PZ Myers links to a great Ted Rall cartoon on Stupid Design. The point being that the world around us isn’t anything close to being efficiently designed. If it is the reflection of the plans of some supernatural architect, many of us could have offered a few useful pointers. As with most such arguments, David Hume was there first:
In a word, Cleanthes, a man who follows your hypothesis is able perhaps to assert, or conjecture, that the universe, sometime, arose from something like design: but beyond that position he cannot ascertain one single circumstance; and is left afterwards to fix every point of his theology by the utmost license of fancy and hypothesis. This world, for aught he knows, is very faulty and imperfect, compared to a superior standard; and was only the first rude essay of some infant deity, who afterwards abandoned it, ashamed of his lame performance: it is the work only of some dependent, inferior deity; and is the object of derision to his superiors: it is the production of old age and dotage in some superannuated deity; and ever since his death, has run on at adventures, from the first impulse and active force which it received from him.
Hume gets extra bonus points for writing before Darwin demonstrated how complex adaptive organisms can arise even without a designer. (But he loses some points for weaseling at the end of the Dialogues.)
Before Darwin, you couldn’t really fault someone for thinking “Gee, my two choices are between imagining that something as complicated as a human being just sort of came together by accident, or that someone designed it. I think I’ll go for Door Number Two.” But once we figured out that there was a Door Number Three — that such complexity could evolve through descent with random modification and natural selection — it boggles the mind how anyone could look at the natural world and conclude that it shows any signs of being intentionally constructed just this way.
One of the prevalent misconceptions about evolution is that, in response to a certain problem, organisms can (over the course of generations) simply “evolve an appropriate solution.” Of course they don’t always do so; sometimes they just die off. But more importantly, the space of possibilities that organisms explore via descent with minor modifications is most definitely not the space of small variations on bodies (or behaviors); it’s the space of small variations on genomes. Even if a certain physiological feature would be useful, we’re not going to be able to evolve it unless flicking a few switches in the genetic code would lead to an intrinsically useful mutation that would move us along that direction.
Years ago, Stephen Jay Gould and Richard Lewontin borrowed the term spandrel from architecture to illustrate an important consequence of the way evolution works. A spandrel is an aspect of some form (whether from Renaissance arches or paedomorphic morphology) that arises as a side effect of some other trait that is useful, even if it doesn’t itself serve a necessary purpose. Those kinds of non-adaptations and accidents and anachronistic features are found all over the place in real organisms. Any intelligent designer with a shred of self-respect would be embarrassed to exhibit such shoddy workmanship.
The classic argument-from-design question is: What good is half an eye? Even when I was twelve years old, I could guess the answer to that one: it’s a lot of good! Imagine just a few photo-sensitive cells evolving on the skin of a sightless organism; that could be immensely useful, offering a decided advantage to its offspring. Continual reinforcement of that tendency could directly lead to better sensitivity and all the other highly-specialized upgrades that our own eyes come with.
On the other hand: What good is half a wheel? Now you’ve got me. The wheel is an excellent answer to a pretty obvious question, if you’re a person sitting there thinking about how to move heavy loads more quickly or efficiently. And it’s not hard to imagine wheels coming in useful on certain organisms. (Tell me that a snake with wheels wouldn’t be pretty efficient, if a bit scary.) But you just can’t get there from here, by ordinary evolutionary means. It’s hard to think of useful transitional forms.
All of which should teach us a lesson when we sit down to try to understand and reproduce the workings of actual organisms. The idea behind Strong Artificial Intelligence is that the brain is basically a computer — a thesis I’m happy to go along with. But reproducing brainlike behavior in actual computers has turned out to be much harder than many people anticipated. In retrospect it’s not hard to see why; the brain might be a computer, but it’s certainly not the same kind of computer that we are used to programming. Its functioning arose naturally, rather than through top-down planning, and this kind of “organic design” leads to very different structures than “synthetic design.” Rather than relatively straightforward sets of algorithms expressed in neurological lines of code divided into tidy subprograms, our minds are subtle machines with virtual processors distributed holographically and interacting nonlocally throughout the brain. As a result, computers still aren’t very good poets, but they’re definitely better at multiplication and division than we are. (Now you tell me which talent might have been more useful out there on the veldt.)
This is probably true, but it is believed that phenotypic variations can help the process along in a few cases.
