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.)
I was under the impression that usually you assume the changes were already present in the population. If the problem actually threatens the survival of the species, they wouldn’t reproduce for a long enough time to actually get lucky with mutations.
Me and my cold would like to have a strong word with the Intelligent Designer as to why he/she/it made nasal mucus a throat irritant.
The standard answer (I think it is mentioned already in Darwin works, or at least implicit) is that the right question is not “What good is half a wheel” but “What bad is half a wheel”. If the mutation is not troublesome, it will survive even if it is not useful, and eventuallly it could evolve into a useful one.
The eye problem, If I recall correctly, was not only how or why evolved the eye, but also if the design of the eye was “inteligent design” or “stupid design”, in the sense that the position of the sensitive part of the retina (and I do not remember if some of the associated optics) are not optimal from the point of view of a photo machine nor a camera.
When I originally started reading this blog, it was firing out high energy physics and cosmology posts on a regular basis. This was of interest to me as I did my PhD in NCG/SUGRA and have since left academia, but would like to keep up to date on general advances in the hep-th area.
However, now all we seem to get is US politics, with emphasis on the debate on evolution. Is it going to stay this way? Because if it is… I’m offski!
Wheels are a particular problem – evolution aside, how do you make one work? Unless the whole organism rolls (which tumbleweeds do) how do you make a rotating joint? On a microscopic scale it works – flagella run on essentially proton-driven motors that spin them around an axis – but how could a multicellular organism make bearings? If the wheel assembly is alive, how could it supply blood, food, oxygen to the wheel itself?
I think the wheel example is not such a good one – we want an example of a big improvement where we can see how it would work, but for which there’s no way to get there from here, so it wasn’t evolved. I can’t think of one like that though…
As for poetry on the veldt, funny you should mention it – I’m reading Jared Diamond’s “The Third Chimpanzee” in which he discusses pretty much exactly that question – what is the evolutionary advantage of art? where did it come from? He looks at various examples of animal art – bowerbirds and captive elephants for example – and concludes that art as a show to attract mates (think of rock groupies if you like) is reason enough to evolve it; of course, we’re a complex enough species that the drive and talent to create art gets applied in all sorts of social situations whether or not it’s impressing potential mates. Anyway, he certainly explains it better than I do. But poetry serves a fairly clear evolutionary purpose, and we’re much better wired for it than math. Mathematics, that is both mathematics research and mathematics teaching, is a constant struggle to take facts and concepts that are frankly alien and put them in the form our veldt-evolved brains can work with effectively.
I’m with Sam on this one.
After I graduated (Physics), I started a PhD in semiconductor physics (III-V opto-electronics mostly). Things didn’t pan out and I left after the first year. I still have a strong interest in science and physics in particular, and this site has always been an excellent place to visit to supplement my addictions to Physics World and New Scientist.
If it’s going to turn into a campaigning tool against creationism (which is an absolutely bonkers idea, in case you’re worried that I’m a closet nutter), then I’m going to lose interest.
There are an enormous number of sites out there already that cover this topic well (as evidenced by the fact that many of your blog entries on the subject link to another site), so it’s not as if you’re providing a unique service in this respect.
Where you are unique is in your presentation of current research. Having several contributors adds hugely to the richness of this blog and the variety of topics covered always makes a visit worthwhile.
Perhaps recent months have just been an outlier. Here’s for hoping for regression to the mean.
Without going off topic, this is a crucial point: how much junk and clutter can you hoard just in case you might one day find a use for it? Get too much clutter, and you can’t see the wood for the trees, but if you hoard abstract odds and ends long enough, it can eventually pay off in a big way. E.g. ellipses were known (as conic sections) in ancient Greece, as well as Aristarchus of Samos’ solar system, but Kepler in c. 1610 was the first to fit both two together to accurately represent Brahe’s observations of Mars’ orbit. There’s also an allegation that Archimedes’ work The Method used the basic principles of the calculus (Archimedes called it the ‘mechanical method’) to work out the volume of geometric shapes by summing over a lot of thin slices, but it was lost and unavailable when calculus was developed by Newton and Leibniz. Maybe this was for the best because Archimedes just regarded calculus as just a non-rigorous trick, not a really convincing proof: ‘… certain things first became clear to me by a mechanical method, although they had to be proved by geometry afterwards …’ (That kind of prejudice was probably best lost because there are now many things you can prove with calculus that can’t be proved afterward using simple geometry.)
