The GOD Delusion (18 page)

Other
sciences raise our consciousness in different ways. Fred Hoyle's own
science of astronomy puts us in our place, metaphorically as well as
literally, scaling down our vanity to fit the tiny stage on which we
play out our lives - our speck of debris from the cosmic
explosion. Geology reminds us of our brief existence both as
individuals and as a species. It raised John Ruskin's consciousness and
provoked his memorable heart cry of 1851: 'If only the Geologists would
let me alone, I could do very well, but those dreadful hammers! I hear
the clink of them at the end of every cadence of the Bible verses.'
Evolution does the same thing for our sense of time - not surprisingly,
since it works on the geological timescale. But Darwinian evolution,
specifically natural selection, does something more. It shatters the
illusion of design within the domain of biology, and teaches us to be
suspicious of any kind of design hypothesis in physics and cosmology as
well. I think the physicist Leonard Susskind had this in mind when he
wrote, 'I'm not an historian but I'll venture an opinion: Modern
cosmology really began with Darwin and Wallace. Unlike anyone before
them, they provided explanations of our existence that completely
rejected supernatural agents . . . Darwin and Wallace set a standard
not only for the life sciences but for cosmology as well.'
⁶¹
Other physical scientists who are far above needing any such
consciousness-raising are Victor Stenger, whose book
Has
Science Found God?
(the answer is no) I strongly recommend,
and Peter Atkins, whose
Creation Revisited
is my
favourite work of scientific prose poetry.

I am
continually astonished by those theists who, far from having their
consciousness raised in the way that I propose, seem to rejoice in
natural selection as 'God's way of achieving his creation'. They note
that evolution by natural selection would be a very easy and neat way
to achieve a world full of life. God wouldn't need to do anything at
all! Peter Atkins, in the book just mentioned, takes this line of
thought to a sensibly godless conclusion when he postulates a
hypothetically lazy God who tries to get away with as little as
possible in order to make a universe containing life. Atkins's lazy God
is even lazier than the deist God of the eighteenth-century
Enlightenment:
deus otiosus
- literally God at
leisure, unoccupied, unemployed, superfluous, useless. Step by step,
Atkins succeeds in reducing the amount of work the lazy God has to do
until he finally ends up doing nothing at all: he might as well not
bother to exist. My memory vividly hears Woody Allen's perceptive
whine: 'If it turns out that there is a God, I don't think that he's
evil. But the worst
that you can say about him is that basically he's an under-achiever.'

It
is impossible to exaggerate the magnitude of the problem that Darwin
and Wallace solved. I could mention the anatomy, cellular structure,
biochemistry and behaviour of literally any living organism by example.
But the most striking feats of apparent design are those picked out -
for obvious reasons - by creationist authors, and it is with gentle
irony that I derive mine from a creationist book.
Life
-
How Did It Get Here?,
with no named author but
published by the Watchtower Bible and Tract Society in sixteen
languages and eleven million copies, is obviously a firm favourite
because no fewer than six of those eleven million copies have been sent
to me as unsolicited gifts by well-wishers from around the world.

Picking
a page at random from this anonymous and lavishly distributed work, we
find the sponge known as Venus' Flower Basket
{Euplectella),
accompanied
by a quotation from Sir David Attenborough, no less: 'When you look at
a complex sponge skeleton such as that made of silica spicules which is
known as Venus' Flower Basket, the imagination is baffled. How could
quasi-independent microscopic cells collaborate to secrete a million
glassy splinters and construct such an intricate and beautiful lattice?
We do not know.' The Watchtower authors lose no time in adding their
own punchline: 'But one thing we do know: Chance is not the likely
designer.' No indeed, chance is not the likely designer. That is one
thing on which we can all agree. The statistical improbability of
phenomena such as
Euplectella's
skeleton is the
central problem that any theory of life must solve. The greater the
statistical improbability, the less plausible is chance as a solution:
that is what improbable means. But the candidate solutions to the
riddle of improbability are not, as is falsely implied, design and
chance. They are design and natural selection. Chance is not a
solution, given the high levels of improbability we see in living
organisms, and
no sane biologist ever suggested that it was. Design is not a real
solution either, as we shall see later; but for the moment I want to
continue demonstrating the problem that any theory of life must solve:
the problem of how to escape from chance.

