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.

[snarks_when_bored]

You have an interesting pantheon, snarks. Would Alfred North Whitehead be a major prophet or just one of the twelve, so to speak (so long as you feel content to make poetic allusion suffice for critical analysis, which is all ANW is adding so far).

You might want to re-read that post about Whitehead, listening for the touch of lightheartedness...

As for the rest of what you wrote, I'm not quite sure what to make it. No doubt the fault is mine. But I don't recall any claims of infallibility by Dawkins or Darwin (or me), nor did I hear Dawkins denying the contingency of the cosmos (or affirming it, for that matter).

[snarks_when_bored]

Despite Dawkins, evolution is still not a fact, though it has a congeries of facts to assemble with speculation and outright guess.

You write sentences I don't understand.

Best regards...

[furball4paws]

I kind of straddle this issue. Why was Science invented and exploited in the West?

The Chinese had been around for much longer, and the Middle East had some bright spots - so why European?

I think the concept of time was very important in the development of Science. The first mechanical clocks were built in 1400's IIRC, just about the time Science took off. Being able to measure time fairly accurately meant that physical things could be identified mathematically. Gallileo used his pulse as a timer, I've read.

The Greeks played a foundational role, but were long gone before Science began to flourish.

The Church played both roles. It fostered academics and learning and then quashed those it didn't like. Overall I think it was a greater impediment to progress than a positive force.

[BelegStrongbow]

Get back to me when you do understand, then.

[frgoff]

Hoyle's comments were made in light of the laws of physical Chemistry and the organic chemicals required for even the simplest one-celled organisms to exist. You can't get selection going until you get self-replicating systems with the potential to mutate.

Dawkins plays some games with just-so stories about clays being the carriers for these complex organics without ever addressing the underlying chemical problems.

Regarding complexity, he would do well to read Dembski's mathematical treaments of complexity and specified complexity. At least Dembski gives an empirical treatment of the subject instead of Dawkin's just-so comment of "Well, just give it enough time and it will happen, I mean, look around. We're here, so it must have happened!"

However, having read Dawkins I find that he is more an idealogue than a scientist. He's a militant, evangelistic atheist and wields evolutionary theory as a sword to slay the religious.

The rumbling of the paradigm shift continues. It will be interesting to see how loud it gets before the shift finally happens.

[snarks_when_bored]

Is English your native tongue?

[snarks_when_bored]

We don't know many of the details of how life began on this planet. Dawkins would acknowledge that. But that's no reason to throw up one's hands and say, "Dang, a miracle must've happened here!" And, even if you do that, you've still got the problem of explaining precisely how that miracle happened: What mechanisms did a designer employ to push atoms together to make specific kinds of molecules and then to push these molecules together to make cellular structures? What forces were employed? Why is there zero evidence of such forces being employed nowadays? Etc.

[aNYCguy]

"The professor has had sex with multiple citizens; therefore his essays have no merit."

Is this really the "argument" you were attempting to make?

[aNYCguy]

...but again, only as a theory. Despite Dawkins, evolution is still not a fact, though it has a congeries of facts to assemble with speculation and outright guess.

I'm not bothering to read the bulk of your ramblings, but this certainly caught my eye. Are you aware that scientific theories are never "promoted" to facts? Theories are the end product of the scientific method.

[b_sharp]

"How does he know that the workings of physics are "unintended," particularly when we speak of "the laws of physics"?"

Are you trying to say that the laws of physics have some goal in mind? Are they intelligent in and of themselves?

" I don't know of any un-authored laws"

Stop anthropomorphizing natural occurrences. The 'laws' of nature are human descriptions of natural consistencies. We observe something that occurs the same way every time and can be modeled mathematically so we call them 'laws'.

Some people will do anything, including play semantic games, to make it look like there 'has to be' an intelligent designer.

[js1138]

People often assert that no one is ever convinced one way or the other by debates on this issue, but this is not true.