Some mentioned mechanisms are:
Phenotypic accommodation, “…the immediate adaptive adjustment of the phenotype to the production of a novel trait or trait combinations.” The Baldwin effect, “…the idea that phenotypic accommodations to variable or extreme conditions can affect the direction of genetic evolution…”. Genetic assimilation, “…a process by which a phenotypic character, which initially is produced only in response to some environmental influence, becomes, through a process of selection, taken over by the genotype…”. Canalization, “…an evolved reduction in developmental flexibility that renders the development of an adaptive phenotype resistant to environmental and genetic (e.g., mutational) perturbations…”. ( http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2006/08/symmetry_breaking_and_genetic.php )
The key case that is mentioned in the link is symmetry breaking. Equal frequencies of handedness (for example coiling in snail shells) can be selected to a preferred antisymmetry for some contingent reason, which later becomes fixated to a tight genetic control by genetic assimilation.
Scott (12): Hume might not have been serious about his weaseling, I haven’t tried to delve into it all that closely. But why weasel at all? Halfway through the book the reader is pretty embarassed that they ever took the argument from design seriously.
Amara: Much better to email quickly if a comment doesn’t appear, so that we can save it before it disappears forever.
Some thoughts of mine, which expand on what Alejandro (#3) and others have said. Some of this is my own speculation, so feel free to help improve my understanding if you have something to add.
The way I understand evolution, for individual members of the species I tend to think more, “Survival of the Able” rather than “of the fittest.” Individuals with advantages will still perish, and individuals with disadvantages may still thrive. (I also think community/altruistic behaviour makes more sense with this subtle word change, but that might just be me.) When looking at a group, however, the one-liner becomes “Dominance of the Fittest,” as long-term odds play out over the course of generations to produce a sort of equilibrium of different traits.
For my own mental model, this helps explain diversity in species. I find the word ‘fittest’ throws up a mental block for most people, and makes us try to find some sort of elite upper-end to a fitness scale – and makes us want to compare species as ‘fit’ vs ‘unfit’ as though they were engaged in a hockey match.
A new mutation doesn’t have to spread through an entire population right away – it may even be recessive, so that the original carrier would show no signs that it carried some new possibility. For recessive traits, as long as the individual is able to survive and reproduce, the offspring of the individual have a chance of being carriers for this new possibility, too. After a few generations, two carriers may come together and produce offspring with the new trait. If the new trait is detrimental, then most individuals with the trait will either perish or be unable to reproduce, limiting the trait to the offspring of two carriers of the recessive trait. If the trait is wildly successful, individuals with the trait will, over time, become the majority. If a trait provides only a minor advantage or disadvantage, the trait will neither die out nor rise to dominance.
This also lets me imagine multiple combinations of mutations and other traits coming together, which may work together (perhaps in unexpected ways) to create something new – the two “half-a-wheel” parts may eventually come together to form a “whole,” and we may even be able to jump over a less-than-optimal middle stage if the right pieces come together at the right time. If all the pieces exist, then it’s just a waiting game until all the odds come together in some generation. Once it’s happened once, the combined trait can spread the same way as an individual mutation might, and may eventually come to be a dominant species trait. If the odds fall favourably multiple times in the same generation, then the spreading of the combo trait may be even faster than the propagation of the original components.
Some minor quibbles were addressed above. Also, let’s not forget genetic drift. Sometimes innocuous, or even “useful” mutations get lost in the statistical cuisinart that is reproduction. Just because you can fill in all those Punnett sqares doesn’t mean nature will, nor will it respect with great fidelity the comforting probabilities of unnuanced Darwinian crosses.
I’m can’t object to “our minds are subtle machines with virtual processors distributed holographically and interacting nonlocally throughout the brain” until I can figure quite what that means. I’m guessing, despite appearances, that this isn’t a reference to quantum minds or so-called holonomic models, which aren’t at all uncontroversial.
Dear Sean: In fact I did email Mark quickly. Then I went to sleep. Then I went to work, and at the day, I decided to give the issue a final try. Third time’s a charm!
Excellent, I’m happy to blame Mark.
Great post as usual,
As an anthropologist and an amateur theologian, I find the entire evolution/intelligent design debate tiresome.
The essential problem is that even if the universe was intelligently designed, unintelligently or otherwise, there would never be a way that science could accept such an assertion because it cannot be tested. The reality is that to test whether our universe was designed is to compare it to another universe that we already knew wasn’t designed! Good luck on that!