Turning
Watchtower's page, we find the wonderful plant known as Dutchman's Pipe
(Aristolochia trilobata),
all of whose parts seem
elegantly designed to trap insects, cover them with pollen and send
them on their way to another Dutchman's Pipe. The intricate elegance of
the flower moves Watchtower to ask: 'Did all of this happen by chance?
Or did it happen by intelligent design?' Once again, no of
course
it didn't happen by chance. Once again, intelligent design is
not the proper alternative to chance. Natural selection is not only a
parsimonious, plausible and elegant solution; it is the only workable
alternative to chance that has ever been suggested. Intelligent design
suffers from exactly the same objection as chance. It is simply not a
plausible solution to the riddle of statistical improbability. And the
higher the improbability, the more implausible intelligent design
becomes. Seen clearly, intelligent design will turn out to be a
redoubling of the problem. Once again, this is because the designer
himself (/herself/itself) immediately raises the bigger problem of his
own origin. Any entity capable of intelligently designing something as
improbable as a Dutchman's Pipe (or a universe) would have to be even
more improbable than a Dutchman's Pipe. Far from terminating the
vicious regress, God aggravates it with a vengeance.

Turn
another Watchtower page for an eloquent account of the giant redwood
(Sequoiadendron
giganteum),
a tree for which I have a special affection
because I have one in my garden - a mere baby, scarcely more than a
century old, but still the tallest tree in the neighbourhood. 'A puny
man, standing at a sequoia's base, can only gaze upward in silent awe
at its massive grandeur. Does it make sense to believe that the shaping
of this majestic giant and of the tiny seed that packages it was not by
design?' Yet again, if you think the only alternative to design is
chance then, no, it does not make sense. But again the authors omit all
mention of the real alternative, natural selection, either because they
genuinely don't understand it or because they don't want to.

The
process by which plants, whether tiny pimpernels or massive
wellingtonias, acquire the energy to build themselves is
photosynthesis. Watchtower again: ' "There are about seventy separate
chemical reactions involved in photosynthesis," one biologist said. "It
is truly a miraculous event." Green plants have been called nature's
"factories" - beautiful, quiet, nonpolluting, producing oxygen,
recycling water and feeding the world. Did they just happen by chance?
Is that truly believable?' No, it is not believable; but the repetition
of example after example gets us nowhere. Creationist 'logic' is always
the same. Some natural phenomenon is too statistically improbable, too
complex, too beautiful, too awe-inspiring to have come into existence
by chance. Design is the only alternative to chance that the authors
can imagine. Therefore a designer must have done it. And science's
answer to this faulty logic is also always the same. Design is not the
only alternative to chance. Natural selection is a better alternative.
Indeed, design is not a real alternative at all because it raises an
even bigger problem than it solves: who designed the designer? Chance
and design both fail as solutions to the problem of statistical
improbability, because one of them is the problem, and the other one
regresses to it. Natural selection is a real solution. It is the only
workable solution that has ever been suggested. And it is not only a
workable solution, it is a solution of stunning elegance and power.

What
is it that makes natural selection succeed as a solution to the problem
of improbability, where chance and design both fail at the starting
gate? The answer is that natural selection is a cumulative process,
which breaks the problem of improbability up into small pieces. Each of
the small pieces is slightly improbable, but not prohibitively so. When
large numbers of these slightly improbable events are stacked up in
series, the end product of the accumulation is very very improbable
indeed, improbable enough to be far beyond the reach of chance. It is
these end products that form the subjects of the creationist's
wearisomely recycled argument. The creationist completely misses the
point, because he (women should for once not mind being excluded by the
pronoun) insists on treating the genesis of statistical improbability
as a single, one-off event. He doesn't understand the power of
accumulation.

