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.

[grey_whiskers]

He could have become the cleric of a little parsonage and still maintained an active pursuit of natural history. In fact, that was the norm.

Why hasn't anyone mentioned Mendel?

Or, for that matter, Rev. Barry Lynn? :-)

[eleni121]

"...were over a hundred women with whom I had sex...I'm no Wilt Chamberlain, but I'm sure it's over three hundred now... They are all wonderful memories."

---

Wonderul memories only if you consider yourself the center of the universe...sounds like you do sadly...and you are definitely not.

[jwalsh07]

Actually I wasn't making any specific argument. I was asking a question that I haven't found a satisfactory answer for yet sharpy ole pal.

Are you arguing that environment alone explains the contraction of Animal phylum?

As a casual observer it appears that body plans are channeled toward a discrete set out of outcomes which narrow as time goes by. Yes?

[jwalsh07]

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

I dunno. I'm in the knowledge seeking mode. Sharpy is pretty knowledgeable in his chosen field.

[Torie]

I was just inquiring. I am useless on this topic. But I do like to ask questions. I like to think I am pretty good at that. :)

[jwalsh07]

The master of those who know.

Headmaster for short.

Full disclosure: I cheated.

[jwalsh07]

LOL, I guess. How'd you do with the electoral prediction in the vacant congressional election?

[grey_whiskers]

BOINK!

An inside joke I missed?

[Torie]

Torie of the three party vote:

Campbell 52%
Young 28%
Gilchrist 20%

Result:

Campbell 46%
Young 28%
Gilchirst 26%

[jwalsh07]

As usual, excellent. Did the border guy get a heavier turnout on election day than you thought he would get?

[Torie]

Well I underestimated Gilchrist by 6%. I think he pulled some Dems votes actually (which is the surprise). There is no way 72% of those who voted were folks who voted for Bush, who got 58% in the CD in 2004. No way, Jose. The turnout may have been disproportionately GOP, but not nearly to that extent. Maybe 62% GOP as a guess. And Campbell I am quite confident didn't get many Dem votes at all. He is a Bushbot basically. :)

[jwalsh07]

Interesting in that your analysis points to the conclusion that illegal immigration is an issue that resonates across the board.

Confirming my own analysis. :-}

[Torie]

Isn't that grand. :)

[jwalsh07]

A political savant.

You should get out of the lawyering business and get into politics as a shaker and mover behind the scenes.

What the hey, you only live once when you're a near atheist. :-}

[b_sharp]

"I dunno. I'm in the knowledge seeking mode. Sharpy is pretty knowledgeable in his chosen field.

Are you insinuating that I'm way out in left field? Hah! I'm not even a fielder, I'm a pitcher.

I'll try getting you some more info about the Cambrian expansion and consequent contraction tomorrow. I'm done for the night.

[Torie]

That is an ineluctable, incontrovertible fact, I think. I only get one shot.

[185JHP]

BTTT

[caffe]

Perhaps you need to read his original publication. Again, another bunny trail. He used a computer to simulate evolution. His demonstration sought to convince the public that evolution by natural selection is a scientifically proven fact. Try reading THE BLIND WATCHMAKER again. He
failed to prove anything. If you believe he was successful, please site exactly what he proved and your proof. I believe this might be called science if you can handle it. So please, tell me exactly what aspect of your talking points do you wish to defend?

I would need to study Ray's simulation but I doubt if it proves anything. I wonder if he emulates Dawkin's unrealistic feature by determinig fitness by comparison to a distant ideal target.
Wise also did a simulation for the IBM compatible PC under DOS. It was circulated by the National Center for Science Education.

If a partaicular Darwinian scenario is to be plausible, then species must be capable of paying all the costs of doing evolutionary business. The costs must be paid through the reproduction of survivors. If the survivors cannot pay the cost, then the given evolutionary scenario is not plausible.
Haldane's Dilemma does not test natural selection. As i hope you know, it tests whether differential survival can supply a superabundance of selective traits within the available time. And much NOT to my surprise, the results show that many higher vertebrates could not have evolved in the time alleged by evolutionists. In ten million years, a human-like population could substitute no more than 1,667 beneficial mutations.
SInce evolutionists have failed to find error in Haldane's analysis, there are only two other possibilities:
1) Something is wrong with the present version of the evolutionary "story"
2) The standard model of evolutionary genetics - the one prominently displayed in all evolutionary textbooks is wrong.
evolutionists might have to openly adopt a different model of population genetics, maybe truncation selection, as a possible theoretical solution to cost problems. This has severe problems as well. But they also would have to give up the illusion - that evolutionary processes are simple and inevitable.

[Alamo-Girl]

The thought occurs to me, snarks, that Dawkins never accounts for the origins of the "unaided" laws of physics. I guess that's a question an atheist simply refuses to ask. He's happy enough to start, not from the beginning, but from Step 2....

So verrry true! Thank you for insights!

[caffe]

My objections were accurate. If you wish I could go into more detail. It's amazing to me how easily people are fooled because they do not investigate the actual methodology and simply accept the results.

Are you accepting speciation as a legitimate fact or theory?

If so, why?