Let’s not forget the “junk DNA” we continue to be flustered and confused by~or “jumping genes” and punctuated equilibrium. These are validated methods of evolutionary change that ofttimes carry a liability factor; though chaotic, that is the point. The chaos introduces novelty, allowing wider exploitation of niches, thus potentially expanding the lifeform(s). I tend to think the whole storm in a waterglass is moot, for usually paradox is truth and both are probably “right.”
Dear Confused Humans,
I designed a self-designing world.
God
Further,
You’ve seen the mess you can make with 25% of your brainpower. Only as you become wiser will you be able to access the remaining 75%. Otherwise it is like giving gasoline and a lighter to a 2-year old. Grow up!
-God (who is angry and vengeful only in your fantasies).
But he loses some points for weaseling at the end of the Dialogues.
Sean, when Pamphilus (the scribe) decides without explanation that Cleanthes won the debate, despite his arguments having been utterly demolished by Philo, do you really think Hume meant for us to take him seriously? I interpreted the weaseling as sarcasm, similar to what Galileo did in his dialogues.
Hume didn’t weasel. The Dialogues were published posthumously (in 1779; Hume died in 1776). What did he have to lose? Moreover, Hume carefully polished the Dialogues over many years. He wasn’t trying any longer to land an academic post (never succeeding at that during his life, btw) or to impress a wealthy patron. Like many of his contemporaries in the late 18th c., Hume is best understood as a deist, but especially as a skeptic. He wanted to deflate pretensions to religious knowledge grounded in the design argument, but at the same time, insisted — even to Enlightenment atheists such as d’Holbach — that no one could really avoid inferences to design, in some form or another.
Hence part XII of the . Hume said exactly what he wanted to say, to readers who wouldn’t be able to lay a finger on him in retribution.
Dear Confused ‘God’
It certainly is conceited for you to comment on a blog under the name of ‘God’. What next, will you be writing us a bible? Regarding your first comment about god designing a self-designing world, that’s a cop-out. Everytime science comes up with a rational explanation for world, you’re going to argue that god made it that way on purpose? Lame. Regarding your second point, I think that with the ability to use more of our brain’s potential we might be more able to intelligently use that power that your self-designing design already gave us. Like taking gasoline and a lighter out of the hands of a 2 year old and giving it to an adult.
I have to agree with Biff. This argument has effectively ruined many other science related websites and is getting to the point of beating a dead horse.
I love reading Physics related posts and that is why I come back here every day. If this becomes just another fight against Intelligent Design, then I may as well look at the whole host of identical blogs and websites.
Maybe this is just a cheap ploy to attract all of the pissed off atheists who love reading these types of posts. Ah I don’t know, but I really hope that this site is not starting a downward spiral.
I’ll agree with those above who say that good physics is the main reason people look here, but thanks for this post anyway. As usual, your perspective helped clarify my thoughts on this subject, even though it has been covered elsewhere.
As is sadly usual for those writing about origins and design, Sean didn’t really appreciate the full range of options or the full range of points and counterpoints. (It reminds me of tiresome political arguments that sideline libertarian or centrist-populist alternatives in favor of bipolar establishmentarian retreads.) First, we shouldn’t confuse two very different considerations:
1. The anthropic fine-tuning of the physical principles themselves, as explored by Barrow, Tipler, Davies, et al.) If the physical constants etc. weren’t very close to what they were, we couldn’t be here. (BTW, there not being anyone to report the converse shouldn’t have kept it from happening – unless you want to be one of those hypocritically indulged “mystics” that physics tolerates when it suits the establishment agenda.)
2. Whether the way things like life turned out still, even with very cleverly designed initial conditions and principles, shows any need for further “meddling.” (Few appreciate the irony, that for things to turn out as well as they did on their own, enhances the impressiveness of the initial fine-tuning. Hence ID of this #2 sort actually works against the effectiveness of the sort made in #1, but see issues below.)
