Some Puzzling Logic
Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler
Albert Einstein
I understood that a ‘Darwinist’ was someone who accepted Darwin’s Theory of Evolution by Natural Selection. But what was a ‘neo-Darwinist’? Darwin completed his theory without knowing of Mendel’s pioneering work on genetics. A decade or two later it became apparent that genetics was a powerful new tool, and after a period of competitive in-fighting, biologists realised that the two new theories and mechanisms could be elegantly integrated, and neo-Darwinism was born:
Evolution via Natural Selection + Mendelian Genetics = Neo-Darwinism
§ …being the definition given by my Penguin Dictionary of Biology (1973). Technically, it is apparently not absolutely correct, but as rule of thumb it works fine.
I looked forward to reading Richard Dawkins’ book. He had said ‘What staggers me about Archbishop Usher’s statement is not that he was wrong (so was everybody else) but that he was wrong with such precision’.
I began The Blind Watchmaker and was impressed by the dozen or so enthusiastic plaudits in the first few pages, clipped from reviews by famous people and newspapers. I read the Preface and was swept along by Mr Dawkins’ elegant style. He would surely answer all my questions. But something in the second paragraph caught my attention. He states that:
‘Biology is the study of complicated things that give the appearance of having been designed for a purpose. Physics is the study of simple things that do not tempt us to invoke design.’
From this I inferred that Dawkins did not think that biological objects show evidence of true design but rather of what might be mistaken for design (‘pseudo-design’, perhaps); and that non-biological, ie merely physical, objects show no sign even of pseudo-design, never mind design proper.
§ There is a problem here, as English doesn’t contain a word for ‘pseudo-design’ (‘pseudesign’?). On any tv nature programme the narrator will say things like ‘the shark is designed for speed’, but if questioned, he will agree with RD that the shark is not designed at all. It just looks as though it has been, and for the sake of brevity he is saying the shark is designed because there isn’t an alternative word. Fine, but the fact remains that ‘designed’ means ‘the product of a designer’. To use it for the sake of brevity or metaphorically, is to court misunderstanding in the listener and, I’m afraid, sloppy thinking in the speaker.**
Do not molecules have ‘design’ then? Or atoms? Surely, what makes an atom of oxygen different from one of helium is its ‘design’, just as much as the ‘design’ of a vole is what differentiates it from a hippo? Biological ‘designs’ are more complex than atoms, but the principle of design (or ‘pseudesign’) still holds true as much for an atom as for a hippo.
If an atom had no element of design, what would it be? Some sort of mess. At the very least, it would not be ‘an atom’. How could it be? It is its very design that gives it its identity as an atom. Mr Dawkins then goes on to state:
‘(..man-made artefacts like computers and cars) are complicated and obviously designed for a purpose, yet they are not alive, and they are made of metal and plastic rather than of flesh and blood. In this book they will be firmly treated as biological objects.’
This was very puzzling. It is not reasonable to ‘firmly treat’ a mechanical item as ‘a biological object’: the disparity is too great. Starting from the premiss that a bicycle is directly comparable to a goldfish must lead to faulty conclusions concerning the nature of life and design. Then Mr Dawkins states:
‘Machines are the direct products of living objects; they derive their complexity and design from living objects, and they are diagnostic of life on a planet. The same goes for fossils, skeletons and dead bodies.’
I appreciate that the point the writer is making is one of being ‘diagnostic of life’, but ‘products of “living objects”‘? Surely he is being disingenuous here? ‘Living objects’ do not create anything simply by virtue of ‘living’. ‘Intelligence’ is the key to producing computers and cars. Dogs and trees are ‘living objects’, but you and I are very particular sorts of ‘living objects’ who have creative capacities well beyond those of dogs or trees. Some ‘living objects’ write interesting books on biology, for example, which requires a lot more of the writer than basic ‘living’. ‘Living objects’ in the form of humanoids, just ‘living’ and kicking sand around on the seashore, did not make computer chips from that sand. It required intelligence and purpose to do that, plus other human qualities, particularly that mysterious entity we call ‘inspiration’ or ‘intuition’**(without which, I suggest, nothing new ever happens) plus the desire to make something new.
§ To claim, as RD does, that a car is just an assembly of parts, each of which obeys certain physical laws, is quite true; but it is not the whole truth. If you fit the wrong carburettor to a car, it will no longer be ‘a car’, in that it will not start or move, and thus will not fulfil the job it was designed to do by people with a purpose and for a purpose. If you fit a proper carburettor, then your ‘assembly of parts’ will once more become a car: ie, after the application of intelligence, will, and purpose on your part.
