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.

[furball4paws]

BOINK!

[jwalsh07]

If nature is irregular, why would a designer screw it up so bad?

He invested in Ex-Lax?

[grey_whiskers]

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.

Crux of the matter number two.

By "definition" science cannot measure the supernatural.

Several corollaries:

1. Science by its own methods, ab initio so to speak, cannot distinguish between competing supernatural claims. Hence the Flying Spaghetti Monster.

2. Since science is there to observe, to predict, to control [and just maybe get rich and famous--! :-) ] anything that cannot be controlled tends to get ignored, or an attempt is made to "average it out." Since by definition the impact of God on experiments cannot be *known* (and would tend to obviate the reason for the experiments anyway), God is ignored or dismissed. (See also Occam's Razor).

3. Add to these the fact that empiricism has done so well to predict and control things, and various flavors of the supernatural (e.g. magic) have not always "reliably" done so. To quote C.S. Lewis in one of his novels: For Paracelsus and Agrippa and the rest had acheived little or nothing: Bacon himself -- no enemy to magic except on this account -- reported that the magicians "attained not to greatness and certainty of works". So since science tends to categorize, and to assume uniformity of causes where possible, the potential is there to sweep ALL supernatural, "magic", what have you, into the same category, on account of their common contrast with the physical, empirical, measurable.

So the potential exists -- and whether it has been fulfilled is the salient point -- to conclude "God was only an illusion, invented by savages to explain a complex world. We the cognoscenti have no need of such childish explanations, no matter how appealing they are to the unsophisticated as a vestigial cultural survival from earlier times."

But the question is, underlying all of this, how WOULD one prove or disprove God, given the claim that God is

a) "supernatural", and
b) able to cooperate, or not, with experiments, without telling us either way which one he is doing at a particular point.

Without a resolution of this issue the rest is merely moonshine.

(The secularist would just say: You have claimed GOD, it is up to you to PROVE him. The error implicit in this statement is left as a proof to interested lurkers.)

Cheers!

[grey_whiskers]

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.

Interesting. You are the only person on either side on any of these threads who has touched on some of the interesting aspects of the simulations; even though to my way of thinking you are somewhat mischaracterizing them.

How fruitful the simulations could be, if they were used systematically to investigate [note the lack of split infinitive] features of the biosystem and their influences on the predicted and actual rates of speciation, instead of just as parlor tricks to intimidate creationists, remains to be seen :-)

Cheers!

[b_sharp]

"You tell me sharpy. No new phyla since the Cambrian. Why?

Yes there has been. And some before the Cambrian.

Cnidaria developed in the Vendian. Bryozoa developed in the Ordovician. Ctenophora in the Devonian. Nematoda in the Cenozoic. The vast majority are indeed from the Cambrian but since the active time of the Cambrian was about 43 million years long - which isn't a drop in the bucket - the explosion was more of a slight bang.

You tell me Walsh old buddy, what body plan did the phyla (Chordata) that we are a part of start with and how similar is it to ours? While you are at it you might want to compare the difference between the first Chordate (Cathaymyrus) and our form to the difference between our phyla and another related phyla. Which shows greater change?

General body plans may have originated in a relatively short time in the Cambrian, but many of those body plans were more similar to each other than they are to extant members of the same phyla.

If your argument is that huge changes occurred in little time and that has not happened since, your argument is true but misleading. Larger changes have occurred in the time since the Cambrian than in the Cambrian, they just haven't included changes to the attributes that define phyla.

The main difference (aside from oxygen content) between the Cambrian environment and the environment of later radiations is the total lack of pre-existent competition in Cambrian ecologies. This lack of competition meant many forms were not weeded out.
Note: Selection actually reduces the rate of variation.

The Cambrian can not be viewed as a justification to propose a limit to morphological change because we can justly expect to recover few fossils from that Era. Soft bodies do not preserve well so intermediates between the phyla should not be expected.

Other Eras have enough intermediate fossils for us to conclude large morphological changes do result from known evolutionary mechanisms.

