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April 21 - June 12, 2023
But all human works are the products of brains, brains are evolved data processing devices, and we shall misunderstand their works if we forget this fundamental fact.
The book had finer ambitions than to serve as a reply to such arguments, but it is still true that anybody tempted by the arguments of creationists will find definitive refutations of them — I think all of them — in here.
In most cases, they know deep down what to believe because their parents recommended an ancient book that tells them what to believe.
That's their ONLY reality.
The holy book of childhood cannot be, must not be, wrong.
The Bible is more of a work of fiction than science.
This book is written in the conviction that our own existence once presented the greatest of all mysteries, but that it is a mystery no longer because it is solved.
Let's be done with it and move on, please.
I want to inspire the reader with a vision of our own existence as, on the face of it, a spine-chilling mystery; and simultaneously to convey the full excitement of the fact that it is a mystery with an elegant solution which is within our grasp.
Darwinism, unlike ‘Einsteinism’, seems to be regarded as fair game for critics with any degree of ignorance.
In essence, it amounts simply to the idea that non-random reproduction, where there is hereditary variation, has consequences that are far-reaching if there is time for them to be cumulative.
We are entirely accustomed to the idea that complex elegance is an indicator of premeditated, crafted design.
The difference is one of complexity of design. 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.
We think that physics is complicated because it is hard for us to understand, and because physics books are full of difficult mathematics. But the objects that physicists study are still basically simple objects.
The watchmaker of my title is borrowed from a famous treatise by the eighteenth-century theologian William Paley. His Natural Theology — or Evidences of the Existence and Attributes of the Deity Collected from the Appearances of Nature, published in 1802, is the best-known exposition of the ‘Argument from Design’, always the most influential of the arguments for the existence of a God.
If we found an object such as a watch upon a heath, even if we didn’t know how it had come into existence, its own precision and intricacy of design would force us to conclude that the watch must have had a maker: that there must have existed, at some time, and at some place or other, an artificer or artificers, who formed it for the purpose which we find it actually to answer; who comprehended its construction, and designed its use.
every indication of contrivance, every manifestation of design, which existed in the watch, exists in the works of nature; with the difference, on the side of nature, of being greater or more, and that in a degree which exceeds all computation.
Paley compares the eye with a designed instrument such as a telescope, and concludes that ‘there is precisely the same proof that the eye was made for vision, as there is that the telescope was made for assisting it’. The eye must have had a designer, just as the telescope had.
A true watchmaker has foresight: he designs his cogs and springs, and plans their interconnections, with a future purpose in his mind’s eye.
Natural selection, the blind, unconscious, automatic process which Darwin discovered, and which we now know is the explanation for the existence and apparently purposeful form of all life, has no purpose in mind. It has no mind and no mind’s eye. It does not plan for the future. It has no vision, no foresight, no sight at all. If it can be said to play the role of watchmaker in nature, it is the blind watchmaker.
I can’t help feeling that such a position, though logically sound, would have left one feeling pretty unsatisfied, and that although atheism might have been logically tenable before Darwin, Darwin made it possible to be an intellectually fulfilled atheist.
The first point that might occur to us, as a necessary attribute of a complex thing, is that it has a heterogeneous structure.
Suppose we try out the following definition: a complex thing is something whose constituent parts are arranged in a way that is unlikely to have arisen by chance alone. To borrow an analogy from an eminent astronomer, if you take the parts of an airliner and jumble them up at random, the likelihood that you would happen to assemble a working Boeing is vanishingly small.
Similarly, of all the millions of unique and, with hindsight equally improbable, arrangements of a heap of junk, only one (or very few) will fly.
The answer we have arrived at is that complicated things have some quality, specifiable in advance, that is highly unlikely to have been acquired by random chance alone.
More generally, if living things didn’t work actively to prevent it, they would eventually merge into their surroundings, and cease to exist as autonomous beings. That is what happens when they die.
Physicists, of course, do not take iron rods for granted. They ask why they are rigid, and they continue the hierarchical peeling for several more layers yet, down to fundamental particles and quarks. But life is too short for most of us to follow them.
We shall explain its coming into existence as a consequence of gradual, cumulative, step-by-step transformations from simpler things, from primordial objects sufficiently simple to have come into being by chance.
The physicist’s problem is the problem of ultimate origins and ultimate natural laws. The biologist’s problem is the problem of complexity. The biologist tries to explain the workings, and the coming into existence, of complex things, in terms of simpler things.
