* The case for modern evolutionary theory can easily stand on its own merits, without reference to its "rival" Design. However, the supposed "contest" between the two becomes even more imbalanced in favor of MET when Design is considered on its own merits. This chapter describes the failings of Design and provides some closing comments.
* While modern evolutionary theory has a list of strengths, Design is characterized by weaknesses. It isn't a very strong idea in the first place: although advocates of Design claim MET is an absurdly complicated and implausible scheme and insist that Design is the simpler and cleaner option, they can only do so by invoking a Design "process" in which all specifics are swept under the rug and ignored.
Design, after all, cannot identify a specific Designer -- any Designer can be proposed, alien white mice or whatever, as anyone likes, one works the same way as any other, and none of them provide insight. To suggest that the Designer was an alien race would be to propose a highly elaborate mechanism, a proposal that would have no credibility unless there was evidence for the existence of such an alien race other than their proclaimed acts of Design.
In practice, if a Designer is identified by the critics at all, it's usually as a supernatural entity of some sort and not a mysterious alien race, but this notion is as or more troublesome for the critics as mysterious aliens. The problem is that by definition "supernatural" means "outside of the laws of nature" -- not just "outside the laws of nature as we know them and not yet explained", but "outside the laws of nature, even those we don't know about, and permanently unexplainable." Invoking the supernatural is just saying that something just went: "POOF!" -- and magically happened somehow; nobody can or ever will be able to say how; so stop asking questions. Given the fact that nobody has ever observed a validated case of "POOF!" in any context, there's no reason to think it a good answer, or for that matter even an answer at all.
In either case -- aliens or supernatural entities -- the only evidence actually offered to support Design is the "negative argument", the notion that Design must be true because all other explanations have been ruled out. There's no alternative to the negative argument, since Design cannot be justified on its own merits: it cannot provide any specific Designer to the exclusion of any others, it cannot say how the Designer did things or when the Designer did it, and it can accommodate any and every pattern of evidence from nature, in fact every conceivable scientific observation of any sort, with the conclusion: "It was just made that way."
If things work like ABC but not XYZ, Design works perfectly; if things instead work like XYZ and not ABC, Design works just as well. Design, unlike MET, has no problems with an old or young Earth; no concerns over the fossil record or mechanisms of heredity; and would have no problems with rabbits in the Precambrian. Any consideration of details is irrelevant. The only question is of what motive the Designer would have to do ABC or XYZ, and since the Designer has provided us with no information on His motivations, we can dream up any motivation we please -- any motivation either sensible or silly, with any one having as much basis in the evidence as any other.
When asked for specifics, the critics reply with evasions and then return to the negative argument, seeking pretexts for criticisms of MET, ignoring the fact that the negative argument doesn't actually provide the slightest evidence for Design. It is the explanation of "absolute last resort", acceptable only if all other explanations have been completely dismissed -- including all explanations that nobody has thought of yet. That may sound like an unreasonable demand for proof, but if the claim is made that something must be true because all other possibilities have been ruled out, the only logical reply is to ask: "So exactly how have absolutely all other possibilities been ruled out, forever?" There's a lot of things we don't understand now, but how could anyone prove we never will? Who could say that something that is a complete mystery today won't be explained ten thousand years from now? Or for that matter, tomorrow?
If MET is, as Design proponents often mock it, "just a theory", Design hardly rates being describe as a theory. Design -- lacking the ability to specify a Designer or details of a Design process, reliant on "just made that way" -- is not an explanation but a non-explanation, once again like detailing the operation of an automobile or a computer by invoking unseen gremlins. The more work put into investigation, the more Design fades into an illusion.
* Of course it can be, and often is, said that maybe there's some other new theory we haven't come up with yet that does a better job than MET. That's completely unarguable, but that's equivalent to saying that if pigs had wings, they could fly. The only answer is: "We'll be honestly intrigued if you can find a winged pig, and, not joking, absolutely fascinated to watch it fly." However, Design doesn't even deliver a pig.
BACK_TO_TOP* Design, lacking support in the evidence, survives on one and only one strength -- its appeal to intuition. It is entirely dependent on the argument of the Reverend Paley, who reasoned that the elaborations of nature indicated that they had been formed by a higher intelligence, a Designer or in Paley's concept a "watchmaker".