[grey_whiskers]

Hence, the egg came first.

I'm surprised at you.

Being from Texas, you of all people ought to know better.

Of course, the rooster came first.
How do ya think the egg got fertilized, anyway? :-0

[grey_whiskers]

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

Time to stir the pot. Didn't I see within the last couple years on Discovery Channel, or Nova, or some such--or was it some crackpot thing like Chariots of the Gods--the idea advanced that life on Earth was "seeded" by an advanced civilization of aliens?

If this *was* put forth by some otherwise respectable scientist (or similar fellow traveler), please address your question to them.

If you are addressing your question to the Christians, I had the impression that one of the tenets of Christianity was the eternal existence of God...

If you're asking the Muslims, get a gun and a good lawyer :-)

Cheers!

[grey_whiskers]

You can always tell when a creationist lacks a fundamental understanding of science

When? WHEN? According so some of the pro-evo folks on the threads, all creationists lack a fundamental understanding of science anyway. /sarcastic exaggeration>

Full Disclosure: ...and if they do, why are they called "fundies" anway?

[grey_whiskers]

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

Absolutely uncaused, or "according to the standard model, it's uncaused" or "it may end up having a cause someday, but we sure don't know now!"

Full Disclosure: I thought certain types of nuclear decay were caused by a 1s electron impinging on the nucleus?

Cheers!

[furball4paws]

"If this *was* put forth by some otherwise respectable scientist (or similar fellow traveler), please address your question to them."

This was one of Francis Crick's babies. Unfortunately he is no longer with us. But he always said it would only answer the questions here. It puts off the questions to somewhere else, where maybe abiogenesis might be more readily achieved.

[Stultis]

If that is "orthodox," then I am a pink gerbil.

Some of Darwin's description may be retrospective in the sense of intruding later views, but in any case he also says that the believed implicitly in the moral teachings of the Bible, and was made fun of by the sailors for his propensity to quote the scriptures on every point.

What I disputed was your claim that Darwin abandoned Christianity "long before" he began speculating on species. I stand by this. One need not believe in every Biblical miracle to be "orthodox," and one need not be fully "orthodox" to be a Christian. Darwin's belief in Christianity faded gradually, and there were skeptical "free-thought" elements present in his outlook as a young adult, but the process was not complete until he was well into middle age.

[js1138]

Don't know about your "certain type."
But for those quantum events considered truly random, a local cause would contradict experimental evidence. The notion of causality derives from common experience and from experimental observation. The apparent lack of causation in certain quantum events derives from theory and from carefully controlled experiments. What the ultimate TRUTH is, no one knows, but it is incorrect to assert that everything has a cause. The evidence currently favors the opposite.

[Pietro]

ping

[AndrewC]

To such people, if a heart (or an eye or a bacterial flagellum) looks designed, that’s proof enough that it is designed.

This is the pot calling the kettle black. What proof was used when the mesonychus was considered a whale? What proof was used to place the pakicetus in its place? Simply, something in it "looked" whalelike.

[grey_whiskers]

Most laws are not simply produced, as it where ex nihilo, by a "law-giver".

Most of them in the U.S. are promulgated as "regulations" by un-elected, career bureaucrats in various and sundry government "departments".

No cheers, unfortunately.

[Torie]

Continuing with existing designs is far more probable than mutations generating entirely new ones?

[grey_whiskers]

Dante called him "il maestro di color che sanno"

Translation please, for those of us who don't speak Greek?

..as in, "It's all Greek to me"

Cheers!

[grey_whiskers]

So no means no and no no means yes.

...and "double plus ungood" means?

[b_sharp]

"Cheers!

Let me grab another beer and then we can really toast.

[grey_whiskers]

I wouldn't have missed any one of them, no regrets, no apologies to you or anyone else! They are all wonderful memories.

Ah, yes. How many of the women still regard them as wonderful memories?

...any exchange of STDs?

...any abortions?

...any offspring left on orphanage steps à la certain French philosophers?