The notion of faith and belief in the transcendant has always been a description of an essentially human reality experienced in the hearts and minds of human beings. It is refelctive of the natural order, but is not necessarily dependent on empirical evidence.
What hardcore intelligent design advocates need to determine for themselves is if their faith would be as strong if they could witness for themselves that intelligent design was not true. If one returned to the dawn of time and witnessed the universe come into being, an God was not empirically evident, if there were not six days of creation, would one cease to believe in God? Should our belief in God be so fragile? What would happen if instead of looking at the universe and placing our ideas of God on it, we allowed the universe to shape the way we understand God?
I think a much more interesting question to ask is: In what way has the communication of science failed in remaining relevant to people of faith? Why do some scientists continue to delight in the arrogant notion that science could somehow disprove the existance of God?
Empiricism cannot disprove the existance of God anymore than it can disprove the existance of love or beauty. These are the realm of subjective experience and as diverse as there are human minds.
Science and religion both need to be honest and humble about their limits and what they essentially can and cannot address.
Count Iblis asked:
A gas cloud consisting of hydrogen and helium can give rise to cars and computers all by itself if you wait long enough…
It can? Are you talking about a static gas cloud?… or a dynamic, expanding, cooling, gas cloud, which requires a structure principle that can’t be derived by any natural model that doesn’t include an anthropic constraint that requires that cars and computers will only arise… now…?
Design is typically associated with the intent and forethought that pre-exists behind the design, but any imbalance will exhibit this characteristic as a dominating tendency to reconcille the inequity, e.g., “Necessity is the mother of invention”.
The fourth option is an imbalance that requires far from equilibrium dissipative structures, like us.
Some scientists adhere to this notion at a local level, Jame Kay, Eric Schneider, Dorion Sagan, and Scott Sampson.
I agree with Sean.
“I didn’t like your post, write something I like” is starting to become a trend on the comments made by a couple of visitors.
Seriously, grow up and stop whining.
On a separate note, if I remember correctly, it was Richard Dawkings who made extensive remarks on the usefulness of “half-traits”, giving special emphasis on the half-eye analogy. Perhaps the comment on “what bad is half a wheel” is right on the money – useless traits might be carried over until they develop into useful ones.
By only addressing the real world.
I don’t know. Who are these scientists of which you speak?
So you content the wheel is irreducibly complex? Is this because you cannot image the use of only the parts of a wheel? Have you joined the Behe camp? For example, the spokes might provide excellent barbeque skewers with only slight modification. The rim would do a fine job of holding a skirt bottom out properly. The axle assembly would be a fine lint remover with only the addition of inverse masking tape….
No, I did not contend that wheels are irreducibly complex. Just that it would be harder to evolve them than to evolve legs. From which I make the prediction that organisms evolved by natural selection are more likely to have legs than to have wheels. And I’m right!
Just like Ed Witten can predict gravity, I can predict the existence of legs.
On Hume prefiguring Darwin- Not long ago I was reading Washington Irving’s “History of New York” and suffered a moment of cognitive dissonance. He’s recounting various creation stories and theories and mockingly refers to Darwin’s suggestion that humans descended from monkeys. Wait a second! Wasn’t this published in 1809? I double checked the date. Then I vaguely recalled something about Charles Darwin’s father, or grandfather being a naturalist. Irving must of meant the elder. I will not entertain temporal anomalies.
On efficiency of design- I was helping a building contractor and he told me to quit wasting my time trying to use scraps and just get the G. Damn job done. He was right. The little I would have saved would not make up for the time expended. God works in mysterious ways, by design, of course.
Adam #32:
The essential problem is that even if the universe was intelligently designed, unintelligently or otherwise, there would never be a way that science could accept such an assertion because it cannot be tested. The reality is that to test whether our universe was designed is to compare it to another universe that we already knew wasn’t designed! Good luck on that!
Your comment is thought-provoking, but not highly convincing to me. Why are you so sure that a question like that must be answered by comparing a designed universe to one which isn’t? Why do so many think the world is lawful (obviously!) , or “fundamentally simple”, or parsimonious, or mathematically “beautiful,” etc., without other universes to compare to, lacking those properties? Even if we did need to, or maybe the reason we don’t is: Why must the comparison be to a “real universe” instead of a conceptual model? (And, “Don’t even get me started” on issue of modal realism: what does “real” universe versus model universe really mean – but I actually like to talk, or perhaps annoy is a better term, about it….) We can indeed do such investigations, and we find just the sort of impressive anthropic fine tuning issues that you consider untestable. That isn’t a direct proof, but should we need directness to justify a preference? Still, I appreciate that we don’t really know, as you expound, and I wish some skeptics were so humble.