Certainly, if Alice and Bob find a watch on the ground, they would know it was made by an intelligence -- but if they then find a butterfly, would they actually have any real cause to think it was Designed? Bob could argue, exactly as Paley did: "The butterfly is too elaborate to have arisen by spontaneous natural processes, and so it had to have been Designed. It looks so obviously like a Design that it is unreasonable to think it could be the result of anything but the handiwork of a Designer."
To which Alice would reply: "Is it, really? We know that a watch is designed and built, but what do we honestly know about the origins of a butterfly? What real facts do we have at our disposal to tell us if it was Designed or not?"
Paley appears to have been a decent and thoughtful man, and it is a bit of a pity that he has become well known for what has been recognized as the "Paley fallacy". His fallacy was not in suggesting that elaboration might imply a Designer; it might. His fallacy was that he was simply reasoning by analogy, believing that since humans design elaborate artificial objects, then elaborate natural objects had to have been Designed by a higher intelligence.
Reasoning by analogy can be treacherous. Analogies are comparisons, usually for illustrative purposes, between two things that are similar in some ways but not in others -- if the two things are either entirely different or exactly the same, there's no useful analogy between them. Simply because two different things are similar in some ways does not imply they are similar in others; for example, there are many similarities in subsystems and construction between a car and a private airplane, but that hardly proves that an ordinary car can fly in any useful sense of the word. The only way to determine what is the same and what is different for the two objects is to go check and see where they are the same and where they differ.
Paley's fallacy was that he didn't check. He had no way of doing so. Our intuition is a product of experience; if we have no experience in some matter, we have no basis for intuition of it. It would seem reasonable enough to bet there is a planet similar in basic properties -- mass, composition, rotation and orbital period -- to the Earth on the other side of our Galaxy, but having said that such a planet may well exist, what can intuition tell us about it? For example, could we say if it was inhabited or not? The most we could do is make arbitrary guesses with no honest confidence of our guesses being the least bit accurate. Whatever guesses we might make would end up being as silly reading as, for example, a book written in 1900 on what life would be like a century later. Do we have, without investigation, any more understanding of the origin of natural objects?
Paley had no knowledge of their origins whatsoever. His argument did not address the question of whether elaborate natural objects could have arisen by some spontaneous natural process, he simply leaped to an answer and proclaimed they had to have been Designed, relying strictly on an analogy with human artifice. Paley was playing with only one card in his hand, having absolutely no other basis for believing, no experience, no evidence to suggest that elaborate natural objects necessarily reflect Design.
In addition, Paley simply assumed that natural objects were static, that they had been more or less Designed in their present form, failing to consider the possibility that they could spontaneously evolve and adapt. However, it is evident that all else -- landscapes, planets, stars, galaxies, the Universe itself -- clearly spontaneously evolves in various ways, their current forms not being the same as their earlier forms nor the same as the forms they will have in the future. Even the atoms themselves may evolve, with heavy elements synthesized in stars and radioactive isotopes decaying to daughter isotopes.
We would have no reason to assume if we found a rock that it had been created in its present form at the beginning of the world, and there is nothing that Paley said to suggest that we should assume so. Paley's assertion was that that the Universe and its natural laws reflect Design; but even accepting that argument, there was nothing in his reasoning that asserted its elements could not spontaneously change. The modern critics of MET leap into this blind spot in Paley's argument, not merely claiming nature reflects Design -- but making a second and independent claim, that for some unexplained reason evolution cannot be part of the Design.
* The Paley fallacy does have a certain intuitive appeal, but it tends to lose its appeal on closer examination. It is a clumsily mechanistic way of thinking, comparing the workings of machinery to the workings of organisms, despite the fact that the resemblance between a biosystem and any machine ever built by humans is slight. Machines, unlike organisms, do not reproduce or grow or rebuild lost parts of themselves. No two organisms of the same species resemble each other as much as two examples of the same product, and by that same coin organisms work perfectly well with components featuring a range of variance that would be intolerable in a machine. Certainly there is no resemblance between the production of machines and of organisms; nobody claims that natural organisms were built in a factory.
Machines that resemble biosystems even superficially are unusual, lacking the rectilinear and rigidly structured configurations of more typical manufactured items, and are often referred to as "organic" in appearance. Of course we can also build machines that look like organisms -- a windup toy to imitate a hopping kangaroo, for example -- but what does that prove? When we do build machines that are, inadvertently or by intent, similar in appearance to organisms, that hardly establishes that the organisms they resemble must also be Designed. Once again, simply because humans imitate nature doesn't imply that nature imitates humans.