Another important point is: it isn’t necessary to imagine that if there is some ground of being/creator etc. it would be as traditional religions imagine “It.” Why think that traditional religions are wrong about It’s existence, but must be right about what it would be like if it did exist? Can you entertain that it’s the other way around: that they are right about there being something like that, but wrong about what It is like? It is not a logical necessity that something “behind” the universe’s existence would be able to make specifics as they are or intervene – maybe “the way things work” is all that can be offered, for what can only be considered proto-existential reasons. In that case, Hume’s complaints, being based on the particulars of the world’s supposed imperfections, are irrelevant. (Hume did not know of the dependence of life on the remarkable degree of fine tuning of the physical constants, so we can only wonder what he would have made of that. However, Hume did rightly attack the idea that physical “laws” are like guards making things do what they do — rather, we generalize the laws we report from what things do, for whatever reason they act as they do. Hence, loose talk about the same “stuff” being ‘subject to different physical laws’ due to who knows what meta-machinations of string dings etc. is very phony.)
Regarding #2: It is fair game in principle to ask and to look into whether the way life turned out looks to be plausible in terms of a given theoretical construct like random mutation + natural selection. Our intellectual-religious-social accidents of history made some unpalatable particular movement dominate alternatives to the standard theory. However, that doesn’t force the universe to comply with some folks’ desire for limited scope of alternatives, or a simple description of what happened. I have some Socratic questions about a subject I have passing familiarity with. There may be good answers, but I haven’t seen enough: I suspect that if we could comprehensively model evolutionary change according to straightforward mutation/selection and simple assumptions about molecules etc, we’d find something different than what we see around us: The beneficial mutations just couldn’t “meet up” together well enough, and the detrimental ones just wouldn’t be filtered out enough. Creatures would be more deformed, variable in features, with ill-defined species boundaries and not nicely displaying the paradigmatic advances (consider that fitness is highly relative…)
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? (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? 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.
Suppose evolution is more difficult that it looks, in terms of how we normally imagine molecular biology? If anthropic fine tuning is already set to be favorable to life, why stop at basic constants? Maybe the most subtle properties of molecules, the tiny higher chance that one complex gene would hook up with just the “right” one/s to advance evolution, are also fine tuned (Barrow and Tipler already came surprisingly close to demonstrating such relationships.) It would be hard to complain, why should the universe “care” about that etc, since we already know it does. It has already given at least a mile, so 100 miles more is no big deal — but would of course increase the pressure to acknowledge there being something relevant about that.
PS — Cyndi Lauper is 54 today! Have another happy turn of the stew, fungirl… Hey, if you are tired of all this talk about “God” but need something to worship, we nutty Cyndi fans welcome you into adoration of the Goddess… ; – )
This entry and the comments have helped me to understand a few problems in the current debates about intelligent design:
1) There may be some disagreements among evolutionists about what evolution means, but for the most part it is one clear theory. Intelligent design or creation, on the other hand, could refer to one of a million ideas (with the common element of a higher power at work). We tend to make the mistake of thinking that the most vocal proponents of intelligent design (those who would have it taught or scientifically accepted) are representative of all people with religious creation beliefs. We then begin to attack all of religious creation belief, even though it is outside the power of our science to win this attack. If we limited our argument to what should be taught or what should be scientifically accepted instead of what should be believed, we would do the debate a service.
2) It is frustrating to scientists to be subjected to wave after wave of bad science from religionists. It must be equally frustrating to theologians to have wave after wave of bad theology thrown at them in this debate. To say “there can’t be a God because my back hurts” probably won’t get you very far in a theology circle.
3) Debaters in general tend to not win friends or influence people if smug mockery is their main delivery style. Still, the cartoon is funny.
From the “About” section of this blog:
Our day (and night) jobs notwithstanding, the blog is about whatever we find interesting — science, to be sure, but also arts, politics, culture, technology, academia, and miscellaneous trivia.
As is the case in many aspects of life, if you don’t like what you’re getting, go elsewhere. The idea that one would attempt to manipulate the output of this blog’s contents, an essentially free service, is at its core no friendlier than having one’s door knocked on before noon one Saturday morning in order to be preached at.
