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.

[r9etb]

I am saying that the existence of a local cause is inconsistent with observed phenomena. Whether there is a cause outside our universe pulling the strings we cannot say.

Either that, or the present understanding of "our universe" is not sufficient to offer an explanation.

Still, the facts of predictability (in the sense that phenomena can be mathematically predicted before they're observed), and reproducibility of observation, are more suggestive of a "consistent mechanism" than they are of a situation where phenomena occur for no reason at all.

[tortoise]

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).

I'm not sure if I'm following this, but an algorithm cannot create create information. An algorithm writing another algorithm only reduces the order of the expression of that algorithm but adds no information to the system (i.e. creates no new algorithms) that was not already there. The reason this is not obvious is that algorithmic induction (discerning the high-order expression of an algorithm from a lower-order expression) is grotesquely intractable such that we prove it in mathematics but we will never have the computational capacity to experience it in anything but a vaguely probabilistic sense. In fact, cryptography relies heavily on the fact that algorithmic induction is extremely expensive while algorithmic deduction (how most software works) is extremely cheap, effectively creating a one-way function.

In short, an algorithm never generates a new algorithm, only a lower order expression of the same algorithm. But if we observe that lower order expression, it is nearly impossible to discern the higher order algorithm that generated it even in toy cases where very little information is involved. As a point of reference, an algorithm with 256 bytes of information can easily generate a low order expression with an apparent complexity the size of our universe -- even if we observed that universe for a million years, we would never be able to divine the 256 bytes of state that generated what we were observing as a mathematical fact.

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.

Sure. Information is existence, and at any level of abstraction one cares to use -- that we can conceptualize some bit of information means it exists physically somewhere. We like to think of the substrate being independent of the information, but that is a bit of an artificial distinction (though very convenient for engineering purposes).

[betty boop]

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.

Who's to say the "algorithm at inception" isn't awesomely simple? If this were the case, where is the difference between your argument and mine? Do you prefer the random to the intelligent in principle?

Indeed, Timaeus is one of my favorites. But Plato never said that being and becoming constituted a "true-or-false" proposition. It is a case of "both," for both are needed to express the ultimate nature of a living cosmos.

Good night, snarks. Must get some sleep. Thank you so much for writing!

[Doctor Stochastic]

The word “random” as used in science does not mean uncaused, unplanned, or inexplicable; it means uncorrelated.

False. The guy who wrote the original thread is clueless.

[betty boop]

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

Well dear tortoise, maybe you're not "trying very hard."

On the other hand, maybe you are "trying very hard" to ignore the obvious. Maybe you even might imagine that the "mathematization" of any something puts it into our "control."

I don't know which it might be; likely it is neither.

But we must leave this interesting conundrum for another time; 'cause I've got to get some sleep! (I'm overdue.)

Hope to see you soon. Thank you truly for writing. Good night!

[Doctor Stochastic]

...It is safer to say with Heisenberg that we disturb stuff simply by observing it ...

That isn't exactly what Heisenberg said. The dispersion relations hold even if the "observer" isn't sentinent; maybe it's only a crystal. There are also observations that don't disturb the object.

[Doctor Stochastic]

1/2

[tortoise]

Well dear tortoise, maybe you're not "trying very hard." On the other hand, maybe you are "trying very hard" to ignore the obvious.

Unfortunately, I really truly have no idea what you are talking about. I cannot think of anything in our universe that is not formally describable. My query is not entirely idle either, because a deeper argument would be that everything we can conceive of has a neat formal description ipso facto. Asserting a phenomenon has a formal description is not the same as having omniscience with respect to the internal state of that phenomenon.

Maybe you even might imagine that the "mathematization" of any something puts it into our "control."

Non sequitur, as best I can figure -- this does not parse as anything that makes sense to me.

[Doctor Stochastic]

If you got the money, honey, I got the thyme....

From PDQ Bach's "The Seasonings" Schickle Number 1/2 tsp.

[snarks_when_bored]

Who's to say the "algorithm at inception" isn't awesomely simple? If this were the case, where is the difference between your argument and mine? Do you prefer the random to the intelligent in principle?

I wasn't really making an argument, just suggesting a possibility. But a consideration I do find compelling is this: as far as we now know, nothing like the self-conscious intelligence that humans manifest was ever manifested by any of the millions of other species, living and extinct, on Earth. Nor do we know that there are any other self-conscious intelligences anywhere else in the cosmos, now or ever before. Moreover, our own self-conscious intelligence is of rather recent origin, a tiny blip in the long history of the cosmos. So what, you ask? Just this: I'm highly suspicious of any attempt to postulate self-conscious intelligence (conceived in analogy to our own) as the root of all reality. Self-conscious intelligence appears to be a very late (and exceedingly rare) product of reality, not its source.

I also have reservations about the notion of a disembodied intelligence; indeed, I can make no sense of it. The fact is this: I don't understand the principle of individuation of disembodied intelligences, that is, how to tell them apart. So either they're all the same (and so, when we die, we become one with the deity), or else there are none (and so, when we die, we're dead).

I'm probably not expressing myself well, being somewhat short of rest, so I'll shut up about that.

But Plato never said that being and becoming constituted a "true-or-false" proposition.

Nor did I, bb!

Best regards and pleasant dreams...

[Right Wing Professor]

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

If ya want to think about life, the universe and everything, there are just some things ya gotta pay forward. Group theory is well worth the effort, it's beautiful and much less demanding than calculus. And you'll never look at a tesselation on the wall of the Alhambra the same way again.

[tortoise]

Self-conscious intelligence appears to be a very late (and exceedingly rare) product of reality, not its source.