In addition, if organisms are compared to machines while acknowledging that unlike machines they grow and reproduce -- then nothing in this line of reasoning rules out the idea that organisms also spontaneously adapt and evolve exactly as MET says they do. If, as the critics like to say, the ability of organisms to grow, repair themselves, and reproduce demonstrates that they are even better Designs than human-made machines, then an ability to spontaneously adapt and evolve makes them better Designed still, drawing the argument into a self-defeating circle.
Indeed, why would we believe that a more complex machine was inherently better designed than a simpler one? Complexity in itself may amount to nothing more than mindless jumble that nobody would think seemed designed. Trying to drive around an old city whose road networks simply grew without planning over centuries can be extremely frustrating; the roads are workable of course, we can get from here to there and locals are generally very skilled at doing so, but the maddening complexity of the road network doesn't reflect design, instead the lack of it. A neatly laid out, orderly road network in a modern city is much more workable, much simpler because more thought was put into its overall design.
In fact, why would we believe that complexity of any sort was a mark of Design? We could build a wall of bricks, or of flat rocks we scavenge up from the landscape. Bricks resemble rocks far more closely than machines resemble organisms -- but nobody reasonably claims that suggests flat rocks were specially Designed, even though their similarity to a human-made artifact like a brick is much greater than that of organisms to machines.
Taking that thought further, if we were to throw a ping-pong ball among a pile of smooth pebbles, we'd have no problem identifying what in the pile is artificial and what is natural. However, in that case the identifying feature of the artificial item, the ping-pong ball, is not complexity but actually simplicity. The ping-pong ball's dimensions and composition are much more uniform than those of the pebbles; would anyone sensibly claim that the relative elaboration of the pebbles, with their varied dimensions and much more complicated compositions, makes them more obviously Designed than ping-pong ball? Or would we then try to claim a soap bubble, which in its regularity and simplicity is much more like a ping-pong ball than the pebbles, is then obviously Designed -- that is, it only exists through the action of a Designer, and science cannot explain it?
If complexity proves Design in some cases and simplicity proves it in others, then any such argument is meaningless. A compass that points in any direction provides no direction at all.
* Despite these obstacles, the machine analogy persists. In modern times, just as Paley made a comparison between organisms and a watch, critics of MET similarly make comparisons between, say, the genome and computer programs -- but it's entirely the same argument, the watch being the 18th-century notion of high technology, computers not having been invented at the time. Such analogies appears so strong that their advocates fail to realize they're mesmerized by a scene in a mental mirror that imposes human ways on a Universe that, as all agree, isn't run by humans. There is a saying that if one has a hammer, then all one sees is nails; as far as the Paley fallacy goes, such a human-oriented mindset ignores the fact that nature has neither hammers nor nails.
In the novel THIEF OF TIME, the British fantasist Terry Pratchett (born 1948) wrote of the monk Lu-Tze and his student Lobsang on a journey through the woods. Lu-Tze is chatting with Lobsang, who asks the monk:
BEGIN QUOTE:
"Er ... why are we whispering?"
"Look at the bird."
It was perched on a branch by a fork in the tree, next to what looked like a birdhouse, and nibbling at a piece of roughly round wood it held in one claw.
"Must be an old nest they're repairing," said Lu-Tze. "Can't have got that advanced this early in the season."
"Looks like some kind of an old box to me," said Lobsang. He squinted to look at it better. "Is it an old ... clock?" he added.
"Look at what the bird is nibbling," suggested Lu-Tze.
"Well, it looks like ... a crude gearwheel? But why -- "
"Well spotted. That, lad, is a clock cuckoo. A young one, by the look of it, trying to make a nest that will attract a mate. Not much chance of that ... see? It got the numerals all wrong and it's stuck the hands on crooked."
"A bird that builds clocks? I thought a cuckoo clock was a clock with a mechanical cuckoo, which came out when -- "
"And where do you think people got such a strange idea from?"
"But that's some kind of miracle!"
"Why?" said Lu-Tze. "They barely go for half an hour, they keep lousy time, and the poor dumb males go frantic trying to keep them wound."