Is it ironic or hypocritical to leave a comment on a post that you think is off-topic? Hm. I have to say that I agree that my interest in this blog is directly proportional to the percentage of physics related content….
However, for those who might be interested, Hume’s notion of the flawed creation of a juvenile deity was spun into one of the most influential (and yet little-read) foundational SF books of all time, Olaf Stapledon’s Star Maker. It’s the book equivalent of the first Velvet Underground album: very few people have read it, but it seems like most of the ones that did became SF authors. It has huge numbers of ideas tossed off in single pages or paragraphs that have since been the conceptual basis of whole books.
It’s a bit hard to read if you’re not up for very dry – though I think, at times, beautiful – 1930s high-academic writing style; the cliche phrase “turgid prose” is often used to describe it. And it lacks anything like a conventional plot. Man has out of body experience, his consciousness expands through several scales of perception (planetary, stellar, galactic, etc), meets Star Maker, returns to body. That’s pretty much the whole story.
I think it’s great. Really interesting stuff. There’s a modern, annotated academic edition that I recommend highly.
“As is the case in many aspects of life, if you don’t like what you’re getting, go elsewhere. The idea that one would attempt to manipulate the output of this blog’s contents, an essentially free service, is at its core no friendlier than having one’s door knocked on before noon one Saturday morning in order to be preached at.”
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I see what you are saying, but we are not attempting to manipulate the content of the blog, but rather save it: every other blog concerning science is turning towards this topic making this blog no different than the rest.
Just look at the recent posts, many are geared towards showing Intelligent Design’s flaws, which can really be found everywhere.
I loved the blog: Angryastronomer, but within the last year, all the content has been directed towards this topic instead of Astronomy. I just hope that Cosmic Variance, being my absolute favorite blog, does not follow the same path as many before it.
In conclusion, thank you Cosmic Variance for literally years of awesome posts, I can only hope that the blog can stay on course instead of following in the countless other’s downward spiral of beating a dead horse.
I have to agree w/ It.milo…let’s have alittle more science. Maybe when JoAnne returns from thin air….
Mike in # 18:
2) It is frustrating to scientists to be subjected to wave after wave of bad science from religionists. It must be equally frustrating to theologians to have wave after wave of bad theology thrown at them in this debate. To say “there can’t be a God because my back hurts” probably won’t get you very far in a theology circle.
Good point, and indeed there is much bad theology and bad philosophy, as I have oft’ exposed. Remember that really, we have a three-ring circus: there is science, theology, and then philosophy in the broadest sense. It isn’t good to say that “theology,” unqualified, just is the philosophy of issues like God and creation, for theology partakes inextricably of religious tradition – which is not the same thing as reasoning as philosophers do. Those of us who practice genuine a priori and independent “philosophical theology” are often left out of the common debates about self-existent versus designed universe/s etc. We feel like the sort of libertarians who are sure they have a clever way to make X work in society, but no one listens to them because all the buzz is from and about traditional liberals and conservatives. (No, I’m not endorsing their often unworkable and elite-biased proposals, but they at least deserve more attention.)
When we originally started this blog, it was attracting commenters who were able to understand the mission statement, exhibited an appreciation for the free service being provided, and possessed the ability to skip over the posts they weren’t interested in without commenting.
However, increasingly we seem to get is complaints that the bloggers are sometimes interested in things that the commenters are not, and that the bloggers should change their behavior accordingly. I don’t think there are any blogs out there for which I am interested in every single post, or even the majority; but the urge to leave a comment loudly protesting my lack of interest is a weird kind of pathology to which I have thankfully never been susceptible.
Seriously, folks: leave. This is what you sound like. It’s just no fun to have a blog if a substantial fraction of the comments are whining.
(Anyone who actually read the post should be able to see that it’s about science, not about religion or politics. Not that there’s anything wrong with that.)
Should we consider things that we have designed as being designed? What I mean is that we are subject to the laws of physics as well and we were not designed in the first place. The things we have invented are a result of a form of evolution as well. A gas cloud consisting of hydrogen and helium can give rise to cars and computers all by itself if you wait long enough…