— Why the Evidence of Evolution Reveals a Universe without Design
Select Quotes
Introduction To The 1996 Edition
Pretend as they will to scientific credentials, the anti-evolution propagandists are always religiously motivated, even if they try to buy credibility by concealing the fact.
In the words of a teeshirt which an anonymous American reader was kind enough to send me: ‘Evolution—The Greatest Show on Earth—The Only Game in Town!’
Preface
We are entirely accustomed to the idea that complex elegance is an indicator of premeditated, crafted design.
1. Explaining The Very Improbable
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. – Page 9
Of all the millions of unique and, with hindsight equally improbable, positions of the combination lock, only one opens the lock. – Page 13
If you read trendy intellectual magazines, you may have noticed that ‘reductionism’ is one of those things, like sin, that is only mentioned by people who are against it. – Page 21
Reductionism, in this sense, is just another name for an honest desire to understand how things work. – Page 22
He asks what the minimum necessary physical conditions are, what is the minimum amount of design work that a very lazy Creator would have to do, in order to see to it that the universe and, later, elephants and other complex things, would one day come into existence. The answer, from his point of view as a physical scientist, is that the Creator could be infinitely lazy. – Page 23
When you eat a steak, you are shredding the equivalent of more than 100 billion copies of the Encyclopaedia Britannica. – Page 28
2. Good Design
Natural selection is the blind watchmaker, blind because it does not see ahead, does not plan consequences, has no purpose in view. – Page 29
Or, at least, the bat’s sensation of her mate may be no more different from my visual sensation of a flamingo, than my visual sensation of a flamingo is different from a flamingo’s visual sensation of a flamingo. – Page 50
Nowadays theologians aren’t quite so straightforward as Paley. They don’t point to complex living mechanisms and say that they are self-evidently designed by a creator, just like a watch. But there is a tendency to point to them and say ‘It is impossible to believe’ that such complexity, or such perfection, could have evolved by natural selection. Whenever I read such a remark, I always feel like writing ‘Speak for yourself’ in the margin. – Page 53
The Argument from Personal Incredulity is an extremely weak argument, as Darwin himself noted. In some cases it is based upon simple ignorance. – Page 55
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. – Page 56
Even if we found one example that we couldn’t explain, we should hesitate to draw any grandiose conclusions from the fact of our own inability. – Page 56
Mutation is random; natural selection is the very opposite of random. – Page 60
3. Accumulating Small Change
The waves and the pebbles together constitute a simple example of a system that automatically generates non-randomness. The world is full of such systems. – Page 62
Obviously all the planets that we see orbiting the sun must be travelling at exactly the right speed to keep them in their orbits, or we wouldn’t see them there because they wouldn’t be there! But equally obviously this is not evidence for conscious design. It is just another kind of sieve. – Page 63
I don’t know who it was first pointed out that, given enough time, a monkey bashing away at random on a typewriter could produce all the works of Shakespeare. The operative phrase is, of course, given enough time. – Page 66
Evolution has no long-term goal. There is no long-distance target, no final perfection to serve as a criterion for selection, although human vanity cherishes the absurd notion that our species is the final goal of evolution. In real life, the criterion for selection is always short-term, either simple survival or, more generally, reproductive success. – Page 72
Of course, the reasons for survival are anything but simple—that is why natural selection can build up animals and plants of such formidable complexity. But there is something very crude and simple about death itself. – Page 87
There is a popular cliché, usually uttered in the tones Stephen Potter would have called ‘plonking’, which says that you cannot get out of computers any more than you put in. Other versions are that computers only do exactly what you tell them to, and that therefore computers are never creative. The cliché is true only in a crashingly trivial sense, the same sense in which Shakespeare never wrote anything except what his first schoolteacher taught him to write—words. – Page 90
4. Making Tracks Through Animal Space
Contrary to the creationist literature, not only are animals with ‘half a wing’ common, so are animals with a quarter of a wing, three quarters of a wing, and so on. – Page 126
In one of the most rapid and complete revolutions science has known, the formerly controversial theory of ‘continental drift’ has now become universally accepted under the name of plate tectonics. – Page 142
5. The Power And The Archives
The final shape of the whole body, the size of its limbs, the wiring up of its brain, the timing of its behaviour patterns, are all the indirect consequences of interactions between different kinds of cells, whose differences in their turn arise through different genes being read. These diverging processes are best thought of as locally autonomous in the manner of the ‘recursive’ procedure of Chapter 3, rather than as coordinated in some grand central design. – Page 173
They are leading us in the direction of a central truth about life on Earth, the truth that I alluded to in my opening paragraph about willow seeds. This is that living organisms exist for the benefit of DNA rather than the other way around. – Page 180
At first, the rate of synthesis was slowed down by the poison, but after evolving through about nine test-tube transfer ‘generations’, a new strain of RNA that was resistant to the poison had been selected. – Page 189
6. Origins And Miracles
A miracle, in other words, if it occurs at all, is a tremendous stroke of luck. Events don’t fall neatly into natural events versus miracles. – Page 197
To explain the origin of the DNA/ protein machine by invoking a supernatural Designer is to explain precisely nothing, for it leaves unexplained the origin of the Designer. You have to say something like ‘God was always there’, and if you allow yourself that kind of lazy way out, you might as well just say ‘DNA was always there’, or ‘Life was always there’, and be done with it. – Page 200