END QUOTE
Some may laugh at this story, others may sneer, but all agree that the notion of a "clock cuckoo" is silly. Of course it is, everybody knows that nature doesn't produce machines as humans understand them, the idea is obviously ridiculous. That being so, then why should anybody take comparisons between clocks and watches -- or computer programs -- and biosystems seriously?
Bob may insist that a butterfly had to have been Designed, but what reason would Alice have to agree? All Bob can do is play the Paley card, comparing organisms to machines, and then proclaim that it is intuitively obvious. Alice can ask in reply why it's supposed to be obvious -- the only support for the idea is an analogy with human construction of machines, and that analogy doesn't hold much water. Do cuckoos really build cuckoo clocks?
BACK_TO_TOP* Having outlined the evidence for evolution, it's worthwhile to have some fun with the idea. A Scots geologist named Dougal Dixon (born 1947) has written a series of speculative books that imagine "bestiaries" of Earths of the future, or Earths where the dinosaurs died out. Dixon's speculative books are "science fiction" in the strict sense of the term, exercises in imagination grounded in the sciences, and though they're basically intelligent amusements they are also thought-provoking, showing how evolutionary principles could give rise to new organisms in different scenarios. They might be considered as "thought experiments".
In his classic 1981 book AFTER MAN, he offers the premise that humanity and quite a few species of animals died out in an unspecified catastrophe, with a new world order emerging over tens of millions of years. Rats form the basis of major predator groups, evolving into wolflike or even bearlike forms, while rabbits evolve into "rabbucks", creatures like long-eared llamas -- one branch of which runs like antelopes, the other which hops like kangaroos.
Consider the possible adaptations of rats in a world where most other mammals have died out. How much change would a rat have to undergo to resemble, say, a weasel? It would need sharper claws, modified teeth, a longer and more flexible body -- all of which could result from a fairly small number of genetic mutations, mostly tweaks of existing developmental genes, no more generally implausible, arguably even less implausible, than the transformation of a wolf into a pekinese. The same exercise can be applied to the changes a rat would have to undergo to result in something like a cat: a bigger body, longer legs, keener eyes and ears, more formidable claws and teeth, different coloration -- once again a fairly modest set of genetic changes. The "tree" of rat-derived predators could then diversify into larger and more formidable beasts -- a rat-cat could easily be the ancestor of a rat-panther through a direct scaling-up, and the rat-panther an ancestor of a rat-sabretooth.
Many of the other beasts of Dixon's future Earth are similarly straightforward derivatives of creatures of our own time, for example "flying monkeys" or "flunkeys", which are Old World monkeys with flaps of skin from the front to back legs to allow them to glide from tree to tree like flying squirrels. This is a very plausible adaptation, since the "glider" format has been "reinvented" so many times. There are also "swimming monkeys" that live in trees along bodies of water, diving in to swim with webbed feet and snatch fish with clawed hands. The eyes, ears, and nose are placed high on the head to keep them above the waterline, just as they are in hippos.
Whales died out in the mass extinction, with the descendants of penguins moving into the vacuum -- resulting in the dolphinlike "porpin" as well as the "vortex", a penguin the size of a humpback whale, with a beak adapted to act as a krill strainer. Again, the genetic changes involved in the "production" of these beasts are fairly modest -- changes in scale, adjustments of organs to deal with bigger body mass, alterations in the beak (with the porpin featuring serrations on its long beak to allow it to catch fish more easily), and so on. A analysis of the genomes of these animals would reveal that they remained clearly similar to the genomes of penguins of our era.
Of course, since evolution tends to produce surprises, Dixon's animal world of the future also contains more than few freaks -- for example, the "flooer", a bat that has lost its wings and returned to a ground-dwelling existence, acquiring a face that looks like a flower and saliva that smells like nectar to allow it to ambush pollinating moths and butterflies. Ridiculous? No more than a mantis that looks like an orchid -- camouflage to trap pollinating insects with, just like a flooer -- or sea dragon that looks like seaweed. The flooer also provides an example of how evolution "makes do" with what is available, resulting in bats that can't fly.
BACK_TO_TOP* I ended up writing this document for the simple reason that the public dispute over evolutionary science got too loud for me to ignore. I had to sit down and sort through the facts to see if the critics really had much legitimate basis for their attacks on MET, and if not what might be said in response.