SPANNER IN WORKS.
If artificial intelligence has any creedence with evolution, then if I dismantle my PC componants, place them all randomly into a cardboard box and leave it for about say 5 million years, I would expect it would evolve into some kind of “self-aware” machine?
Any form of artificial intelligent designed devise, that can “self-repair” using basic random-modification process, should by all acounts, be able to deviate from it’s rigid mathematical formalisms to achieve specific intentional “glitch” improvements!
This is my “strong_arm” mechanical logic, against evolution spandrels?
Obvious the first step to mechanical re-assemble, is to create a devise that can hold some sort of Spanner for self-repair to begin!
From which I make the prediction that organisms evolved by natural selection are more likely to have legs than to have wheels.
That’s what happens when you put an engineer on a fixed budget… 😉
Dear Jeremy,
I made the universe once. It is your prophets and your scientists that keep changing the explanation.
Maybe one day you will understand that being more intelligent does not make you more ethical. Humanity’s (and its successors) intelligence will increase as your ability to make and stick with difficult ethical choices increases. If you don’t blow yourselves up or smother yourself to death, you have a great future in this self-designing universe.
But this universe is rather merciless with fools.
-God
PS: My writing here does not make Mark, Sean, John, JoAnne, Daniel etc. into Prophets.
I wrote a post on my (slightly pathetic) blog about Hume and intelligent design awhile back…it’s good to know other people out there read this stuff too. I know hardly anything about philosophy but read Dialouges Concerning Natural Religion in an intro level class last semester and really enjoyed it (my favorite part is the argument that the world might as well be a giant vegetable…), and, in general, learning about the philosophy of that period has forced me to do a lot of thinking about what it means to do science. Looking back on the post I wrote, I guess I went a little over the top on the ranting about the awesomeness of science part, but oh well.
Alan Walker, Professor of Biological Anthropology, Penn State University, sums up stupid design quite well. “External testes, and that’s called intelligent design!” “To have the gonads, the stuff that carries the genetic message from one generation to the next in a little bag between our legs is intelligent design?”
It is probably a bad idea to reply at this point, as we are fast approaching the Godwin Constant… but I was the first person to bring up the lack of physics posts in this blog so I feel obliged to state that I’m not whinging, I’m just asking a question about the direction of this blog…
I agree that this blog has never been solely about physics and the off-topic posts have in the past been entertaining, but the reason why I subscribed to this blog is because I wanted to keep up to date on HEP. I learnt GR from Sean’s notes and that made it a no-brainer to subscribe. Now, I’m not saying the random postings should go away, but these days it seems the physics posts are few and far between and the random posts no longer interest me as they are mostly about US politics.
All I want to know is: should I expect more US politics in the coming months? (And yes, the evolutionary debate is US Politics). Given the build up to your presidential elections etc, I’m guessing physics is not going to be on the agenda much (unless it’s physics funding policies). That’s fine… I’ll just come back when you have a new president who hopefully isn’t as mad as a box of frogs.
In the meantime, is anybody aware of any other regular, high quality HEP/cosmology blogs? Preferably EU/CERN based.
Neil B. at # 17:
Most, if not all, of your objections to evolution are the result of your limited knowledge about biology and how evolution works, not of any problems with evolution itself.
I mean, I can imagine mutations occurring here and there in some reptiles which would eventually drive development of feathers from scales. But how do the carriers of the occasional good mutations – and that must include the related features like hollow bones which go with that for effect – “get together” enough to concentrate that into what can turn into a new, demarcated species with nicely developed features, and not loaded with flaws and grading into similar kinds?
But “grading into similar kinds” is precisely how evolution works. New species emerge gradually and (almost) imperceptibly via very small changes. Daniel Dennett’s book Darwin’s Dangerous Idea has a very good discussion of this point, including how new species can generally only be identified after they’ve diverged from the parent species.
As for the evolution of birds, it’s not a case of “you need feathers *and* wings *and* hollow bones all at once,” as you seem to think. If you want a more realistic scenario: some dinosaur scales become feathers *first* (and we have fossils of feathered dinosaurs which are clearly not fliers), probably because feathers insulate better than scales. Actual flight characteristics (like hollow bones) emerge later among those feathered dinosaurs that began to take up an arboreal existence (perhaps jumping from limb to limb to begin with).