Michael Denton, author of "Evolution, a Theory in Crisis, has written a new book, "Nature's Destiny," on intelligent Design. In it he says this:

"it is important to emphasize at the outset that the argument presented here is entirely consistent with the basic naturalistic assumption of modern science - that the cosmos is a seamless unity which can be comprehended ultimately in its entirety by human reason and in which all phenomena, including life and evolution and the origin of man, are ultimately explicable in terms of natural processes.

This is an assumption which is entirely opposed to that of the so-called "special creationist school". According to special creationism, living organisms are not natural forms, whose origin and design were built into the laws of nature from the beginning, but rather contingent forms analogous in essence to human artifacts, the result of a series of supernatural acts, involving the suspension of natural law.

Contrary to the creationist position, the whole argument presented here is critically dependent on the presumption of the unbroken continuity of the organic world - that is, on the reality of organic evolution and on the presumption that all living organisms on earth are natural forms in the profoundest sense of the word, no less natural than salt crystals, atoms, waterfalls, or galaxies."

Behe, the chief defence witness at Dover, has this to say about evolution:

I didn't intend to "dismiss" the fossil record--how could I "dismiss" it? In fact I mention it mostly to say that it can't tell us whether or not biochemical systems evolved by a Darwinian mechanism. My book concentrates entirely on Darwin's mechanism, and simply takes for granted common descent.

Nearly all the major players in the ID game accept common descent, even if they quibble over details of mechanism.

[b_sharp]

"Purity of heart and wisdom go hand in hand. Wouldn't it be in the interest of someone who treats human beings as disposable objects of pleasure to support a philosophy that reduces human beings to mere physical processes?"

This is simply an appeal to emotion. You have no idea how Ruse views those he's had relationships with do you? Or are you contending that anyone who has sex with more than one person necessarily treats others as disposable by definition?

BTW that little nugget of yours' Purity of heart and wisdom goes hand in hand' is a pretty wild assertion. Want to tell me what this 'purity of heart' means, and how wisdom is not possible without it?

[Aquinasfan]

" So the cardinals wanted to fund a mathematical model that had no relationship to reality?" If it helped them to better predict the movements of the planets and stars, absolutely.

And then what? They could develop a missile system to attack scientists?

"Galileo's mistake was in demanding that the Church endorse his theory. At that point, their theories were unprovable scientifically." He demanded the Church endorse his theory? When? His *problem* was the Church's initiation of force on anybody who deviated from their positions.

[Copernicus'] great work, "De Revolutionibus orblure coelestium", was published at the earnest solicitation of two distinguished churchmen, Cardinal Schömberg and Tiedemann Giese, Bishop of Culm. It was dedicated by permission to Pope Paul III in order, as Copernicus explained, that it might be thus protected from the attacks which it was sure to encounter on the part of the "mathematicians" (i.e. philosophers) for its apparent contradiction of the evidence of our senses, and even of common sense. He added that he made no account of objections which might be brought by ignorant wiseacres on Scriptural grounds. Indeed, for nearly three quarters of a century no such difficulties were raised on the Catholic side, although Luther and Melanchthon condemned the work of Copernicus in unmeasured terms. Neither Paul III, nor any of the nine popes who followed him, nor the Roman Congregations raised any alarm, and, as has been seen, Galileo himself in 1597, speaking of the risks he might run by an advocacy of Copernicanism, mentioned ridicule only and said nothing of persecution. Even when he had made his famous discoveries, no change occurred in this respect. On the contrary, coming to Rome in 1611, he was received in triumph; all the world, clerical and lay, flocked to see him, and, setting up his telescope in the Quirinal Garden belonging to Cardinal Bandim, he exhibited the sunspots and other objects to an admiring throng.

He was tried for heresy...

Because he claimed that Scripture erred.

