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.

[Alamo-Girl]

Thank you oh so very much for all your insights, those quotes and your kind words! It has been a pleasure!

We began with a scientific image of the world that was held by many in opposition to a religious view built upon unverifiable beliefs and intuitions about the ultimate nature of things. But we have found that at the roots of the scientific image of the world lies a mathematical foundation that is itself ultimately religious. All our surest statements about the nature of the world are mathematical statements, yet we do not know what mathematics "is" ... and so we find that we have adapted a religion strikingly similar to many traditional faiths. Change "mathematics" to "God" and little else might seem to change. The problem of human contact with some spiritual realm, of timelessness, of our inability to capture all with language and symbol -- all have their counterparts in the quest for the nature of Platonic mathematics. - Barrow, Pi in the Sky

[Alamo-Girl]

LOLOL! Thank you so much for the chuckle!

[Physicist]

I'm not sure #598 describes nuclear decay exactly. I don't think that there are any micro-states that describe the time of decay.

Ignore nuclei. Consider instead the following decay: Upsilon(4S) --> B⁰B^0~ (i.e. a B meson and an anti-B meson, each with subsequently reconstructed flavor-tagged decays).

[Geek alert: "flavor tagged" means that each decays in such a way that you know whether it was a B meson or an anti-B meson. A B meson contains an anti-b quark, which weakly decays into an anti-c quark, which weakly decays to an anti-s quark, which is positively charged. So if you see a K+ meson, you know it was a B meson and not an anti-B meson.]

Consider: the B and anti-B are entangled. Until one of them decays--thereby "picking" a flavor--the other one doesn't know how it is supposed to decay. The "second" one to decay will subsequently oscillate back and forth between being a B and an anti-B meson: effectively, it has two decay rates, one in its role as a B and one in its role as an anti-B.

Here's the trick: those clocks got reset to zero when the "first" meson decayed, through the magic of EPR correlation. There's no hidden variable you can assign to the "longer-lived" meson that will describe its decay, because it didn't have enough information, back when it was born, about both how and when to decay. That information didn't exist. And you can't say that it was pre-informed about the decay fate of the "first" meson because that doesn't help: such a scheme will necessarily obey Bell's inequality, and the experimental fact--predicted by quantum mechanics--is that these decays do not obey.

It actually gets worse. Notice that I've been putting "first" and "second" in scare quotes. This is because by the time they decay, they have travelled some distance from each other. If they decay close enough in time, the decays have a space-like invariant interval between them. So "first" and "second", in that case, will be observer-dependent. But the correlation still works! This is predicted by quantum mechanics, but impossible to arrange with deterministic hidden variables. "Fate" is mathematically unable to perform this clock-reset trick.

Now, you say, fine for B mesons, but what about non-EPR correlated nuclear decays? Perhaps they're different. Perhaps B and K mesons are magic and causeless, but nuclear decays have a cause. Perhaps you'd be right. But there's no experimental reason to believe that the mechanisms governing B meson decays are any different from what governs nuclear decays. Occam's Razor leads us to conclude that all subatomic decays have a random, causeless element, somewhere.

[Doctor Stochastic]

Thanks. This is the sort of think I had in mind (but I'm not a physicist, but I did publish in physics journals after staying in a Motel 6.)

[js1138]

My original assertion was that the necessity of causation is no longer supported by observation and experiment.

Without getting mystical about it, this has consequenses for philosophy and theology, assuming they care about things like facts.

[Alamo-Girl]

Thank you both for your replies!

I certainly agree with you, Quark, on the importance of symmetries regarding inversion of coordinates in geometric physics!

This whole sidebar could have been nipped in the bud were it not for RWP hypothesizing a single spatial dimension universe. IOW, a physical universe – not just a dimensional hypothetical. Perhaps that was not his intent, for he says in post 674:

There are one dimensional problems in our universe, too. There are systems with 1D inversion symmetry. You don't need the second or third dimension, or time, to deal with them.

Certainly, we can perform inverse geometry on single dimensional objects in our four dimensional space/time. And mathematics empowers us to hypothesize seemingly without end.

In this case we can hypothesize about a single dimensional universe and perform inverse geometry on it because it is not physically real.

But when we test it with a thought experiment – as though the single spatial dimension universe is physically real and we are the observer “in” it (the line) – then we run into the causal problem of “were it not for time, events could not be.” The inversion becomes physically impossible because the “creator” RWP did not provide a temporal dimension and an additional spatial dimension (template, zero point, direction, etc.) for context.

