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<DIV class=OutlookMessageHeader lang=en-us dir=ltr align=left>
<HR tabIndex=-1>
</DIV>
<DIV class=OutlookMessageHeader lang=en-us dir=ltr align=left><FONT face=Tahoma
size=2><B>From:</B> Michael Shermer [mailto:skepticssociety@skeptic.com]
<BR><B>Sent:</B> Wednesday, November 23, 2005 12:00 AM<BR><B>To:</B> Herb
Martin<BR><B>Subject:</B> eSkeptic: Dawkins on the Illusion of
Design<BR></FONT><BR></DIV>
<DIV></DIV><FONT size=4></FONT><FONT style="BACKGROUND-COLOR: #ffffff"
size=4></FONT><FONT style="BACKGROUND-COLOR: #ffffff" size=4></FONT><FONT
style="BACKGROUND-COLOR: #ffffff" size=4></FONT>
<DIV id=eskeptic_wholepage>
<H3 class=eskeptic><SPAN class=forAccessibility>eSkeptic: the email newsletter
of the Skeptics Society</SPAN></H3>
<DIV id=eSkepticDate>Wednesday, November 23rd, 2005 <SPAN class=issn>|
ISSN 1556-5696</SPAN> </DIV>
<HR class=forAccessibility>
<DIV class=Announcement>
<DIV class=imageclearall><IMG class=banner height=140
alt="Adapting Minds book cover"
src="http://www.skeptic.com/eskeptic/05-11-23images/Adapting_Minds.jpg"
width=500 NOSEND="1"> </DIV>
<H4>Sex, Jealousy & Violence <BR><SMALL>A Skeptical Look at Evolutionary
Psychology</SMALL> </H4>
<P class=Presenter>Dr. David Buller </P>
<P class=DateLocation>Sunday, December 11, 2pm <BR>Baxter Lecture Hall, Caltech,
Pasadena, CA <BR>(The Skeptics Distinguished Lecture Series at Caltech) </P>
<P class=ProseFirstLines><SPAN class=FirstLines>Was human nature really
designed</SPAN> 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,
<EM>Adapting Minds: Evolutionary Psychology and the Persistent Quest for Human
Nature</EM>, Dr. David J. Buller, a professor of philosophy at Northern Illinois
University, examines in detail the major claims of evolutionary psychology. </P>
<P>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. </P></DIV>
<HR class=forAccessibility>
<DIV class=Introduction>
<DIV class=imagefloatleft style="WIDTH: 260px"><IMG class=diagram height=300
alt="photo of Richard Dawkins by Lalla Ward"
src="http://www.skeptic.com/eskeptic/05-11-23images/dawkinsRichard.jpg"
width=250 NOSEND="1">
<P class=caption>Richard Dawkins (copyright © Lalla Ward) </P></DIV>
<P>In this week’s <EM>eSkeptic</EM> we present an article by Richard Dawkins
which appeared as the introduction to a special section on “Darwin &
Evolution” in the November issue of <EM>Natural History</EM> magazine. The
section was edited by Richard Milner, the singing Darwinian scholar who is known
to many <EM>Skeptic</EM> 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 <A
href="http://www.naturalhistorymagazine.com/">www.naturalhistorymagazine.com</A>
and Richard Milner’s latest performance dates are listed on his website <A
href="http://www.darwinlive.com/">www.darwinlive.com</A>. This article copyright
© <EM>Natural History</EM> magazine, Inc., 2005. Used by permission. </P>
<P>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 <EM>The Selfish Gene</EM> (Oxford University
Press, 1976), <EM>The Blind Watchmaker</EM> (W.W. Norton, 1986), <EM>Climbing
Mount Improbable</EM> (W.W. Norton, 1996), and most recently, <EM>The Ancestor’s
Tale</EM> (Houghton Mifflin, 2004), which retells the saga of evolution in a
Chaucerian mode. </P></DIV>
<HR class=forAccessibility>
<DIV class=Story>
<H4>The Illusion of Design </H4>
<P class=Author>by Richard Dawkins </P>
<P class=ProseFirstLines><SPAN class=FirstLines>The world is divided</SPAN> 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. </P>
<P>No wonder Thomas Henry Huxley, “Darwin’s bulldog,” was moved to chide himself
on reading the <EM>Origin of Species</EM>: “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 “<A
href="http://www.naturalhistorymagazine.com/1105/1105_feature3.html">Evolution
in Action</A>” — 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. </P>
<P>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. </P>
<P>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. </P>
<P>Paraphrasing the twentieth-century population geneticist Ronald A. Fisher,
natural selection is a mechanism for generating improbability on an enormous
scale. <EM>Improbable </EM>is pretty much a synonym for <EM>unbelievable</EM>.