In
Climbing
Mount Improbable,
I expressed the point in a parable. One
side of the mountain is a sheer cliff, impossible to climb,
but on the other side is a gentle slope to the summit. On the summit
sits a complex device such as an eye or a bacterial flagellar motor.
The absurd notion that such complexity could spontaneously
self-assemble is symbolized by leaping from the foot of the cliff to
the top in one bound. Evolution, by contrast, goes around the back of
the mountain and creeps up the gentle slope to the summit: easy! The
principle of climbing the gentle slope as opposed to leaping up the
precipice is so simple, one is tempted to marvel that it took so long
for a Darwin to arrive on the scene and discover it. By the time he
did, nearly three centuries had elapsed since Newton's
annus
mirabilis,
although his achievement seems, on the face of
it, harder than Darwin's.

Another
favourite metaphor for extreme improbability is the combination lock on
a bank vault. Theoretically, a bank robber could get lucky and hit upon
the right combination of numbers by chance. In practice, the bank's
combination lock is designed with enough improbability to make this
tantamount to impossible -almost as unlikely as Fred Hoyle's Boeing
747. But imagine a badly designed combination lock that gave out little
hints progressively -the equivalent of the 'getting warmer' of children
playing Hunt the Slipper. Suppose that when each one of the dials
approaches its correct setting, the vault door opens another chink, and
a dribble of money trickles out. The burglar would home in on the
jackpot in no time.

Creationists
who attempt to deploy the argument from improbability in their favour
always assume that biological adaptation is a question of the jackpot
or nothing. Another name for the 'jackpot or nothing' fallacy is
'irreducible complexity' (IC). Either the eye sees or it doesn't.
Either the wing flies or it doesn't. There are assumed to be no useful
intermediates. But this is simply wrong. Such intermediates abound in
practice - which is exactly what we should expect in theory. The
combination lock of life is a 'getting warmer, getting cooler, getting
warmer' Hunt the Slipper device. Real life seeks the gentle slopes at
the back of Mount Improbable, while creationists are blind to all but
the daunting precipice at the front.

Darwin
devoted an entire chapter of the
Origin of Species
to
'Difficulties on the theory of descent with modification', and it is
fair
to say that this brief chapter anticipated and disposed of every single
one of the alleged difficulties that have since been proposed, right up
to the present day. The most formidable difficulties are Darwin's
'organs of extreme perfection and complication', sometimes erroneously
described as 'irreducibly complex'. Darwin singled out the eye as
posing a particularly challenging problem: 'To suppose that the eye
with all its inimitable contrivances for adjusting the focus to
different distances, for admitting different amounts of light, and for
the correction of spherical and chromatic aberration, could have been
formed by natural selection, seems, I freely confess, absurd in the
highest degree.' Creationists gleefully quote this sentence again and
again. Needless to say, they never quote what follows. Darwin's
fulsomely free confession turned out to be a rhetorical device. He was
drawing his opponents towards him so that his punch, when it came,
struck the harder. The punch, of course, was Darwin's effortless
explanation of exactly how the eye evolved by gradual degrees. Darwin
may not have used the phrase 'irreducible complexity', or 'the smooth
gradient up Mount Improbable', but he clearly understood the principle
of both.

'What
is the use of half an eye?' and 'What is the use of half a wing?' are
both instances of the argument from 'irreducible complexity'. A
functioning unit is said to be irreducibly complex if the removal of
one of its parts causes the whole to cease functioning. This has been
assumed to be self-evident for both eyes and wings. But as soon as we
give these assumptions a moment's thought, we immediately see the
fallacy. A cataract patient with the lens of her eye surgically removed
can't see clear images without glasses, but can see enough not to bump
into a tree or fall over a cliff. Half a wing is indeed not as good as
a whole wing, but it is certainly better than no wing at all. Half a
wing could save your life by easing your fall from a tree of a certain
height. And 51 per cent of a wing could save you if you fall from a
slightly taller tree. Whatever fraction of a wing you have, there is a
fall from which it will save your life where a slightly smaller winglet
would not. The thought experiment of trees of different height, from
which one might fall, is just one way to see, in theory, that there
must be a smooth gradient of advantage all the way from 1 per cent of a
wing to 100 per cent. The forests are replete with gliding or
parachuting animals illustrating,
in practice, every step of the way up that particular slope of Mount
Improbable.