Natural selection is the blind watchmaker, blind because it does not see ahead, does not plan consequences, has no purpose in view. Yet the living results of natural selection overwhelmingly impress us with the appearance of design as if by a master watchmaker, impress us with the illusion of design and planning.
Bats have a problem: how to find their way around in the dark. They hunt at night, and cannot use light to help them find prey and avoid obstacles.
You might say that if this is a problem it is a problem of their own making, a problem that they could avoid simply by changing their habits and hunting by day. But the daytime economy is already heavily exploited by other creatures such as birds.
Returning to bats, they have an engineering problem: how to find their way and find their prey in the absence of light.
Given the question of how to manoeuvre in the dark, what solutions might an engineer consider?
The first one that might occur to him is to manufacture light, to use a lantern or a searchlight.
What else might the engineer think of? Well, blind humans sometimes seem to have an uncanny sense of obstacles in their path.
The sensation of ‘facial vision’, it turns out, really goes in through the ears. The blind people, without even being aware of the fact, are actually using echoes, of their own footsteps and other sounds, to sense the presence of obstacles.
The American zoologist Donald Griffin, who was largely responsible for the discovery of sonar in bats, coined the term ‘echolocation’ to cover both sonar and radar, whether used by animals or by human instruments. In practice, the word seems to be used mostly to refer to animal sonar.
Different groups of bats use sonar in radically different ways, and they seem to have ‘invented’ it separately and independently, just as the British, Germans and Americans all independently developed radar.
When a little brown bat detects an insect and starts to move in on an interception course, its click rate goes up. Faster than a machine gun, it can reach peak rates of 200 pulses per second as the bat finally closes in on the moving target.
Even if this weren’t so, there would probably be good economic reasons for not keeping up the maximum pulse rate all the time. It must be costly producing loud ultrasonic pulses, costly in energy, costly in wear and tear on voice and ears, perhaps costly in computer time.
It is a dilemma inherent in the dramatic difference in intensity between outgoing sound and returning echo, a difference that is inexorably imposed by the laws of physics.
What other solution might occur to the engineer? When an analogous problem struck the designers of radar in the Second World War, they hit upon a solution which they called ‘send/receive’ radar.
The muscles contract immediately before the bat emits each outgoing pulse, thereby switching the ears off so that they are not damaged by the loud pulse.
The Doppler Shift occurs whenever a source of sound (or light or any other kind of wave) and a receiver of that sound move relative to one another.
The Doppler Effect is used in police radar speed-traps for motorists. A static instrument beams radar signals down a road.
Different wavelengths switch on the red-sensitive and the blue-sensitive photocells in our retinas. But there is no trace of the concept of wavelength in our subjective sensation of the colours. Nothing about ‘what it is like’ to see blue or red tells us which light has the longer wavelength.
The reason the sensation of seeing is so different from the sensation of hearing and the sensation of smelling is that the brain finds it convenient to use different kinds of internal model of the visual world, the world of sound and the world of smell.
His hypothesis was that living watches were literally designed and built by a master watchmaker. Our modern hypothesis is that the job was done in gradual evolutionary stages by natural selection.
He makes heavy use of what may be called the Argument from Personal Incredulity. In the course of one chapter we find the following phrases, in this order: … there seems no explanation on Darwinian grounds … It is no easier to explain … It is hard to understand … It is not easy to understand … It is equally difficult to explain … I do not find it easy to comprehend … I do not find it easy to see … I find it hard to understand … it does not seem feasible to explain … I cannot see how … neo-Darwinism seems inadequate to explain many of the complexities of animal behaviour … it is not easy to
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Then ask a 7th grader to explain it to you.
As for camouflage, this is not always easily explicable on neo-Darwinian premises. If polar bears are dominant in the Arctic, then there would seem to have been no need for them to evolve a white-coloured form of camouflage.
Just simple logic will do: he need it to hunt seals.
Polar bears stalk seals resting on the ice.
Even if the foremost authority in the world can’t explain some remarkable biological phenomenon, this doesn’t mean that it is inexplicable. Plenty of mysteries have lasted for centuries and finally yielded to explanation.
The Bishop goes on to the human eye, asking rhetorically, and with the implication that there is no answer, ‘How could an organ so complex evolve?’ This is not an argument, it is simply an affirmation of incredulity.