As "creator" of his universe though RWP could perform an inversion "in" it because he would be the context and not be bound by the spatial/temporal limitations of his own "created" universe.

As betty boop observed, this is a compelling demonstration of a number of issues which intersect in philosophy, theology, mathematics and physics.

[Alamo-Girl]

Occam's Razor leads us to conclude that all subatomic decays have a random, causeless element, somewhere.

I would like to take issue with the assertion of "causeless".

One of the forms of causality is "where it not for A, C would not be". In this case, were it not for space/time, subatomic decay would not be.

[Right Wing Professor]

This whole sidebar could have been nipped in the bud were it not for RWP hypothesizing a single spatial dimension universe

Which I didn't, as you admit. So why is your misreading of my words my problem?

The inversion becomes physically impossible because the “creator” RWP did not provide a temporal dimension and an additional spatial dimension (template, zero point, direction, etc.) for context.

I've answered this over and over again. I've also asked you, over and over again, to identify where time enters the problem. You are either unable or unwilling to do so.

Go learn some math, AG. That's the kindest thing I can say to you right now.

[b_sharp]

"Instead?? This only holds if you assume God or gods were invented as a mechanism to 'explain'.

Why?

At one time God was wholly responsible for tornadoes, science decided tornadoes would be an interesting thing to look into, so they did. What they found were causes that were natural in origin. For this not to hold you have to make God personally responsible for all those causes.

[js1138]

Let's see your evidence. Demonstrate that space/time cannot spontaneously come into existence.

[longshadow]

intriguing placemarker

[Physicist]

In this case, were it not for space/time, subatomic decay would not be.

I'll stipulate that existence exists. <g>

The issue here is whether decay events could be specifically predicted, given complete (or at least sufficient) knowledge of the initial state. (Proximate cause, if you will.) The reality is that, in order for such a thing to be mathematically possible, decays would necessarily behave in a manner contrary to what is experimentally observed. At least some decays cannot have proximate causes.

[Alamo-Girl]

If we have been talking past each other then I apologize.

My assertions from the beginning of this sidebar have been in context with the void which I raised way back at post 328.

Your counter-argument was:

The most symmetric possible 'thing' is the void; it looks the same irrespective of how we move it in any direction or rotate it. A point is less symmetric than the void; a sphere less symmetric than a point; and so on. There is nothing more symmetric than nothing, if you get my drift. So 'where does it come from' is the wrong question. To which I replied:

Whoa! There is no symmetry in the void. It cannot be observed, moved, rotated. It is null. There are no fields, no points, no space, no time in the void. No geometry, ergo no symmetry.

As you say a point is more symmetric than a field. But the term symmetry cannot be applied absent spatial and temporal dimensionality.

Again we are at the causal relation that were it not for A, C would not be. No space/time therefore no events, no things, no symmetry etc.

All along I’ve been arguing the point – not as a mathematical construct – but as physics. And as I have previously asserted, not all mathematical constructs translate well to physics. An inversion “in” a single spatial dimension universe is one, infinity is another.

[caffe]

Then, based on what you said, science is often forced to cope with the supernatural: Logical self-consistency demands it.

[Alamo-Girl]

I'll stipulate that existence exists.

Thank you oh so very much for your reply and your stipulation! That is the point.

[js1138]

Science can easily deal with the supernatural. People who believe in the supernatural are seldom pleased with the experimental results.

[js1138]

Looking back to the post you were responding to, I don't see the point you were trying to make.

The history of quantum theory and relativity are examples of instances where science had to deal with contradictory evidence. In such cases, what changes is our understanding of things.

Science deals with such changes in perception all the time.

[Physicist]

That is the point.

An empty one, I'm afraid. Wittgenstein himself said that the fundamental problem of philosophy is "why is there something, and not just nothing," but admitted that no answer was possible. IMHO, the only solution is to take a cue from Ayn Rand, taking "Existence Exists" as an axiom and having done with it.

[b_sharp]

"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.

My text was incomplete. I was not trying to say science has the intention of shrinking God, just that the shrinking of God is a 'side effect' of science's desire to understand. I see no evidence for God just like I see no evidence for the tooth fairy. I have no desire to shrink God in the minds of others or expand him. I just don't care. I do care about the external effects those beliefs impose on my culture.

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

Science does what it does, humanity benefits, God doesn't.

"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'll have to expand on this, I'm not familiar with the story.

"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.

You are welcome.

[hosepipe]

[ I'll stipulate that existence exists. / Thank you oh so very much for your reply and your stipulation! That is the point. ]

LoL... <<- Eddie Murphy laugh..