Richard Dawkins- Darwinism and design
" Darwinism encompasses all of life- human, animal, plant, bacterial, and if I am right in the last chapter ( The Blind Watchmaker), extraterrestrial. It provides the only satisfying explanation for why we all exist, why we are the way that we
are.it is the bedrock on which rest all the disciplines known as the humanities. I do not mean that history, literary criticism, and the law should be recast in a specifically Darwinian mould.
But all human works are the products of brains, brains are evolved data processing devices, and we shall misunderstood their works if we forget this fundamental fact.
Darwinism evolution, as one reviewer has observed, " is the most portentous natural truth that science has yet discovered ".
There are still those who seek to deny the truth of evolution, and they mostly centre around the notion of 'design'- which also happens to be the principle theme of The Blind Watchmaker. 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-I think all of them- in here.
This book is written in the conviction that our own existence once presented the great st of all mysteries, but that it is a mystery no longer because it is solved. Darwin and Wallace solved it, though we shall continue to add footnotes to their solution for awhile yet. I was surprised that so many people seemed not only unaware of the elegant and beautiful solution to this deepest of problems but, incredibly, in many cases actually unaware that there was a problem in the first place.
The problem is that of complex design. The computer on which I am writing was consciously designed and deliberately manufactured. The brain with which you are understanding is array of some ten million kiloneurons. At the molecular genetic level, every single one of more than a trillion cells in the body contains about a thousand times as much precisely- coded information. The complexity of living organisms is matched by the elegant efficiency of their apparent design. 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.
For reasons that are not entirely clear to me, Darwinism seems more in need of advocacy than similarly established truths in other branches of science. Many of us have no grasp of quantum theory, or Einstein's theories of special and general relativity, but this does not in itself lead us to oppose those theories. I suppose one trouble with Darwinism is that, as Jacques Monod perceptively remarked, everybody thinks he understands it. It is a remarkably simple theory. 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.
But we have good grounds for believing that this simplicity is deceptive. Never forget that, simple as the theory may be, nobody thought of it until Darwin and Wallace, nearly two hundred years after Newton's Principia, and more than two thousand years after Eratosthenes measured the earth.
It is almost as if the human brain were specifically designed to misunderstand Darwinism and to find it hard to believe. Take ,for instance, the issue of 'chance', often dramatiz d as blind chance. The great majority of people that attack Darwinism leap with almost unseemly eagerness too the mistaken idea that there is nothing other than random chance in it. Since living complexity embodies the very antithesis of chance, if you think that evolution is tantamount to to chance you'll obviously find it easy to refute Darwinism.
Another way in which we seem predisposed to disbelieve Darwinism is that our brains are built to deal with events on radically different timescales from those that characterize evolutionary change. We are equipped to appreciate processes that take seconds, minutes, years. Darwinism is a theory of cumulative processes so slow that they take between thousands and millions of decades to complete. All our intuitive judgements of what's is probable turn out to be wrong by many orders of magnitude.
Our well-tuned apparatus of scepticism and subjective probability-theory misfir s by huge margins. It requires effort of imagination to escape from a prison of familiar timescale.
A third respect in which our brains seem predisposed to resist Darwinism stems from our great success as creative designers. Our world is dominated by feats of engineering and works of art. We are entirely accustomed too the idea that complex elegance is an indicator of premeditated, crafted design. This is probably the most powerful reason for the belief in some kind of supernatural deity. It took a very large leap of imagination to see that, contrary to all intuition, there is another way for complex design to arise from primeval simplicity."
And so we build our three legged stool- physics, evolution, art.
Bend every sinew to the task
