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.

[Doctor Stochastic]

There are four basic food groups: ice cream, pizza, soft drinks, potato chips.

[hosepipe]

[ It takes at least two spatial dimensions to invert. No. One is sufficient. ]

You cannot invert here to there if there is no there..

[hosepipe]

[ There are four dimensions: time, space, substance, and individuality. These are all illusory. ]

Hmmm... In a first reality or in a second reality.?.

[cornelis]

These are all illusory.

Illusion has a basis in reality for it to be illusory.

[caffe]

I think if you investigate Speciation, it is another illusion. Punctuated equilibria places emphasis on speciation: dominance and non-directionality. Punctuated equilibria says speciation events are where most evolution occurs..that it allows change to happen. Eldredge and Tattersall state" Most major change is related to speciation events. Certainly no one has ever shown much real evolutionary change to occur in lineages where there has been no speciation." During these speciation/punctuation events, a new species experiences a large amount of evolutionary change. Gould, Stanley and Eldredge admit that the direction of speciation is highly unpredictable or "random". "There simply is no hard and fast relationship between the origin of new species and the sorts of anatomical and behavioral changes which are the stuff of adaptive evolution" (Eldredge and Tattersall)
So since they claim most evolution occurs in short, rapid bursts (punctuation) followed by stasis. This produces a large morphological gap. They then claim most evolution occurs at speciation. Also Speciation has no inherent directionality. A daughter species, for example, tends to originate in a random, non-adaptive direction from the parent species.
So how do you explain adaptation. How can adaptation arise if change is concentrated in events that are random concerning adaptation?
Guess what they come up with? A mechanism they call species selection: selection at the species level. According to this, entire species are selected, rather than individual organisms. So entire species survive or perish, according to their adaptations.
Speciation is to species selection as mutation is to individual selection.

So see the illusion? evolutionary theory has structure.
They claim species selection reequires that species are driven extinct because they are less adapted. BUT this is speculative and not supported by the fossil record.
Raup, evolutionist, admits this "Sadly, the only evidence we have for the inferiority of victims of extinction is the fact of their extinction" A circular argument.
Also John Maynard Smith used population genetics to show that species selection is inadequate to account for the degree of adaptation observed in the record.
One could go on and on and on but every time a theory is revealed to have flaws, they simply try another one. If one actually trys to keep up with all these "scientists" you can spot all the conflicts, contradictions, circular reasoning and illusions. Evolutionary theory is not science; it is a smorgasbord.

Recall, the classic evidences for evolution never were valid because evolution never predicted them. They were merely used as evidence against a designer. Evolutionary theory has no coherent structure. It is amorphous. It is malleable and can readily adjust to disparate patterns of data. Kinda like how fog accommodates landscape. Evolutionary theory FAILS to clearly predict anything about life that is actually true.

[RightWhale]

We'll each find out about reality soon enough. In the meantime serve justice: do good to friends and evil to enemies. Merry Christmas!

[RightWhale]

I don't know what illusion is, but it is definitely something.

[aNYCguy]

SWB: 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'.

AquinasFan: 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.

AF, the word law is an English word with multiple meanings. The fact that humans chose the set of phonemes "law" to describe both man-made rules and natural consistencies does not, despite your struggle to assert otherwise, imply a natural law-giver.

If scientists agreed tomorrow to refer to what we call "natural laws" instead by the set of phonemes spelled "chocolate bars," I'm sure you would argue that this decision implies the existence of a cosmic, all-powerful candy factory which set the parameters of reality.

[zeeba neighba]

I've come to realise that many of them are completely and totally wicked.

But can they hold a candle to all those "scientists" faking the data to advance their careers, lol.

[Alamo-Girl]

Indeed, a one dimensional universe would consist of a line not a point, i.e. a point on the line. But I do not see how you can invert the line without an event (time dimension) or a context (a second spatial dimension). Nor could you the geometer come up with "inversion geometry" to do it since you would require at least one time dimension and two spatial dimensions to exist physically and "do" anything.

[CarolinaGuitarman]

"I'm sure you would argue that this decision implies the existence of a cosmic, all-powerful candy factory which set the parameters of reality."

Well, smarty pants, it IS a fact that the uncaused cause is Willy Wonka. :)

[Coyoteman]

There are four basic food groups: ice cream, pizza, soft drinks, potato chips.

I thought the essential food groups were caffeine, alcohol, fats, and sugars.

Or are some of those vitamins?

[cornelis]

If scientists agreed tomorrow to refer to what we call "natural laws" instead by the set of phonemes spelled "chocolate bars,"

I can think of many reasons why they would or wouldn't. It depends where the discourse takes place. On the popular level where Dawkins lives and breathes, he knows better than any which one he'll choose.

[Alamo-Girl]

Thank you for your challenge!

