[extropy-chat] FW: eSkeptic: Dawkins on the Illusion of Design (posting Shermers current newsletter, ID is disccussed and many may want to subscribe)

[Herb Martin]

  _____  

From: Michael Shermer [mailto:skepticssociety at skeptic.com] 
Sent: Wednesday, November 23, 2005 12:00 AM
To: Herb Martin
Subject: eSkeptic: Dawkins on the Illusion of Design



eSkeptic: the email newsletter of the Skeptics Society

Wednesday, November 23rd, 2005  |  ISSN 1556-5696 
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 Adapting Minds book cover
<http://www.skeptic.com/eskeptic/05-11-23images/Adapting_Minds.jpg> 

Sex, Jealousy & Violence 
A Skeptical Look at Evolutionary Psychology 


Dr. David Buller 

Sunday, December 11, 2pm 
Baxter Lecture Hall, Caltech, Pasadena, CA 
(The Skeptics Distinguished Lecture Series at Caltech) 

Was human nature really designed by natural selection in the Pleistocene
epoch? The dominant view in evolutionary psychology holds that it was - that
our psychological adaptations were designed tens of thousands of years ago
to solve problems faced by our hunter-gatherer ancestors. In this lecture,
based on his new book, Adapting Minds: Evolutionary Psychology and the
Persistent Quest for Human Nature, Dr. David J. Buller, a professor of
philosophy at Northern Illinois University, examines in detail the major
claims of evolutionary psychology. 

Buller does not argue that we cannot apply evolutionary theory to human
psychology, only that much of the conventional wisdom in evolutionary
psychology is misguided. Our minds are not adapted to the Pleistocene,
Buller says, but, like the immune system, we are continually adapting, over
both evolutionary time and individual lifetimes. We must move beyond the
reigning orthodoxy of evolutionary psychology to reach an accurate
understanding of how human psychology is influenced by evolution. When we
do, Buller claims, we will abandon not only the quest for human nature but
the very idea of human nature itself. 

  _____  

 photo of Richard Dawkins by Lalla Ward
<http://www.skeptic.com/eskeptic/05-11-23images/dawkinsRichard.jpg> 

Richard Dawkins (copyright C Lalla Ward) 

In this week's eSkeptic we present an article by Richard Dawkins which
appeared as the introduction to a special section on "Darwin & Evolution" in
the November issue of Natural History magazine. The section was edited by
Richard Milner, the singing Darwinian scholar who is known to many Skeptic
readers, and features articles by Don Prothero on transitional fossils,
Jonathan Weiner on natural selection in the wild, and many other articles of
interest. Excerpts from the issue can be seen at
www.naturalhistorymagazine.com <http://www.naturalhistorymagazine.com/>  and
Richard Milner's latest performance dates are listed on his website
www.darwinlive.com <http://www.darwinlive.com/> . This article copyright C
Natural History magazine, Inc., 2005. Used by permission. 

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. 

  _____  


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. The breathtaking
power and reach of Darwin's idea - extensively documented in the field, as
Jonathan Weiner reports in "Evolution
<http://www.naturalhistorymagazine.com/1105/1105_feature3.html> 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 of Natural History in which this article first
appeared], 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
November issue of Natural History magazine], and tormented by illness and
bereavement, as Richard Milner's interview with the psychiatrist Ralph Colp
Jr. shows in "Darwin
<http://www.naturalhistorymagazine.com/1105/1105_feature2.html> '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
November issue of Natural History Magazine]) 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 November issue of Natural History Magazine] and Sean B.
Carroll details further for the exciting new field of "evo-devo" in "The
Origins  <http://www.naturalhistorymagazine.com/1105/1105_feature4.html> 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. 

  _____  

 The Ancestor's Tale book cover
<http://www.skeptic.com/eskeptic/05-11-23images/ancestors_banner.gif> 

Richard Dawkins' DVDs & books 
available at Shop Skeptic


*	Dawkins
<https://www.skeptic.com/Merchant2/merchant.mvc?Screen=PROD&Store_Code=SS&Pr
oduct_Code=magv03n4> interview in Skeptic vol.3 no.4 

*	Dawkins
<https://www.skeptic.com/Merchant2/merchant.mvc?Screen=PROD&Store_Code=SS&Pr
oduct_Code=magv07n2> on Genes in Skeptic vol.7 no.2 

*	Dawkins
<https://www.skeptic.com/Merchant2/merchant.mvc?Screen=PROD&Store_Code=SS&Pr
oduct_Code=magv10n3> writes "A Devil's Chaplin" in Skeptic vol.10 no.3 

*	River
<https://www.skeptic.com/Merchant2/merchant.mvc?Screen=PROD&Store_Code=SS&Pr
oduct_Code=av036> Out of Eden (DVD) 

*	The
<https://www.skeptic.com/Merchant2/merchant.mvc?Screen=PROD&Store_Code=SS&Pr
oduct_Code=av139> Ancestor's Tale (DVD) 

*	The
<https://www.skeptic.com/Merchant2/merchant.mvc?Screen=PROD&Store_Code=SS&Pr
oduct_Code=b087PB> Blind Watchmaker (paperback) 

*	The
<https://www.skeptic.com/Merchant2/merchant.mvc?Screen=PROD&Store_Code=SS&Pr
oduct_Code=b092HB> Ancestor's Tale (hardback) 

  _____  

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