methane, some alcohols, formaldehyde, the simpler amino acids.

Those are the ones I was talking about. They form (or contain) the building blocks for more complicated organics. And they formed by themselves (unless you're going to claim that their constituent hydrogen atoms and carbon atoms and nitrogen atoms and others were whipped into shape by an invisible hand...).

These sorts of molecules are the ones that Dawkins is referring to when he talks about the ratcheting process. As he puts it, "[a]s the generations unfold, ratcheting takes the cumulative improbability up to levels that—in the absence of the ratcheting—would exceed all sensible credence." Yes, they inhabit living cells; but we're witnessing late versions of these molecules, and we still have a dim picture of the history preceding their development.

[Right Wing Professor]

He'd say there's a universal grammar, but that's not exactly the same thing.

[b_sharp]

"Not any more than any other laws. No, of course not. But human laws have authors, which is my point. So why when we observe laws in nature do we presume that they have no author? This is contrary to other lived experiences. The presumption should be otherwise.

You are equivocating. Humans do author laws. Physical laws are simply a description of observations. There are no 'laws' in nature. There are in the physical world consistent phenomena that we observe. The consistency allows us to develop mathematical models that describe those actions under specific conditions.

You are conflating the 'law' with the phenomenon.

"Is the "Law of Gravitation" a law or a consistency, that is, is it a statistical probability? My understanding is that the law admits of no exceptions."

The 'Law of Gravity' is a law, as penned by humans. The law of gravity (our description) breaks down in the micro world of quantum physics. Most laws do have exceptions, even the 'Second Law of Thermodynamics' for some substances as they approach zero degrees K.

"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. No one's forcing you to take the side of irrationality. You have chosen it freely."

What is bordering on the irrational is to assume that because humans create legalities that we call laws that the phenomena behind the laws of physics must have been produced by law-givers. The laws of nature (I'm using this as a shorthand to refer to the phenomena the laws describe) and the laws of man are not similar.

The same goes for design. We design. We can recognize our own work. Because some features of nature remind us of our own work we jump to the conclusion that it too must be designed. This is a huge jump. What isn't contained in this equation is our reliance on nature to give us design ideas. The similarity of our design to nature's design is based on our observation of nature, our innate abilities and limitations and the constraints the laws of physics (my shorthand again) places on both us and nature.

As for Dembski's ideas of complexity and specificity as well as his unfounded and unsupported 'Law of Conservation of Information' have been roundly debunked by a mathematician and a biologist Here and by others Here and Here.

The assumption that only intelligences can produce complexity that appears to have a purpose is simply that, an assumption.

[RightWhale]

we can elucidate laws of physics

I wouldn't know if that necessarily requires design, but it does require some characteristics remain constant. That could be taken as a corollary of design.

[rootkidslim]

Any enemy of Steven Jay Gould (dead or alive) is a friend of mine! Forgive this post, but I saw his name and I posted before I read a single response. (I'm sure this thread is mired in controversy now) I read The Selfish Gene and The Extended Phenotype and I've been an admirer ever since. The only question I have is how he can be a lefty. It would seem to me that his views would dictate that he would be a conservative. No matter, I give him the same wide philosophical berth I give Christopher Hitchens. (my other favorite lefty)

[puroresu]

#####I know that way of looking at them is neither useful nor meaningful. Where were the laws before we figured them out?#####

Assuming they exist, they were there before we figured them out. However, it's doubtful we've even scratched the surface of 0.0001% of all the knowledge of the universe.


#####What happens when we find a law, that we thought was universal, in fact isn't, like the law of conservation of matter? Were we given a defective law, or did we think we had a law that wasn't a law?#####


I would assume the latter. However, it's only an assumption. Likewise, it's an assumption that there's a God who designed the universe to work in certain ways, and an assumption that there isn't such a God. I see no reason why science should require the latter assumption.


#####If the latter is true, how do we know there are any laws at all?#####


Maybe there aren't any laws. Maybe all the laws we currently think inviolable, aren't. Our knowledge of the universe is very primitive, limited, and superficial. We can't rule out the possibility that today's most brilliant scientists and their most trusted theories won't be discarded as passe nonsense two centuries from now. That's why it's always good to keep an open mind and not just declare the prevailing orthodoxy to be a settled issue that we must all rally around or be declared boobs. :-)

[don asmussen]

Right Wing Professor: You mean, like common law? The laws of grammar?

Yes. The former reflects a universally recognized moral laws (i.e., theft is wrong). The fact that all people recognize the natural moral law as binding on all people at all times indicates the existence of a timeless moral authority, since only an authority can bind someone to a law.
Aquinasfan

The people of the USA recognize only Constitutional law as binding, -- and trial by jury to establish whether a specific "theft is wrong".

We the people are our own "authority", not your particular concept of a "moral Authority" .

[b_sharp]

"Like the "evolution" of finch beak size?

Are you trying to imply that the adaptation of beak size and shape is *not* evolution?

[js1138]

I'm just curious about a universal grammar that seems to say exactly nothing about actual instances of human grammar. Can you say anything at all about human language based on universal grammar?

Can you formulate a rule, for example, for generating the sentence, "He's bad."