I did this essentially as an amusement and to settle things in my own head. I'm not sure that it could make much of an impression on anyone else. I have to point out, if it's not obvious, I have no formal qualifications in the sciences -- my background is in engineering, and I'm a technical writer by trade. I began with a low level of knowledge and only spent a year and a half writing the first release. This is a document by an amateur, and I'm sure there are some naive statements here and there that will have to be fixed in the future. That's what revcodes are for.
Writing this document was a learning experience less in the acquisition of details than in construction of an argument. Every now and then I would take off in one direction and then realize the foolishness of it -- for example, working up a long defense of Darwin's personal integrity, only to abruptly realize that I had no stake in defending him. Charles Darwin was a Victorian gentleman who I never met and who, being long dead, is completely immune to any offense or injury anyway.
In fact, I had to remind myself that I had no emotional stake in MET to begin with. I cannot think of any reason of why I would want to accept it except for the fact that the evidence demands it. If the Universe works some other way, I would find it every bit as interesting, and if I find ever find new and persuasive evidence that suggests the Universe works some other way, I'll have no problem discarding my present views.
I admit I feel more instead of less justified in my acceptance by the criticisms of MET, which amount to little more than a trashbin of long-refuted arguments, thrown out in total indifference to credibility or logical consistency. Given how long the critics have been at it, if there was anything seriously wrong with MET, they'd be able to come up with arguments, even wrong ones, that were actually interesting. Nor is this prejudice on my part. Critics of MET, who are often religious zealots, insist that opposition to their views is based on hostility to religion, but in my own case I can state as an unbreakable fact that's not the case. I'm an apatheist -- whether people firmly believe in God, or pointedly do not, is a matter of as much interest to me as whether they prefer Pepsi to Coke. That is a position that will make no one happy with me, but whatever -- the bottom line is I don't have a dog in that fight.
Besides, if MET is indeed the way things work, no ideological concern is going to alter the material facts in the slightest, any more than such concerns affect the weather. Yes, I do get annoyed with the critics, but only out of weariness. If they don't want to buy MET -- fine, they have an unarguable right. However, the sciences, believe them or not, say MET is the way things work, and claiming the sciences themselves say different is preposterous.
Alas, the mean-spirited quarreling over MET quickly becomes tiresome and hard to take seriously. Sometimes I wish I'd never heard of evolution, I've got other interesting things I can work on that are far less troublesome. Unfortunately, I did get into it, and lacking any way to mindwipe myself to forget all about it, I finally had to recognize that I was more or less stuck with it.
However, instead of finishing on a sour note ... reflecting on the mockery that MET is like thinking that a bunch of monkeys pounding on typewriters could produce the Bible, I recall a very short fantasy story I read when I was a lad, about a scientist who trained a group of chimpanzees to type and let them go at it. They promptly produced the Bible, the complete works of Shakespeare, and were pounding out the ENCYCLOPEDIA BRITANNICA when the scientist flew off the handle and shot them all. Only one badly-wounded chimp was still moving after the massacre; with his dying breaths, he crawled up to the typewriter and punched out:
T H E E N D
* Sources include:
I spent a considerable amount of time surfing the internet for interesting background materials. The discussion of the evolution of toxins was from a blog entry by P.Z. Myers commenting on the work of Australian naturalist Brian Grieg Fry. Of course, I have to give credit to my neighborhood prairie dogs, who are always amusing and also a good source of evolutionary inspiration.
* Revision history:
v1.0.0 / 01 jan 08 / gvg / INTRO TO EVOLUTIONARY SCIENCE, 22 chapters. v1.1.0 / 01 apr 08 / gvg / Title INTRO TO EVOLUTION, went to 24 chapters. v1.2.0 / 01 jun 08 / gvg / Added DR. TATIANA info, various polishings. v1.2.1 / 01 jul 08 / gvg / Extensive small tweaks. v1.2.2 / 01 aug 08 / gvg / A few more tweaks, went to 28 chapters. v1.3.0 / 01 jan 09 / gvg / Deleted chapters on Darwin Wars, 21 chapters. v2.0.0 / 01 may 09 / gvg / General rewrite, cut origin of life material. v3.0.0 / 01 jun 10 / gvg / General rewrite, went to 24 chapters. v3.0.1 / 01 jul 10 / gvg / Multiple cleanups on v3.0.0. v3.0.2 / 01 sep 10 / gvg / Follow-on cleanups.BACK_TO_TOP
