10.31.05
Illusions of Dawkins
Natural History magazine has an issue devoted to the Darwin debate. An
article by Dawkins, The Illusion of Design, more or less repeats, repeats, the basic position points that are no more than that, assertions. Both sides, in fact, simply assert positions,
and expect us to take sides, from the cheering gallery. These debates are the phoniest thing. They are really the parade of those with the media clout to fight for a piece of the public. The whole game gets a bit dreary, and with the exception of the new kid on the block, evo-devo, most of the material is the same old stuff.
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. 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.
The Intelligent Design movement plays on the ambiguity of the term ‘design’. We can speak of design in a naturalistic sense, or of design as the result of a designer, unidentified, and in fact, undefined. We can call the first n-design, and the second, g-design. n stands for nature, g, evidentally, for god, or gollum, or Goofey with a capital G. Complex structures almost by definition show n-design. Whether they show g-design is as hard to prove as anything from the litany of natural selection produced by Darwinists. n-design ought to be a fully fledged subject, for it suggests something that is missing from current physical understanding, natural teleology, that is, n-design. Theorists of evolution are only as good as their technology, and the
current hi-tech primitives plying what they call technological civilization are in reality stuck on toasters, and are at risk of theological invasion for their inability to produce machines that show end directed behavior, beyond the clear premonitions in feedback and cybernetic devices. That makes them prone to ambush from religious highwaymen who know a good chance to confuse n-design with g-design, good propaganda. And one can understand the edgy insistence of Dawkins
trying to rub the rabbit’s foot of Darwinian fundamentals. But it won’t work.
Things don’t just happen. Nothing in our everyday experience behaves that way, and we should ask why we are to take Darwinists seriously if they exempt evolution here. We should be obliged to call this bad science. That’s all it is. Evolution doesn’t just happen, should be our first assumption, unless someone cares to show contrary evidence. But that Darwinists don’t do. Ever. Watch their examples of proof. They are never sufficient. Claims for g-design are pointless unless you can establish the nature of this ‘designer’. So we should simply put
the idea of g-design to one side and focus on the inability of natural selection to produce n-design.
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.
Huxley was a brave defender of evolution, but he cautioned Darwin on the eveof publication of his Origin of his excessive emphasis on natural selection. So by that reckoning, he is a borderline case. Mr. Weiner’s evidence is of microevolution, and not sufficient to prove the case. Let’s face it, the theory of natural selection is simply an hypothesis, and probably a not very good one. It persists because it is on the borderline of evidentiary confirmation. Because of its visible omnipresence, we tend to clutch at straws for a theory, and land
on this oversimplification about microevolution.
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.
Why should be kowtow to Darwin’s dangerous idea? It actually is a dangerous idea, so maybe we should be wary of it. Thugs, even now, are using this to justify predatory behaviors. It has been going on since Darwin’s mendacious ‘breakthrough’ landed him the fame and fortune he sought after, damn the evidence. Darwin’s idea is a bungled job, and constantly suggests acting out in those who are somehow convinced this is the way things are.
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.
Fisher, like Dawkins, is a typical example of a frequent phenomenon, a highly intelligent scientist who is brain scrambled on certain key points, but who ends up setting public opinion on the basis of the appearance of rigorous thinking. What on earth is a mechanism for generating improbability???? That’s a garbled thought, there is no such thing as a mechanism that can generate improbability.
The mechanism so claimed is not essentially different from that in games of chance, and any mechanism to generate improbability is a fantasy on a par with Las Vegas style superstitious about runs of luck.
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?
Poor Fred Hoyle. The last scientist, apparently, with enough common sense to point to the obvious, at the dawn of the DNA age. He was one of the great scientists of the twentieth century, and saw the obvious problem with random evolution. He deserves better than the treatment he gets.
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.
Pure rubbish, and evidence of the paradox of modern scientific culture. Any serious scientific culture, armed with Hoyle’s insight, would have paused to reflect where they were going wrong on evolution, but instead an immense effort has emerged instead to miseducate young minds onprobability. Don’t be intimidated by science types making such statements. It is equivalent to saying up equals down, and all you can do is hope to survive until a new and better technological civilization comes along, one that doesn’t corrupt school kids with bad science.
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.
The question of gaps has indeed been confused by creationists. But the question is not gaps, but, starting with Hoyle’s insight, the fact that random evolution would take too long, longer even than the billions of years Darwinists are granted. We see not gaps but the discrepancy between two measures, of random evolution, and what we actually see. Some factor of compression must be present. So the issue is not just gaps in the fossil record, but any compression of the stages of evolution in any form. The descent of humans shows that compression, and we have the mysterious Great Explosion, which isn’t a gap, but suspicious evidence that something far more complex than natural selection is
all work.
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.
Nonsense. I find the idea of chimpanzee lineage inspiring.
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.
This paragraph is a gross distortion of the record of Social Darwinist
violence that reeked in the generation after Darwin and drove William Jennings Bryan to his counterattack against Darwin’s sly piece of disguised economic and social competition ideology in disguise. As a matter of fact, anyone trying to grasp the enormity of the Holocaust ought to consider carefully the influence of Darwinism on Hitler.
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!”
Pure hypocrisy. If you think natural selection produced the human brain you will put a premium on competition, survival of the fittest, and the rest, and you will void the significance of ethics in the process. The result, in this civilization of Darwin thugs with science PR, is a pseudo-culture of Nietzschean riffraff and pragmatist palookas.
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.
I have no idea what evidence would change Darwinists minds. The discovery of evo-devo, a massive case of n-design, should have made them see that many of Darwin’s original claims had been falsified. Instead they are now trying to graft evo-devo onto the old natural selection. And they suspect they can get away with it, once again.
Yes we all agree on the fact of evolution. But the theory of natural
selection, one of the longest running frauds in the history of science, remains as ambiguous as it was to many of the first reviewers of Darwin, who weren’t all religious types, and still had the common sense remaining before the rise of the Darwin propaganda machine to see that Darwin had produced a fake theory.