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.

[PatrickHenry]

601

[snarks_when_bored]

I''d be thrilled to see your links, if you have time to locate and post them.

I could've sworn I had two PDF articles discussing the nature of the laws of physics...I can't find them now. But I do recall reading an article by Victor Stenger a couple of years ago, and I find that he has now turned that article into a book to be published next year. Here's a link to his website for the book; you can download each of his chapters as a PDF file:

The Comprehensible Cosmos: Where Do the Laws of Physics Come From?

(The name of the linked HTML file has a ring to it.)

As for the "appearance of design," doesn't Dawkins realize that things might "appear" to be designed because they actually are designed? That humans are just awfully good at spotting "design" in nature? I don't mean that a designer is running around actively producing natural forms; my conjecture is that something like an "algorithm in the beginning," as my dear friend Alamo-Girl puts it, "loaded in" that which conduces to design in the beginning. It does not fully specify absolutely every detail of organic and inorganic forms, for there is a random aspect built into the structure of things. But what it does do is constrain evolution and make it subject to laws.

I think the answer to both of your questions is "of course he realizes that". As for the 'algorithm at the beginning', one can't rule it out, but one also can't rule out that there was no algorithm but rather what we see is the unfolding of a cascade of causation from a rather simple beginning.

With respect to your remarks about Greek philosophy, you're in the company of Plato if you're distinguishing between ever-existent, always unchanging Being and never-existent, always changing Becoming (he lays that out with particular emphasis in the early pages of Timaeus, which I believe you've read if memory serves).

[snarks_when_bored]

Just a couple of quick remarks on this paragraph from your earlier post, A-G:

In the void of the beginning there is no space, no time, no energy/matter, no physical laws, no physical constants, no mathematics, no logic, no universals, no forms, no autonomy, no qualia, no physical causation. There is no physical causation in the void - the first cause must be uncaused and the only candidate for uncaused cause is God.

The sort of void you describe is indistinguishable from a perfect unity, and so would be indistinguishable from what you're calling 'God'. You're running up against the old problem of coincidentia oppositorum here, and Hegel's "the night in which all cows are black". Care is warranted!

[forsnax5]

SCHWARTZian time!

That reminds me of a short story I read many years ago, in which a con was pulled on an earthling by an alien (called a "Sloonian," IIRC) who inserted a day (called "Zeepsday," I think) between Wednesday and Thursday. The con was caught because the protagonist was "allergic to Sloonian time."

It's strange, really, what odd things will stick in your memory for decades...

:)

[snarks_when_bored]

A nice Victor Stenger article with a bit of a sting to it:

Wherever the Data Lead

Sounds like a modest proposal the Kansas Board of Education couldn't refuse...

[furball4paws]

Oh My... I didn't know you cared.

[furball4paws]

I buy most of my stuff from Penzey's. Their blends can be a little iffy, but the basic stuff is cheaper and better than any market stuff.

[betty boop]

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.

Well jeepers Professor, wherever did you get the idea that we human beings live "in" a "formal system?" I thought we all lived in a "real" system.

Who is the "idealist" here?

Sorry to be such a P.I.T.A.

[betty boop]

All squeeks then, are your own echos..

Not at all dear brother. Your "squeeks" make sense. But I'll need to follow you around for a while before I fully comprehend them.

To be continued....

[tortoise]

As for the 'algorithm at the beginning', one can't rule it out, but one also can't rule out that there was no algorithm but rather what we see is the unfolding of a cascade of causation from a rather simple beginning.

In a strict mathematical sense, there is no distinction here. Even in less strict terms, an 'algorithm' is nothing more than the name for a high-order representation of information, and therefore all information is an algorithm (and everything is information, mathematically). In this sense, there is nothing special about 'algorithms', at the "beginning" or elsewhere; if something exists at all it must be an algorithm.

The idea that data, information, patterns, computers, and algorithms are fundamentally different concepts is an intuitive but perniciously incorrect bit of common sense. It is one of the reasons information theory is so difficult to grok -- its fundamental theorems violate what most people "know".

[tortoise]

I thought we all lived in a "real" system.

Does this real system exhibit properties not describable in mathematics? I cannot think of any.

[betty boop]

Is this correct?

Sorta. But needs substantial tweaking to achieve clarity.

So do you want to help out with this clarifying "tweaking operation?"

There are always two sides to any good dialogue. Monologues tend to get boring. :^)

Thanks for writing, b_sharp!

[snarks_when_bored]

I was emphasizing the possibility that what we see is a self-unfolding process (an algorithm in process of writing itself, as it were), wishing to set that over against the idea that there was a pre-existing program that was then 'run'. I'm not sure that's a distinction without a difference (although it could be).

