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.

[caffe]

"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"

How can Dawkins maintain respectibility in this area? He is such an obvious zealot; he reminds me a little of Howard Dean. The more he states or yells something is true, a fact, the more fragile he appears. Poor guy!

[Alamo-Girl]

Thank you oh so very much for that insightful excerpt!!! It is a great meditation for this weekend.

[AndrewC]

Excuse me for confusing empiricism with science.

You're excused. Mr. Goodwrench® uses empirical methods.

[RightWhale]

There is no symmetry in the void.

Pardon me for interrupting and ignoring the entire line of reasoning at this point. The symmetry of the void is perfect and total rather than lacking.

[cornelis]

But whether or not ID is science is the important issue

Therefore whether science is science is also the issue.

Insofar as science restricts itself to particular aspects of objects it should recognize its severe limitations as being "useful" for a human life.

[caffe]

LOL, It does not have the long history of, let's be honest, the appearance of science as evolutionary theory might enjoy in academics. Yet, I believe it brings scientific research that conflicts with some basic foundations of Darwin . I can state that atheistic evolution is NOT a science but a philosophy that manipulates scientific data and changes as new scientific research exposes the lies. I believe if just the hstory of atheistic philosophy was objectively examined in the classroom, students could draw their own conclusions. My bet? An even higher percentage of our population would reject it .

[RightWhale]

whether science is science is also the issue

Somewhere along the line, perhaps about 1915, we left off the main line: which was the development of the science of science. Whether science is scientific is a valid question.

[cornelis]

Poetic, but n'est pas possible if you stick to the greek concept of sum-metron. You have to have a plurality of things to speak of symmetry. So, if there is anything to what you say, its perfect and total symmetry an extrinsic denomination in its relation to everything that is not the void.

I'm not sure whether in these threads the void has been differentiated from a logical concept of non-being or non-existence and the more spacial reference to what the Greeks called the chorema or receptacle.

[DennisR]

Well, if "Richard Dawkins, a world-renowned explicator of Darwinian evolution" says it, it has to be true. /s

[hosepipe]

[ I see physical death as a "weighing of the anchor". In your metaphor, it would be getting off the donkey. In the Jewish mystic interpretation, it would be a separation of body and spirit, so that the speed of light is no longer a boundary. ]

I see.. maybe the speed of light is only the speed of a certain kind of light.. I'll call it 3rd dimensional light according to the 3 spatial dimensions kind of light as opposed to the 4 dimensions paradigm.. If there is a kind of light beyond what we can measure or know about.. Could explain the problems with string theory.. and Einsteins dilema too, the gravity one. Ya think?..

[Alamo-Girl]

Thank you for your reply!

Pardon me for interrupting and ignoring the entire line of reasoning at this point. The symmetry of the void is perfect and total rather than lacking.

The void is indeed perfect but it cannot be symmetrical because there is no space, no time, no points, no fields, no energy/matter, no form, no autonomy, no universals, no qualia, no mathematical constructs, no logic, no thing at all in the void.

A point, OTOH, is perfectly symmetrical. The difference between a point and the void is much like the difference between zero and null.

[RightWhale]

The plurality is achieved by reduction of symmetry from total to something less. In the Big Bang, symmetry was total to begin with, all forces were one, all matter was one. As soon as the expansion began the loss of symmetry began. Not cause and effect, but the plurality of the four kinds of forces in the present universe is associated with the low order of symmetry.

[cornelis]

Somewhere along the line, perhaps about 1915, we left off the main line: which was the development of the science of science. Whther science is scientific is a valid question.

The answer seems to be integral to human choice and preference, a feature not entirely dictated by the objects that science studies.

js1138 doesn't think it such a flapdoodle to talk about the development of science, but js1138 is quite adamament about the kind of results expected from science.

[Alamo-Girl]

I should add that a singularity is not the void, it is a point. And black holes have entropy.

[cornelis]

The one, the Big Bang, the void are three different donkeys, each one carrying a stupendous amount of peculiar historial baggage.

[RightWhale]

A point, OTOH, is perfectly symmetrical.

From of an earlier observation:

It cannot be inverted without a dimension of time, so the symmetry of inversion is lacking.

However, a point in a zero dimensional universe is simply the inversion of the infinitely dimensional totality, a simple symmetry operation possible under the illusion of time.

[RightWhale]

a singularity is not the void, it is a point. And black holes have entropy.

A black hole contains a singularity due to to the illusion of relativity, but a black hole need not be a point, and a singularity need not be a point. Also, the entropy of information is not the same as the entropy of thermodynamics even though it has a similar mathematical form.

[bobdsmith]

I can state that atheistic evolution is NOT a science but a philosophy that manipulates scientific data and changes as new scientific research exposes the lies.

And I can equally "state" that atheistic atomic theory is "NOT a science but a philosophy that manipulates scientific data and changes as new scientific research exposes the lies". Great.

[RightWhale]

Science is sophism. For this reason, there should be no effort to make a science of morality. A geometry, perhaps.

[hosepipe]

[ And yet the Other which he is, is shrouded in darkness; and it is in this crucifixion of himself that Modern Man has come to see, without knowing that he sees, the hidden irony of the Cross. ]

Quite deep Cornelis.. almost hynotizing.. Quite beyond me to grasp it all.. But what you you think about this snippet.?.. Can you simplify it for me.?.. Like brandy I can only take a little.. Little is good, more is too much..