Add to this the need for every single one of the ‘parts’ in the ‘assembly’ to have been carefully designed, using intelligence and purpose, all the way from the smallest nut to the body shell, and Professor Dawkins’ definition of a car as just ‘an assembly of parts’ looks, well.. simplistic and naïve.
And apart from all the above, any ‘assembly’ is in itself a work of intelligence, by definition.
To compare a computer, which is the result of intelligent design, with a fossil, which Prof Dawkins is claiming is not the product of intelligent design is, I would say, very unapt.
I was now quite alarmed at what I had read: three very questionable propositions in only two pages.
§ Let’s be clear what they are:
*That a goldfish gives the impression of design, while an atom does not.
*That a bicycle is treatable as a biological (ie ‘living’) object.
*That merely ‘living’ is enough to produce creations, with no mention of intelligence, purpose, will, etc.
A little further on, still on page 2, he says:
‘Our brains were designed for hunting and gathering.’ (Note…’designed’.)
‘Designed’ means ‘constructed for a purpose, by an intelligent mind’. I don’t know what Dawkins’ definition could be, except possibly ‘something which has not been constructed for a purpose, by an intelligent mind’.
I was shocked by all this. I was expecting an explanation of why Darwin might be called ‘purely material’ and why ghosts were anathema to science. But I was confused by what seemed to me to be several patches of muddled logic.
My next reaction was of disbelief. This was a world-famous professor, whose book had been hugely praised,
§… and who in 1995 became Professor for the Public Understanding of Science at Oxford: the highest biologist in the land, if not the world.
and here was I, a gardener on sick leave, picking holes in his logic. Surely I must be mistaken? I checked and re-checked, but could find no flaw in my critique of the quotes above. I still can’t.
§ To criticise the writings of such an eminent man is heresy in the eyes of some. But scientific progress is based upon disagreement and rational criticism, as Professor Dawkins would be the first to agree.
I read on, cautiously. Would The Blind Watchmaker tell me:
1: Why Professor Dawkins, and presumably neo-Darwinists in general, were against there being design in nature?
2: What precisely is ‘materialism’ in the scientific sense, and how it relates to this ‘design’/’no design’ business?
3: How Science (as represented by Mr Dawkins) knew that materialism was true and all other views were untrue?
4: What alternatives to materialism there were?
Did Professor Dawkins answer my questions for me? I’m afraid not. He did give a lucid description of the principles and processes of Evolution and Natural Selection, and an introduction to genetics, but as for my questions, no explanation; just a bald declamation that there is no design in Nature. What we perceive as ‘design’ is the result of tiny incremental changes in genes and DNA, Naturally Selected over aeons of time.
§ But the complexity of living creatures would seem to be entirely in opposition to RD’s notion of The Selfish Gene (the title of his best-known book). Surely, if it is allowable to give a chemical gene the anthropomorphic quality of ‘selfish’, then that gene will do what selfishness does best: looking after Number One, thus selfishly aiming to replicate only itself? That’s what ‘selfish’ means.
But all the designs (or ‘RD-non-designs’) of Nature point to quite the contrary state of affairs: a complex display of cooperation between genes. If no cooperation, then no structure of any sort; just a pile of genes. At best, any ‘selfish gene’ produces a cancer, not an immensely complex and cooperative human body. Or did ‘selfish’ now mean something else, too?**
Materialism is not mentioned in the book. This was a bit disturbing. Darwin is Mr Dawkins’ hero, but he seems not to know that Darwin positively mentions ‘the Creator’ in all editions of The Origin of Species. In fact Mr Dawkins says that any explanation that needs ‘a Creator’ is ‘transparently feeble’. He also claims that Darwin thought that all the creatures of the world came into being
‘…by gradual, step-by-step transformation from simple beginnings, from primordial entities sufficiently simple to have come into being by chance.’
This, I’m afraid, is simply not true. Not only did Darwin acknowledge ‘a Creator’ in all editions of Origins, but he also states unequivocally:
‘…I have nothing to do with the origin of the primary mental powers, any more than I have with that of life itself.’
In The Blind Watchmaker there is no discussion of why materialism is true, and no proof offered. No discussion of alternatives to materialism, although there is mention of ‘ying (sic) and yang’. The options discussed all seemed to be ‘materialistic’, as I understood the term, but they were never called such.
I found other points of faulty logic too, for example Mr Dawkins’ neglect of the relevance of Mind in creativity, and in the analogies he makes.
§ I’m using ‘Mind’ with a capital to mean ‘The faculty of mind’, as opposed to ‘changing one’s mind’ etc. The capitalisation also draws attention to the importance of this faculty.