How can any other than 3 dimensions be proven as any other than a mental construct.?.. I see no way..

Relativity which is based on four dimensions (three of space and one of time) has been put to the test for nearly a century now. If the theory were not solid, we would not have a space program.

Additional dimensions are increasingly accepted - both of space and time - as physics continues to search for the Higgs field/boson: Mysteries of Mass

[Right Wing Professor]

But I do not see how you can invert the line without an event (time dimension) or a context (a second spatial dimension). Nor could you the geometer come up with "inversion geometry" to do it since you would require at least one time dimension and two spatial dimensions to exist physically and "do" anything.

Inversion in 1D is an operator I such that, for every x, I x -> -x.

Do you see any t there? Do you see any other coordinate y there?

[wotan]

Some comments on this tripe.

He [Darwin] 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.

Not true.   Darwin hypothesized that the laws of physics could lead to the great variety of living forms in the fullness of "geologic" time.  He did not discover that they "could" or "did".

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.

And still no one has shown this can lead to life as we know it in "geologic" time.  

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.

But, then, "true" design is also not by design, hence, not true.   Is this a contradiction?

Paradoxically, the extreme simplicity of what the philosopher Daniel C. Dennett called Darwin’s dangerous idea may be its greatest barrier to acceptance.

Dennett is the kook who thinks that not only do you not exist, neither do your thoughts.

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.

This is painting with a very broad brush indeed.   More accurately:  some who reject the Darwinian and neo-Darwinian theories of evolution have argued that living structures of the complexity existing could not have evolved in "geologic" time by random variation and natural selection

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 He has always been around.   Then, you don't need an explanation of where He came from.

"intelligent-design bullyboys"

No propaganda here!   Just rational argument!

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.

The absence of a testable model for Darwinian evolution is evidence for intelligent design.   The essence of intelligent design seems to be that the Darwinians have no model for how life could have evolved by random variation and natural selection.   What does that leave?

“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.

It's just a coincidence that children, after 150 years of Darwinism, are now behaving much more like animals.

Some have said that Hitler founded his political philosophy on Darwinism.

Does the following from Mein Kampf sound more like it came from a Catholic or a Darwinian?  "The struggle for the daily livelihood leaves behind everything in the ruck that is weak or diseased or wavering, while the fight of the male for the female gives the strongest the right, or at least the possibility, for the propagation of its kind."

... 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.

So, what is your point?

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.

Dawkins is opposed to physical law!   What a mass of contradictions he is!

Science needs to understand natural selection as a force in nature, the better to oppose it as a normative force in politics.

And just what in the heck is a normative force, Mr. Dawkins?  Is it a physical force or some other kind?   If it's not physical in origin, how can you blithely ascribe everything that happens in evolution to physical forces?

Evolution is a fact.

Yes, but the Darwinian Theory of Evolution is a theory.

[RightWhale]

A line would have cartesian attributes, positive in one direction, negative in the other. Any mathematical operation could be performed on these ordered numerical values, including inversion, negation, addition, scaling, reordering, rotation, reversion, eversion, metaversion, paraversion, or any symmetry operation.

[betty boop]

The claim [God] is outside of our universe is simply a 'just so story' that attempts to place him where science can no longer reduce his realm to nothing as it has been slowly doing over the centuries.

Jeepers, b_sharp, you seem quite disappointed that anything can be conceived that is beyond the realm of science -- and that you actually appreciate/approve the aim of scientific materialism: to reduce God to "nothing" because God is (a) outside spacetime; (2) not physical; and (3) therefore not properly an object for science at all. But because God does not reduce to your method does not mean that God does not exist.

By now we have something like 39 millennia of human testimony/experience that God exists. That testimony (in some form or other) seems to be universal to all human cultures, at all times and places, throughout human history.

If you were a half-decent empiricist, I think you'd have to qualify such testimony as directly admissible in the evaluation of the question of whether God exists. To do otherwise amounts to the claim that humanity has been totally irrational, the whole human race just a gang of superstitious morons, easily misled, prior to the Enlightenment. And then -- and only then -- did humankind acquire the habits of reason and start to get things "right" -- for the first time in the history of Homo sapiens sapiens.

Instead, because you can't stick God under the microscope and subject him to direct empirical tests, or observe him through a high-power telescope, you simply say he does not exist.

And you accuse me of telling "just-so stories!" It is inconceivable to me that something outside of spacetime that is not physical can have a physical cause that arises in spacetime. And I gather that "physical cause" is what you mean by "cause."

[RightWhale]

Relativity which is based on four dimensions

Not at all. One of the early solutions involved five dimensions. The four-dimensional solution was Minkowski's. Modern solutions involve 10, 11, or 26 dimensions.

[Right Wing Professor]

By now we have something like 39 millennia of human testimony/experience that God exists.

Huh?