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.

[Quark2005]

Maybe the original point has been lost on this thread somewhere (and correct me if I'm mistaken), but I believe RWP is talking about spatial inversion - this concept is used often in quantum field theory - i.e. whether or not objects/particles are invariant under spatial i.e. parity inversion. The concept does not pertain as to whether such an inversion is physically possible; it is just a mathematical tool used to investigate the symmetries of objects/particle.

Unless an object has symmetry, a 3-D inversion will change it to a different object. For example, invert all 3 dimensions of a screw, and you have a screw with the opposite thread direction - you can't get back to the original object by simply rotating it. Invert a 1-D line-like object in 3-D space, though, you still have the same object - just rotate it back around. However, if you "live" in a 1-D space and you invert a 1-D object, it is a new object, because you can't get the same object back without rotating it through a 2nd dimension (which doesn't "exist" in a 1-D space). Basically, a body inverted along N dimensions in an N-dimensional space is not invariant unless there is a symmetry along at least one dimension, but a body inverted along N-1 or less dimensions in an N-dimensional space is invariant.

r9etb, I thought the question you referred to as "dim" was the most insightful one on this subject here (made me think pretty hard about this).

[spunkets]

"Who said anything about time passing? Where is time in the inversion operation I x -> - x? "

Inverison is a logical construct. It's a function of intelligence. W/o some underlying physical reality to provide the mechanics of that intellegence function, the logical construct doesn't exist. IOWs if there's no one arround to ponder, nothing will be pondered.

The physical universe is the set of all physical reality. Physical reality requires the dimenisonal attributes of location and persistence. Time is a measure of persistence. The peceptible universe is 4D. If one ponders a lower dimensional universe persistence is fixed at some sufficiently long lifetime.

[Right Wing Professor]

Inversion is an event. If there is no time in RWP's single dimension universe, an inversion will not occur.

An inversion operation is not an event. Your argument is circular. An event implies it occured at some point in time. Once again, where is time as a variable in the identity I posted? You still haven't answered the question.

[js1138]

http://www2.truman.edu/~edis/writings/articles/accident.html

I think the burden on those who believe quantum events are not truely random.

[Right Wing Professor]

No. She has asserted that one could not perform an inversion in a 1D universe without stepping outside it. But that's a false assertion. There is nothing in the formal structure of a 1D inversion that needs to contain more than one coordinate - the coordinate of that dimension.

The problem you're both having is that you're trying to think intuitively in a formal system for which your intuition really doesn't work. The way you're thinking about inverting something is to turn it. There's another way, by the way, that that doesn't work in a space of odd dimension. Example: inverting a right hand gives a left hand. But you can't rotate a right hand onto a left hand.

[spunkets]

"I think the burden on those who believe quantum events are not truely random."

Randomness is a property of event occurance in the system. It does not refer to causation. You said uncaused events happen. There are no uncaused events.

[hosepipe]

[ Yours is a most fascinating speculation. I can't say it's wrong, dear hosepipe. And I'll be thinking it over some more! ]

So then I have NOT decended into total Moonbatery.. Thats a relief.. Nothing worse that being a loney Moonbat in a real cave alone.. All squeeks then, are your own echos.. Thanks..

[razorbak]

BUMP! [as if this type of thread needed it]

[cornelis]

All squeaks then, are your own echos.

The social criterion of truth is one of the hardest to resist. It seems to be a kind of might-makes-right argument and presses its way into the popular conscience through polling practices. It shows to the poverty of the human psyche. At least we need not by cycloptic and accept it as the criterion.

In the opening of the Republic, Socrates' friends compel him to join them, and he asks for a good reason. They reply, "because we are more than you."

[chronic_loser]

I think the burden on those who believe quantum events are not truely random.

You ever play pool with Hume?

[hosepipe]

[ The social criterion of truth is one of the hardest to resist. It seems to be a kind of might-makes-right argument and presses its way into the popular conscience through polling practices. It shows to the poverty of the human psyche. At least we need not by cycloptic and accept it as the criterion. ]

The statement could send Prof. Erwin Cory away humiliated..
But somehow it makes me "feel" better about myself.. Thanks..
You are a piece of work, Cornelis...

[chronic_loser]

Because they [much deleted] starts ranting and raving about secularism. When a creationist tells me that "Sorry to break it to you but you and Hiter have the same ideas." not because of any political or social views that I expressed but simply because I happen to accept the theory of evolution.

did one person really do all that shit, or is that kind of a "greatest hits" compendium?

[Poser]

I hate these threads. There are hardly ever any pictures of Ann Coulter.

[chronic_loser]

Best post of the day!!!!!

[r9etb]

Well, now you've effectively cut it down from "many" to "some." When you get to "a few wingnuts" then perhaps we can talk about their "wickedness".

[js1138]

If an event is truely random, explain the cause.

[r9etb]

I hate these threads. There are hardly ever any pictures of Ann Coulter

They're on every post, actually -- but taken from the side.

[furball4paws]

I am going to put a different spin on time. I think, based on absolutely no evidence whatsoever, that time will be found to be particulate.

It makes for interesting contemplations.

[Dimensio]

did one person really do all that shit, or is that kind of a "greatest hits" compendium?

Each incident came from a different creationist poster, except in the one case where I made mention of a creationist doing two things to illustrate that particular creationist's hypocracy.

If all of that had really just come from one person, I wouldn't be making unpleasant generalizations that have gotten r9etb in such a tizzy.

[spunkets]

"If an event is truely random, explain the cause.

Random simply refers to a distribution of outcomes for events. The cause is what drives the events in the first place. Note these are both general concepts. Pointing to a particular cause requires a particular system to examine. Do you have an example where you want a cause IDed?