There is some very interesting research in recent years that offers some insight into why this is. The nuts and bolts of it is that tractable intelligence for a construct of our size can only exist in an exceedingly tiny part of the algorithm phase space, despite its extraordinary value from an evolutionary standpoint. Ideal intelligence is extremely intractable, and usable approximations make a very narrow target. The basic components are pretty simple theoretically, but there is relatively little wiggle room for implementation.

From an evolutionary standpoint, once the basic component was discovered it was exploited like mad in nature until it eventually produced humans despite its high cost in biology. The evolution of intelligence in animals was extremely quick on the timeline as such things go. Ideal intelligence has some severe limitations in the mathematics and the human approximation, while not as efficient as it could be, is a reasonable facsimile.

Intelligence is not an exceptionally complex thing, but one has to hit pretty close to the target or it really does not work at all as a practical matter for esoteric theoretical reasons.

[snarks_when_bored]

Interesting...any links to hand?

[caffe]

I was reading this page of posts and am curious if any of you have considered Godel's proof?

"Godel showed that all efforts to prove arithmetic to be free from contradictions are doomed to failure. Arithmetic cannot be proven consistent. In fact, no system powerful enough to include arithmetic is capable of proving itself consistent, unless the proof uses rules of inference from "outside the system" whose own internal consistency is as much open to doubt as is the consistency of arithmetic itself. In short, one monster is slain only by creating another; the proof is never completed." Quote from Nagel on Godel's Proof

IF you've ever read Bertrand Russell (happen to have his book, Portraits of Memory" , he laments about the lack of certainty in mathematics. I find his comments so obviously related to evolutionary delusions.


"I wanted certainty in the kind of way in which people want religious faith. I thought that certainty is more likely to be found in mathematics than elsewhere. Yet I found it full of fallacies, and that, if certainty were discoverable in math, it would be in a new field of math. But as the work proceeded, I was continually reminded of the fable about the elephant and the tortoise. Having constructed an elephant upon which the mathematical world could rest, I found the elephant tottering, and thus constructed a tortoise to keep the elephant from falling. But the tortoise was no more secure than the elephant, and after many years of toil, I came to the conclusion that there was nothing more that I could do in the way of making mathematical knowledge indubitable."
You see, for millennia, mathematicians had relied on the axiomatic method. Any mathematical statement that is true could be proven to be true. But Godel destroyed this notion. He showed there exists mathematical truth that can never be proven true. There exists truth forever out of reach of the axiomatic method. Yet Godel showed the existence of unprovable truth.
He proved that arithmetic cannot be proven to be consistent. Then he proved arithmetic is either inconsistent or incomplete - one of the other must be true.
Obviously , mathematicians had a dilemma. If arithmetic was inconsistent then the entire structure of math and logic would collapse . So to avoid self-contradiction, mathematicians were forced to acknowledge that arithmetic is incomplete. Logical self-consistency demanded it.
Some true theorems can never be proven true and they are called BELIEVE IT OR NOT - Supernatural Theorems.


The point? one would be that the Supernatural is a friend of Science

Many scientists feel science can only study the natural and can never hope to determine anything about the supernatural. Evidence from mathematics suggests the contrary. Studies of mathematics and logic have shown the hidden hazards of self-reference. Evolutionists claim that science must understand nature in terms of nature. This is a task of self-reference. It is not too difficult to show the inconsistencies and self-contradictions if one dare admit - perhaps they are illusions. Behe talked about this when he described the elephant in the room that science wanted to ignore.

[Right Wing Professor]

Yet science per se is not "categorically" opposed to God.

No, science just gradually restricts God to smaller and smaller spaces. What was once most of Italy is now 30 acres on one bank of the Tiber, and we're thinking St. Peter's Square would be a great place for a Walmart.

(cue demonic laugh)

[edsheppa]

Does this real system exhibit properties not describable in mathematics?

I would say yes. Let's say the physical situation is this: I will fire a vertically polarized photon through a horizontal polarizer at a detector. The detector will either definitely register the photon or not. So far as I know, you can't write a program that predicts which will occur even though your knowledge of the situation is perfect.

[edsheppa]

Duh. I meant a polarizer oriented at 45 degrees - obviously the horizontal polarizer will block the light.

[tortoise]

Science is non-axiomatic, and therefore Godel's Incompleteness theorem does not apply. There is even a nascent use of non-axiomatic term logics in theoretical computer science and related areas, such that some applied mathematics are largely immune as well. Occam's Razor (the formal version) is a powerful example of this.

Godel's Incompleteness Theorem is not quite the bludgeon some people (like Roger Penrose) think it is. It relies on certain assumptions that are not universally true in practice.

[tortoise]

So far as I know, you can't write a program that predicts which will occur even though your knowledge of the situation is perfect.

Bad construction on two accounts. First, the example is formally describable as is, to the limits of description allowed by mathematics given the parameters provided. Second, the knowledge of the situation is not perfect by definition, so your assertion to the contrary is invalid. We have no visibility inside the blackbox and the appplication of mathematical induction to that state is intractable (the given severe finite limits you placed on induction is how we derived the strict probabilistic version in the first place). If we did have internal visibility, we would be able to predict the outcome -- again, by definition.

Unpredictable is very, very different from random mathematically, even though they look the same to an observer with a sufficiently poor inductive model. You have posited a scenario where they are mathematically equivalent as far as a formal description is concerned, but one could adjust the parameters of the scenario so that this is not the case.

[Right Wing Professor]

I don't think you understood his description. Edsheppa's experiment is in essence identical to the two slit experiment. While I'd argue both experiments are formally deterministic, if you divide the system into quantum system and measuring apparatus, the result is as completely random as anything a physical system could provide; in fact, any algorithm that purported to predict the result to better than 50% accuracy would violate the uncertainty principle.