For example, he shows us some electronic critters he calls ‘biomorphs’ which have resulted from a computer program he wrote. He says that all the diverse little forms are ‘randomly mutated progeny’ which have developed ‘over many generations of cumulative evolution’. But surely the force behind this diversity was his own mind, which devised the program: the instructions that he inserted into the computer? The machine simply carried out Prof Dawkins’ intelligent instructions (which included the instruction to iterate according to a hopefully random sequence). ‘Computer-generated-biomorphs’ and ‘naturally-evolved-lifeforms’, both require intelligent instructions, if any analogy is to be made.
It’s as if for Mr Dawkins Mind as a creative force simply doesn’t exist, despite his own academic brilliance. There is no mention in the index of The Blind Watchmaker of either ‘mind’ or ‘intelligence’. Mr Dawkins often refers to ‘our minds’, ‘the human mind’, ‘rational minds’, etc in the text. Surely he must acknowledge the role of Mind, Purpose, Will etc when programming for biomorphs?
And why so many false analogies? Computers, cars, locos… all the products of intelligence, purpose, will etc… equated with extraordinarily complex living creatures which RD claims are not designed by intelligence, purpose, will, etc.
§ And what of RD’s claim that the self-generation of Life from non-life all depends on there being enough ‘time’ for it to occur in? This is an inappropriate argument. You can argue quite sensibly that given aeons of time a fish might morph into a human via Natural Selection; but you can not argue sensibly that a stone might morph into a fish, no matter how many aeons of time you give it. A fish is alive; a stone is not. Evolution is not an appropriate process to look to. Thus time does not come into it at all.
And the misrepresentation of Darwin? As a careful scholar, RD must have noticed at least one of CD’s two positive mentions of ‘the Creator’ in his copy of the first edition, even if he missed CD’s denial of having any views on the origin of life? And could he really be ignorant of the ‘Creator’ in that famous last sentence of the final, definitive, edition?
This did seem particularly odd… First the writer of that Introduction, and now the highest authority in the land, both misrepresenting Darwin’s clearly stated views.
§ Darwin is at pains to make his views absolutely clear via the epigraphs he presented on the first page of Origins. Some reprints omit these brief quotations, but they may be found in full, in the original rather stodgy language, in the Gutenberg Project e-versions at http://www.gutenberg.org/wiki/Main_Page
Common to both 1st & 6th editions:
‘But with regard to the material world, we can at least go so far as this – we can perceive that events are brought about not by insulated interpositions of Divine power, exerted in each particular case, but by the establishment of general laws.’
Whewell: Bridgewater Treatise.
and…
‘To conclude, therefore, let no man out of a weak conceit of sobriety, or an ill applied moderation, think or maintain, that a man can search too far or be too well studied in the book of God’s word, or in the book of God’s works; divinity or philosophy; but rather let men endeavour an endless progress or proficience in both.
Francis Bacon: Advancement of Learning.
From these it is clear that CD believed in ‘general laws’ (Whewell), and in ‘God’ (Bacon). How he squares the two apparent opposites is not so clear.
However, by the time of the 6th and final edition, he clarifies things by adding a third epigraph:
In the 6th edition, but not in the 1st:
‘The only distinct meaning of the word ‘natural’ is STATED, FIXED or SETTLED; since what is natural as much requires and presupposes an intelligent agent to render it so, i.e., to effect it continually or at stated times, as what is supernatural or miraculous does to effect it for once.’
Butler: Analogy of Revealed Religion.
This third epigraph makes it clear that Darwin believes Intelligence forms what is ‘natural’. In other words, an intelligent creative force makes nature/the world/the Laws. This would tally with his use of ‘the Creator’ in the texts of Origins, and his comment in that letter to Mr Fordyce in 1879, in which he says: ‘I have never been an Atheist in the sense of denying the existence of a God.’
I’d seen Prof Dawkins on television and he seemed like a perfectly honest man, so why were there so many lesions in his arguments? And how had he written such an apparently comprehensive book while misusing analogies?
I was uneasy. How was it that nobody else seemed to have noticed all these errors? What about RD’s peers? All those people who wrote glowing testimonials in the front of The Blind Watchmaker? What about the entire scientific community? Had nobody else spotted what I had? Impossible to believe. I must be wrong, somehow.
Or…. was I witnessing here the promotion of Materialism from a tentative philosophy to a dogmatic ‘truth’?
Time to get more informed.
Why Materialism?
None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free
Goethe
Work on our smallholding continued…
‘April’ had her first calf in the spring. A perfect little creature, but stillborn: immaculate hooves, eyes, nose… just no spark. What, I wondered, was that spark? And where had it gone?