THE BLIND WATCHMAKER
Richard Dawkins, 1996, W. W. Norton & Company, Inc.
Created: October 3rd, 2003 Friday 17:54, Ankara
Updated: October 5th, 2003 Sunday 14:14, Ankara
This book is related to evolution and how the theory of evolution explains a world without conscious design. Notes that I took while reading:
- " Darwinian evolution, as one reviewer has observed, 'is the most potenteous natural truth that science has yet discovered.' I'd add, 'or is likely to discover'." (p.x)
- " 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 these theories! Darwinism, unlike 'Einsteinism', seems to be regarded as fair game for critics with any degree of ignorance. I suppose one trouble with Darwinism is that, as Jaques Monod perceptively remarked, everybody thinks he understands it. It is, indeed, a remarkably simple theory; childishly so, one would have thought, in comparison with almost all of physics and mathematics. 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 seem, nobody thought of it until Darwin and Wallace in the mid-nineteenth century, nearly 200 years after Newton's Principia, and more than 2,000 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...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 or, at most decades to complete. 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 is probable turn out to be wrong by many orders of magnitude." (p.xv)
- " Darwin made it possible to be an intellectually fulfilled atheist." (p.6)
- " The total number of cells in the body of a human is about 10 trillion. When you eat a steak, you are shredding the equivalent of more than 100 billion copies of Encyclopedia Brittanica." (p.18)
- " 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 illusion of design and planning. The purpose of this book is to resolve this paradox..." (p.21)
- "
Donald Griffin tells a story of what happened when he and his colleague Rober Galambos first reported to an astonished conference of zoologists in 1940 their new discovery of the facts of bat echolocation. One distinguished scientist was so indignantly increduluous that
he seized Galambos by the shoulders and shook him while complaining that he would not possibly mean such an outrageous suggestion. Radar and sonar were still highly classified developments in military technology, and the notoion that bats might do anything even remotely analogous to the latest triumphs of electronic engineering struck most people as not only implausible but emotionally repugnant.
It is easy to symphatize with the distinguished sceptic. There is something very human in his reluctance to belive. And that, really, says it: human is precisely what it is. It is precisely because our own human senses are not capable of doing what bats do that we find it hard to believe. Becasue we can only understand it at the level of artificial instrumentation, and mathematical calculations on paper, we find it hard to imagine a little animal doing it in its head. Yet the mathematical calculations that would be necessary to explain the principles of vision are just as complex and difficult, and nobody has ever had any difficulty in believing that little animals can see. The reason for this double standard in our sceptism is, quite simply, that we can see and we can't echolocate.
I can imagine some other world in which a conference of learned, and totally blind, bat-like creatures is flabbergasted to be told of animals called human that are actually capable of the newly discovered inaudible rays called 'light', still the subject of top-secret military development, for finding their way about." (p.35) - "
The Argument from Personal Incredulity is an extremely weak argument, as Darwin himself noted. In some cases it is based on simple ignorance. For instance, one of the facts that the Bishop finds it difficult to understand is the white colour of polar bears.
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.
This could be translated:I personally, off the top of my head sitting in my study, never having visited the Arctic, never having seen a polar bear in the wild, and having been educated in classical literature and theology, have not so far managed to think of a reason why polar bears might benefit from being white." (p.38)
- " 'How could an organ so complex evolve?' This is not an argument, it is simply an affirmation of incredulity." (p.39)
- " Mutation is random; natural selection is the very opposite of random." (p.41)
- " In real life, the cirterion for selection is always short-term, either simple survival or, more generally, reproductive success." (p.50)
- " It is raining instructions out there; it's raining programs; it's raining tree-growing, fluff spreading, algorithms. That is not a metaphor, it is the plain truth. It couldn't be any plainer if it were raining floppy discs." (p.111)
- " Amazingly only about 1 per cent of the genetic information in, for example, human cells, seems to be actually used...Nobody knows why the other 99 per cent is there...it might be parasitic, freeloading on the efforts of the 1 per cent..." (p.116)
- " ...living organisms exist for the benefit of DNA rather than the other way around...The lifetimes of DNA messages (give or take a few mutations) are measured in units ranging from millions of years to hundreds of millions of years; or, in other words ranging from 10,000 individual lifetimes to a trillion individual lifetimes. Each individual organism should be seen as a temporary vehicle, in which DNA messages spend a tiny fraction of their geological lifetimes." (p.126-127)
- " 'What it takes to be in the world' turns out to include the ability to build machines like you and me, the most complicated things in the known universe." (p.127)
- " 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. " (p.141)
- " Natural selection may only subtract, but mutation can add." (p.169)
- " The genes themselves don't evolve, they merely survive or fail to survive in the gene pool. It is the 'team' that evolves." (p.171)
- " ...all organisms are more seriously threatened by competition from their own species than from others." (p.184-185)
- " If females really could successfully choose males with the best genes, their very success would reduce the range of choice available in the future: eventually, if there were only good genes around, there would be no point in choosing. Parasites remove this theoretical objection. The reason is that, according to Hamilton, parasites and hosts are running a never-ceasing cyclical arms race against one another. This in turn means that the 'best' genes in any one generation of birds are not the same as the best genes in future generations." (p.212-213)