(Mutations should be partial in effect, or does a bird emerge from a reptile’s egg, as some extravagant followers of punctuated equilibrium have put it?) Also, mutations are usually presented in terms of ACTG groups changing within a given DNA chain, but how does DNA evolve longitudinally, as strands get longer?
You’re confusing punctuated equilibrium with the “hopeful monsters” idea. Punctuated equilibrium argues for periods of very rapid change (but still incremental and taking place over tens of thousands of years) separated by periods of near-stasis.
“Mutations” encompass a whole set of changes in DNA, on all scales, not just the “point mutations” you refer to. Sections of DNA can be accidentally duplicated, deleted, or shuffled into different sections of the genome. Entire chromosomes can be duplicated. There are plant species which have emerged as a result of the entire genome being accidentally duplicated (“polyploidy”). See the Wikipedia article on mutations.
Finally, since we can’t (?) really do a full-scale modeling to test the mutation-selection theory, now where are the philosophical purists who say that is a requirement for validity? How much of evolutionary theory is really testable in the hard sense? It just isn’t like physics, get over it.
(Sigh.) Lots of it is testable. Lots of it has been tested, both in computers and in laboratories. There’s a group at Michigan State University that does both (see this
article, for example, or this article about research at Yale) Now, it is true that evolutionary biology isn’t like physics in some respects. Neither are geology, astronomy, cosmology, and a whole host of other sciences.
“The point being that the world around us isn’t anything close to being efficiently designed.”
“Those kinds of non-adaptations and accidents and anachronistic features are found all over the place in real organisms. Any intelligent designer with a shred of self-respect would be embarrassed to exhibit such shoddy workmanship.”
I am the last person in the world to try to advocate for intelligent design, but as a biologist I take issue with the two statements above that Sean writes. Sure, there are lots of examples in biology of silly, vestigial remnants (appendix, uvula) or hyper-evovled traits (ridiculous mating rituals, obscene plumage) that seem to hardly be “intelligent,” if we imagine the divine designer to be human-like in his appreciation of efficient design.
But when you focus the lens a bit and take a slightly closer look at biology, on the level of a cell and a fertilized egg, it is impossible to really think about what is happening and not be completely in awe of the complexity and beauty of how life sustains itself. Research comes out every week that shows that our puny human imaginations are no match for the inventiveness of nature and the robust program that is genetics and life. I happen to study development, and a research interest in my lab happens to be how cells in an organism know where they are and develop appropriately, and then maintain that identity throughout life. This fundamental attribute of life, the rentention of the morphology of an entire organism, is rarely messed up except in rare congenital conditions, yet it isn’t something we think much about in our daily life. But isn’t it remarkable to think that if you injure your pinky, the tissue that grows back knows that it’s part of your pinky, and not your thumb or your little toe. How do individual cells figure this out? We’re only just beginning to understand it, but I think it’s an amazing feat of ingenuity to have such a robust system.
Sean, I would say that occassionally when I learn about certain facts in biology, like the inevitability of neurodegeneration in the elderly, I think to myself: why does that have to be? That seems sloppy. But then when I stop to consider everything else that I accept as fact in biology, the fact that genomes can stay 99% constant over hundreds of thousands of years, that every multicellular organism in the world can arise froma single cell which knows exactly how to become a copy of it’s parents, I think that an intelligent designer would be proud. The “accidents” and “anachronistic features” are tiny, tiny blips in the huge universe of ingenious, remarkable solutions that the cell has figured out over millions of years. I believe strongly in evolution, but my faith in the beauty of life and G-d is preserved when I work in science.
-Michael
WOW!… a biologist who isn’t trying to downplay the significance of evidence simply because they believe that creationists will abuse it. On the surface at least, it is as impressive as it is refreshing to find somebody that isn’t in auto-denial mode before the gate even opens.
Michael B., to ask a dumb question, are you familiar with the work of Dr. Lynn Margulis?
…but my faith in the beauty of life and G-d is preserved when I work in science.
oops… nevermind.
Sam – none of us has any idea about the direction of the blog. It isn’t something we plan out. Each of us posts independently when we feel like it about whatever we feel like.
So, you can try using tags, the RSS feed, or any of the other things we’ve advised, but that’s the best we can do.