Any theory that explains the highly improbable is asking to be disbelieved by
those who don’t understand it. </P>
<P>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. </P>
<P>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? </P>
<P>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. </P>
<P>As the generations unfold, ratcheting takes the cumulative improbability up
to levels that — in the absence of the ratcheting — would exceed all sensible
credence. </P>
<P>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. </P>
<P>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. </P>
<P>In the case of fossils, as Donald R. Prothero documents in “The Fossils Say
Yes” [see the print issue of <EM>Natural History</EM> 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. </P>
<P>Absence of evidence <EM>for</EM> is not positive evidence <EM>against</EM>,
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. </P>
<P>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. </P>
<P>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. </P>
<P>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!” </P>
<P>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
<EM>Natural History</EM> magazine], and tormented by illness and bereavement, as
Richard Milner’s interview with the psychiatrist Ralph Colp Jr. shows in “<A
href="http://www.naturalhistorymagazine.com/1105/1105_feature2.html">Darwin’s
Shrink</A>,” 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. </P>
<P>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 “<A
href="http://www.naturalhistorymagazine.com/1105/1105_feature4.html">The Origins
of Form</A>,” Darwinism proves to be a flourishing population of theories,
itself undergoing rapid evolutionary change. </P>
<P>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. </P></DIV>
<HR class=forAccessibility>
<DIV class=Announcement>
<DIV class=imageclearall><IMG class=banner height=186
alt="The Ancestor's Tale book cover"
src="http://www.skeptic.com/eskeptic/05-11-23images/ancestors_banner.gif"
width=500 NOSEND="1"> </DIV>
<H4>Richard Dawkins’ DVDs & books <BR>available at Shop Skeptic</H4>
<UL>
<LI><A
href="https://www.skeptic.com/Merchant2/merchant.mvc?Screen=PROD&Store_Code=SS&Product_Code=magv03n4">Dawkins
interview in <EM>Skeptic</EM> vol.3 no.4</A>
<LI><A
href="https://www.skeptic.com/Merchant2/merchant.mvc?Screen=PROD&Store_Code=SS&Product_Code=magv07n2">Dawkins
on Genes in <EM>Skeptic</EM> vol.7 no.2</A>
<LI><A
href="https://www.skeptic.com/Merchant2/merchant.mvc?Screen=PROD&Store_Code=SS&Product_Code=magv10n3">Dawkins
writes “A Devil’s Chaplin” in <EM>Skeptic</EM> vol.10 no.3</A>
<LI><A
href="https://www.skeptic.com/Merchant2/merchant.mvc?Screen=PROD&Store_Code=SS&Product_Code=av036">River
Out of Eden</A> (DVD)
<LI><A
href="https://www.skeptic.com/Merchant2/merchant.mvc?Screen=PROD&Store_Code=SS&Product_Code=av139">The
Ancestor’s Tale</A> (DVD)
<LI><A
href="https://www.skeptic.com/Merchant2/merchant.mvc?Screen=PROD&Store_Code=SS&Product_Code=b087PB">The
Blind Watchmaker</A> (paperback)
<LI><A
href="https://www.skeptic.com/Merchant2/merchant.mvc?Screen=PROD&Store_Code=SS&Product_Code=b092HB">The
Ancestor’s Tale</A> (hardback) </LI></UL></DIV>
<HR class=forAccessibility>
<DIV id=Footnote><EM>eSkeptic</EM> is a free, public newsletter published
(almost) weekly by the Skeptics Society. Contents are Copyright © 2005 Michael
Shermer, the Skeptics Society, and the authors and artists. Permission is
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