Introduction: The Illusion of Design [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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Thank you for your reply!

me: the first question ought to be what do you consider to be physically real?

you: That would be the last question.

To the contrary, that needs to be the first question because (as I recall) your list of illusions is quite long. Now you assert that geometry and all of mathematics are metaphorical.

On Hawking's black hole entropy, the issue was physical entropy. Strominger and Vafa used string theory to make the calculation (Bekenstein/Hawking). The issue of information (reduction of Shannon entropy) being lost in black holes came up separately. AFAIK, none of the physicists confused the two entropy formulations.

Also, the "ergod" is not the inverse of the void.

As before, if we are going to explore ergodic theory - we need to distinguish between physics and mathematics.

And concerning ergodic theory and singularities, the zero point is the poison pill:

Statistical Mechanics

Boltzmann thought of the proper average values to identify with macroscopic features as being averages over time of quantities calculable from microscopic states. He wished to identify the phase averages with such time averages. He realized that this could be done if a system started in any microscopic state eventually went through all the possible microscopic states. That this was so became known as the ergodic hypothesis. But it is provably false on topological and measure theoretic grounds. A weaker claim, that a system started in any state would go arbitrarily close to each other microscopic state is also false, and even if true would not do the job needed.

The mathematical discipline of ergodic theory developed out of these early ideas. When can a phase average be identified with a time average over infinite time? G. Birkhoff (with earlier results by J. von Neumann) showed that this would be so for all but perhaps a set of measure zero of the trajectories (in the standard measure used to define the probability function) if the set of phase points was metrically indecomposable, that is if it could not be divided into more than one piece such that each piece had measure greater than zero and such that a system started in one piece always evolved to a system in that piece.

But did a realistic model of a system ever meet the condition of metric indecomposability? What is needed to derive metric indecomposability is sufficient instability of the trajectories so that the trajectories do not form groups of non-zero measure which fail to wander sufficiently over the entire phase region. The existence of a hidden constant of motion would violate metric indecomposability. After much arduous work, culminating in that of Ya. Sinai, it was shown that some "realistic" models of systems, such as the model of a gas as "hard spheres in a box," conformed to metric indecomposability. On the other hand another result of dynamical theory, the Kolmogorov-Arnold-Moser (KAM) theorem shows that more realistic models (say of molecules interacting by means of "soft" potentials) are likely not to obey ergodicity in a strict sense. In these cases more subtle reasoning (relying on the many degrees of freedom in a system composed of a vast number of constituents) is also needed.

If ergodicity holds what can be shown? It can be shown that for all but a set of measure zero of initial points, the time average of a phase quantity over infinite time will equal its phase average. It can be shown that for any measurable region the average time the system spends in that region will be proportional to the region's size (as measured by the probability measure used in the microcanonical ensemble). A solution to a further problem is also advanced. Boltzmann knew that the standard probability distribution was invariant under time evolution given the dynamics of the systems. But how could we know that it was the only such invariant measure? With ergodicity we can show that the standard probability distribution is the only one that is so invariant, at least if we confine ourselves to probability measures that assign probability zero to every set assigned zero by the standard measure.

We have, then, a kind of "transcendental deduction" of the standard probability assigned over microscopic states in the case of equilibrium. Equilibrium is a time-unchanging state. So we demand that the probability measure by which equilibrium quantities are to be calculated be stationary in time as well. If we assume that probability measures assigning non-zero probability to sets of states assigned zero by the usual measure can be ignored, then we can show that the standard probability is the only such time invariant probability under the dynamics that drives the individual systems from one microscopic state to another.

As a full "rationale" for standard equilibrium statistical mechanics, however, much remains questionable. There is the problem that strict ergodicity is not true of realistic systems. There are many problems encountered if one tries to use the rationale as Boltzmann hoped to identify phase averages with measured quantities relying on the fact that macroscopic measurements take "long times" on a molecular scale. There are the problems introduced by the fact that all of the mathematically legitimate ergodic results are qualified by exceptions for "sets of measure zero." What is it physically that makes it legitimate to ignore a set of trajectories just because it has measure zero in the standard measure? After all, such neglect leads to catastrophically wrong predictions when there really are hidden, global constants of motion. In proving the standard measure uniquely invariant, why are we entitled to ignore probability measures that assign non-zero probabilities to sets of conditions assigned probability zero in the standard measure? After all, it was just the use of that standard measure that we were trying to justify in the first place.

In any case, equilibrium theory as an autonomous discipline is misleading. What we want, after all, is a treatment of equilibrium in the non-equilibrium context. We would like to understand how and why systems evolve from any initially fixed macroscopic state, taking equilibrium to be just the "end point" of such dynamic evolution. So it is to the general account of non-equilibrium we must turn if we want a fuller understanding of how this probabilistic theory is functioning in physics.

Again, the void is not the same thing as the singularity. There is no space (not just zero space) no time (not just zero time) no energy/matter, etc. in the void.

#930... Interesting (serious) discussion on "revelation".. You are a brave warrior, my dear.. I'll do a little recon myself.. and maybe bit of snipe'ing..

My experience on spiritual revelation is varied.. Sometimes it can be as simple as an intellectual breakthrough or as mind boggling as an epiphany or even a vision.. I see a vision as a vision.. ugh!.. more than mere a clearing of thoughts or the fog that clouds my idea about some thing.. But a "seeing" on a grand scope, a vision of "something" far greater than you were in the market for, since didn't even know that a "sight" like that Could exist..

Amazing (once you get used to it) that a human mind could be transported to another place "not on your own".. "not on purpose". Other than that it could be scary.. I would say revelation is progessive.. Some revelation needs other relevation as foundation.. Because without a proper foundation the revealment of the revelation would not be emergent.. Inspiritation is only revelation if it is spiritual..

Discovery of awareness and what awareness is, might be an epiphany but its not a vision.. as I see it so far.. For awareness is a synonym for gratitude.. Seems like the more aware you are the more gratitude overflows your cup.. The less gratitude you are filled with the more awareness you are in need of.. And where gratitude is King, a loveing faithful sacrificial attitude is Queen..

A revelation of what a proper family is, is indeed a "vision"..

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