Cultural evolution is many orders of magnitude faster than DNA-based evolution, which sets one even more to thinking of the idea of ‘takeover’. And if a new kind of replicator takeover is beginning, it is conceivable that it will take off so far as to leave its parent DNA (and its grandparent clay if Cairns-Smith is right) far behind. – Page 225
Will a robotic Cairns-Smith write a book called Electronic Takeover? Will he rediscover some electronic equivalent of the metaphor of the arch, and realize that computers could not have sprung spontaneously into existence but must have originated from some earlier process of cumulative selection? – Page 225
If we were biologically capable of living for a million years, and wanted to do so, we should assess risks quite differently. We should make a habit of not crossing roads, for instance, for if you crossed a road every day for half a million years you would undoubtedly be run over. – Page 231
7. Constructive Evolution
In natural selection, genes are always selected for their capacity to flourish in the environment in which they find themselves. We often think of this environment as the outside world, the world of predators and climate. But from each gene’s point of view, perhaps the most important part of its environment is all the other genes that it encounters. – Page 240
As we have seen, the long-lived gene as an evolutionary unit is not any particular physical structure but the textual archival information that is copied on down the generations. This textual replicator has a distributed existence. It is widely distributed in space among different individuals, and widely distributed in time over many generations. – Page 241
9. Puncturing Punctuationism
Probably many of them had no very clear idea that they were travelling in any particularly consistent direction, and they meandered round and round from oasis to oasis as nomadic desert herdsmen are wont to do. – Page 317
Darwin’s view was that a complete fossil record, if only we had one, would show gentle rather than jerky change. But since fossilization is such a chancy business, and finding such fossils as there are is scarcely less chancy, it is as though we had a cine film with most of the frames missing. – Page 326
The reason the ‘transition’ from ancestral species to descendant species appears to be abrupt and jerky is simply that, when we look at a series of fossils from any one place, we are probably not looking at an evolutionary event at all: we are looking at a migrational event, the arrival of a new species from another geographical area. – Page 342
Comparisons between modern punctuationism on the one hand, and catastrophism or saltationism on the other, have a purely poetic force. They are, if I may coin a paradox, deeply superficial. – Page 344
10. The One True Tree Of Life
Instead of science, history, literature, geography, and so on, their major departments are gardening, cookery, ‘TV titles’, the occult, and I once saw a shelf prominently labelled ‘RELIGION AND UFOs’. – Page 364
But of all the systems of classification that could be dreamed up, there is one unique system, unique in the sense that words like ‘correct’ and ‘incorrect’, ‘true’ and ‘false’ can be applied to it with perfect agreement given perfect information. That unique system is the system based on evolutionary relationships. – Page 365
Such is the breathtaking speciesism of our Christian-inspired attitudes, the abortion of a single human zygote (most of them are destined to be spontaneously aborted anyway) can arouse more moral solicitude and righteous indignation than the vivisection of any number of intelligent adult chimpanzees! I have heard decent, liberal scientists, who had no intention of actually cutting up live chimpanzees, nevertheless passionately defending their right to do so if they chose, without interference from the law. Such people are often the first to bristle at the smallest infringement of human rights. – Page 372
But anybody who thinks that there is something obvious and self-evident about human ‘rights’ should reflect that it is just sheer luck that these embarrassing intermediates happen not to have survived. – Page 373
11. Doomed Rivals
His anti-Mendelian fanaticism, and his fervent, dogmatic belief in the inheritance of acquired characteristics, would have been harmlessly ignored in most civilized countries. Unfortunately he happened to live in a country where ideology mattered more than scientific truth. – Page 412
So, the effect, if any, that a gene has is not a simple property of the gene itself, but is a property of the gene in interaction with the recent history of its local surroundings in the embryo. This makes nonsense of the idea that the genes are anything like a blueprint for a body. – Page 419
The truth is that the principle of use and disuse is incapable of shaping any but the crudest and most unimpressive of adaptations. – Page 427
It is extremely hard for the modern mind to respond to this idea with anything but mirth, but we must beware of repeating the patronizing tone of Bateson himself: ‘We go to Darwin for his incomparable collection of fact (but …) for us he speaks no more with philosophical authority. – Page 432
It is only if you define ‘random’ as meaning ‘no general bias towards bodily improvement’ that mutation is truly random. – Page 435
Nearly all peoples have developed their own creation myth, and the Genesis story is just the one that happened to have been adopted by one particular tribe of Middle Eastern herders. It has no more special status than the belief of a particular West African tribe that the world was created from the excrement of ants. – Page 448
Modern theologians of any sophistication have given up believing in instantaneous creation. The evidence for some sort of evolution has become too overwhelming. – Page 449
The essence of life is statistical improbability on a colossal scale. Whatever is the explanation for life, therefore, it cannot be chance. The true explanation for the existence of life must embody the very antithesis of chance. The antithesis of chance is nonrandom survival, properly understood. Nonrandom survival, improperly understood, is not the antithesis of chance, it is chance itself. – Page 450