In fact, I tend to the view that all information is embodied information, that there was never, is not now nor will there ever be any information that is not physically carried or mediated. This is what I call the Roseanne Roseanna Danna theory of reality: "There's always something...if it's not one thing, it's another."

[betty boop]

Your cosmological argument for the existence of a god can be entirely reduced to "Everything which exists needs a creator, and the creator of the universe is God, but God doesn't need a creator because when I said 'everything' I wasn't talking about him."

Well, that's exactly right, aNYCguy. But you still haven't told me what, on your view, is specifically "wrong" with this understanding/formulation.

I'm a very patient person who is looking forward to your reply.

We haven't met before, nor spoken before; and I have no idea what you most care about or where you're coming from, what you have seen in your experience, etc.

But if you a looking for a good faith, civil, rational dialog/debate over issues of deep importance to you, then please give me a yell.

Just specify the issue you most want placed in contention. And once we know what that is, then we'll be at liberty to debate it, pro and con.

Thanks for writing, stranger!

[forsnax5]

It's strange, really, what odd things will stick in your memory for decades...

Thanks to the magic of Google, I was able to pinpoint the decade. The story was called "Zeepsday," it was by Gordon R. Dickson, and it appeared in the November issue of F&SF in 1956. I would have been an eighth grader at the time, and I did have a subscription to F&SF back then (I still do, in fact).

[betty boop]

Throughout the history of science, the realm of God has been shrinking.

Yes. I have noticed that. Yet science per se is not "categorically" opposed to God. Only some of its more "doctrinally materialist" thinkers engage in such activity. Such as the dude who penned the essay at the top of this thread.

I just think this is a case of science biting the hand that feeds it. Which seems to be all the rage these days.

But I also know that where the "realm of God" shrinks, so do human prospects. As in: "The Incredible Shrinking Humanity." Which comprehends the problem of "The Incredibly Shrinking Person."

You wrote a fine essay, b_sharp; yet it's late and so I'll have to defer a fuller response to tomorrow. I'm grateful for your post.

Good night!

[AndrewC]

There was a lot more evidence than you suggest used to place the fossils demonstrating whale evolution in their proper sequence.

No. The "proper sequence" had the mesonychus in it until a few years ago. And your link's conclusion was not a "proper sequence", but Conclusion Taken together, all of this evidence points to only one conclusion - that whales evolved from terrestrial mammals. We have seen that there are nine independent areas of study that provide evidence that whales share a common ancestor with hoofed mammals. The power of evidence from independent areas of study that support the same conclusion makes refutation by special creation scenarios, personal incredulity, the argument from ignorance, or "intelligent design" scenarious entirely unreasonable. The only plausible scientific conclusion is that whales did evolve from terrestrial mammals. So no matter how much anti-evolutionists rant about how impossible it is for land-dwelling, furry mammals to evolve into fully aquatic whales, the evidence itself shouts them down. This is the power of using mutually reinforcing, independent lines of evidence. I hope that it will become a major weapon to strike down groundless anti-evolutionist objections and to support evolutionary thinking in the general public. This is how real science works, and we must emphasize the process of scientific inference as we point out the conclusions that scientists draw from the evidence - that the concordant predictions from independent fields of scientific study confirm the same pattern of whale ancestry. Notice it is only in the first sentence. The rest is a rant. My point is that the evidence is mostly "appearance" and all inferential.

[betty boop]

Just because a phenomenon occurs regularly and is capable of human, or scientific, explanation does not nullify the nature of creation as it stands.

I totally agree, Fester,

I gather that b_sharp has illusions about human intellectual progress "progessively" displacing God -- on whose truth human intellectual progress has ever depended -- to the purpose of finally eradicating God in the end. [As if a person, or all of humanity collectively working together towards that purpose, could ever do that.]

It has been observed (P. J. Raju, 1972) that we live in a "mysterious" universe; yet Raju insists the mystery is a rational one, not a "superstitious" one.

And Plato and Aristotle essentially had the same observation, in common.

I think if people could just get used to that idea, the enterprise of science would really prosper.

Just between you and me, where does b_sharp think logic (among other things) came from to begin with?

Thank you so much for writing, Fester. Good night!

[spunkets]

Re: smooth time

Looks like I made a mistake. There was a thread on FR awhile back regarding an experiment that said it was smooth. I now assume the report is NG, because it doesn't pop up on a web search. All I can find is from 2004 right now. This and this which is the sort of work the first easy to understand article is based on are all I see. The nature note gives a summary. The space is quantized and the only way to get it to give a 4D world is to require constant c and causality on the Plank scale.

[betty boop]

Got your last. Much good stuff to chew on. But it'll have to wait till tomorrow; for it's late, and it's time for bed.

So, good night b_sharp! See you tomorrow. Thanks for writing!