At the same time, it must not be forgotten that, while there was as yet no sufficient proof of the Copernican system, no objection was made to its being taught as an hypothesis which explained all phenomena in a simpler manner than the Ptolemaic, and might for all practical purposes be adopted by astronomers. What was objected to was the assertion that Copernicanism was in fact true, "which appears to contradict Scripture". It is clear, moreover, that the authors of the judgment themselves did not consider it to be absolutely final and irreversible, for Cardinal Bellarmine, the most influential member of the Sacred College, writing to Foscarini, after urging that he and Galileo should be content to show that their system explains all celestial phenomena -- an unexceptional proposition, and one sufficient for all practical purposes -- but should not categorically assert what seemed to contradict the Bible, thus continued:

I say that if a real proof be found that the sun is fixed and does not revolve round the earth, but the earth round the sun, then it will be necessary, very carefully, to proceed to the explanation of the passages of Scripture which appear to be contrary, and we should rather say that we have misunderstood these than pronounce that to be false which is demonstrated.

Gallileo Galilei

When it wasn't trying scientists for heresy for saying things it didn't like. BTW, it was the pagan Greeks who gave birth to science.

Why didn't their science didn't develop into a self-sustaining enterprise? Why did science only develop into a self-sustaining enterprise in the Christian, i.e., Catholic West?

[Senator Bedfellow]

Want to tell me what this 'purity of heart' means...

It means that it's okay to have sex with lots of people, so long as you don't enjoy it.

Well, it wasn't "purity of body", so you tell me...

[js1138]

A physicist at Harvard proposes that gravity may leak from a fifth dimension into the known four dimensions. Such a phenomenon, if verified, would radically alter our understanding of the "physical laws."

Our understanding of physical laws changes constantly. Our understanding is scarcely recognizable from one century to the next.

What science agrees on is that the underlying phenomena do not change.

[b_sharp]

How does this in any way counter what SWB stated? He was explaining what laws are; a human construct.

Aside from that, science is not incompatible with Christianity, however those scientists did not insert their religious views into their science.

[Aquinasfan]

"The professor has had sex with multiple citizens; therefore his essays have no merit."

Is this really the "argument" you were attempting to make?

With a high degree of probability, yes. Moral lepers generally make poor intellectuals. "Intellectuals" and "Architects of the Culture of Death" provide abundant evidence in support of this commonsensical notion.

But let's look at Mr. Ruse's statement.

Yet after a lifetime of studying Americans -- I have gone to school with them, I have argued with them, I have had sex with them, and now I live with them -- I am still puzzled.

By this statement, I can only conclude that Mr. Ruse has extremely low morals and extremely poor judgement. Simply stated, he gives every indication of being a scumbag.

[CarolinaGuitarman]

" And then what? They could develop a missile system to attack scientists?"

Are you that deficient in scientific history that you don't know why people were interested in knowing the movements of the planets and stars?


He was tried for heresy...

---

"Because he claimed that Scripture erred. "

So? It WAS in error. Are you supporting house arrest of people who commit *heresy*? He got into trouble when he insisted that not only was the Copernican model an excellent way to predict the movement of the planets and stars, but that it was also true physically. That's enough to sentence someone to house arrest for? The Church had no right to stop ANYBODY from freely investigating nature.

"Why did science only develop into a self-sustaining enterprise in the Christian, i.e., Catholic West?"

Because the Church lost it's grip on science and scientists became free to explore the universe without fear of being arrested for heresy.

[Dimensio]

By this statement, I can only conclude that Mr. Ruse has extremely low morals and extremely poor judgement. Simply stated, he gives every indication of being a scumbag.

And therefore his statements regarding to biological science are false?

This is exactly the kind of illogic that I expect from creationists, so no real shock.

[b_sharp]

"Dawkins makes an a priori assumption, which is the opposite of the a posteriori "scientific method."

You make it sound as if 'a priori' is in all cases bad. Sometimes 'assumptions', such as the noninterference of the supernatural, must be made to enable certainty of conclusion. Generally assumptions like that are based on the consistency of nature and are more accurately called 'conclusions'.