Life is always better when I have a book on the go which I can hardly wait to get back to. The Blind Watchmaker by Richard Dawkins is not quite going to be that for me. Too complicated. Not central enough to the things I happen now to be interested in, probably because I already agree with it far too completely for it to grab me by the throat. But, I have recently been dipping into this book, having finally got hold of a cheap second-hand copy of it, and yesterday I came across an argument in it which I found familiar, but in another context.
Dawkins criticises Bishop Hugh Montefiore (on page 38 of my 1991 Penguin paperback edition) for again and again resorting to the argument that he just cannot believe that this or that complex organ or organism could possibly have evolved. For instance, Dawkins quotes Montefiore saying this:
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, says Dawkins, should be translated thus:
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.
Dawkins then adds a further objection, which is that even labouring under all these handicaps, Montefiore ought to have been able to work out that predators benefit from camouflage – from being invisible to their prey – just as a creature benefits from being camouflaged if it is, potentially, someone else’s prey. The polar bear is not dominant anyway, whatever colour it is. It is dominant because it is white, and can thus sneak up on its targets unobserved.
But what interested me was the similarity between Dawkins’ first objection to arguments from incredulity, that the incredulous one has simply not given it enough thought, and confused his own casual inability to come up with an evolutionary explanation for this or that puzzling or complicated biological phenomenon with the absolute inability of anyone to provide such an explanation, and above all of the inability of evolution itself to work the trick.
This reminds me a lot of how many opponents of a free market economy have argued with me in the past, and my riposte was a lot like the Dawkins riposte to Montefiore. My anti-free-marketeer would posit some problem which he alleged would crop up in a free market, such as: – I don’t know – only rich people being able to get the kind of food they like; or: the chaos caused by a mass of conflicting standards for personal computers (I am old enough to remember that one); or (now): the problem of failing banks, or: whatever. And he gives his chosen problem about the same amount of thought, and with about the same lack of preparatory qualifications or relevant experiences, as Bishop Montefiore brought to bear (sorry) on the matter of the whiteness of polar bears. He fails to think of a free market, entrepreneurial, voluntarily funded, customer financed answer to his problem. And he immediately concludes from his own failure instantaneously to provide a market solution to his problem that nobody, however well (i.e. massively better) acquainted with the business in question, and however much longer and harder they try to devise an answer, will be able to crack it. Ergo, the government must immediately step in and sort it out. In the mind of the anti-free-marketeer, the government occupies the same kind of intellectual territory as the divine designer in the mind of an anti-Darwinian.
I am making a very modest point here, perhaps too modest given the length of this posting. I am just saying that these two arguments remind me of each other. I’m not saying that because Darwinism is true (as I think it is) it therefore follows that the free market is right (although I think that too). Nor am I arguing that if you agree with me about markets, then you should agree with me and Dawkins and the rest of the Darwinian tribe, about evolution, if you happen now not to. I am just, as many Americans are fond of saying, saying.
“In the mind of the anti-free-marketeer, the government occupies the same kind of intellectual territory as the divine designer in the mind of an anti-Darwinian.”
That’s one for my quotes file…
Brian,
Two things:
1) What you are doing, realize it or not, is comparing/associating socialists with creationists. The similarities are interesting, but it is fundamentally a flawed comparison. Just because there isn’t a natural creator does not mean humans can not create a socialist system that works. (Note: I don’t believe they can either). But the argument is flawed all the same. It is just a comfortable thought pattern that allows you to dismiss one of them a little easier. We seek truth, not easy answers (although the truth is usually quite easy once you finally discover it.)
2) More substantially, but shorter. What is even more interesting is the decentralization inherent in both evolution and free markets. Lack of central planning, simultaneous evolution of competing standards/methods, and general chaos. And yet, in both evolution and free markets – it is the only thing we have ever discovered that works. Fascinating.
The classic example is bees: J E Meade published a paper in 1952 using bees as an example of positive externality leading to underproduction (because beekeepers couldn’t get the benefits of their bees fertilizing orchards). Cheung in 1973 explained how beekeepers and orchard-growers had long since solved the problem, creating a market in locating beehives.
http://www.econlib.org/library/Columns/y2008/Mungerbees.html
Jay, of course the parallels are not exact, and I doubt that Brian meant them to be. But the idea of an all-seeing god and a wise central planner are remarkably similar in the broad sense. And of course one should not forget that for many socialists, the collective is a sort of substitute for God. It saves them from having to take personal responsibility, to think.
Brian,
First off, the blind watchmaker is a pain to read. I would stick to The Selfish Gene and Climbing Mt Improbable; they are his most readable books.
On the other matter. Yep.
I have never understood Dawkins own attitude to the free market, selection and economics being almost two sides of the same coin.
That the man can be so insightful in one area and so blind in another, almost identical, area, is difficult for me to fathom.
Like Dawkins, you are in danger of conducting a “straw man” attack on several ideological perspectives, by taking an ill-thought out proponent of one of them, and attributing this confusion to others.
For example, I can see no intellectual or liberty-consequential problems for someone who argues the following:
1) God sneezed or whatever and Big Bang occured.
2) The universe has natural laws (gravity, motion, thermodynamics).
3) Evolution occurred as the universe cooled down.
4) There will be an end (entropy).
5) People are responsible for their actions and can/will be held to account.
6) God knew all this before he sneezed.
Would such a person respect the right to life, liberty and property of other people? Probably, most of the time.
However, I do see intellectual and liberty-consequential problems in the following chain:
1) There is no God.
2) Evolution is “The Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life.”
3) Human beings are just meat.
4) “Law” is nothing more than bourgeois convention or the ravings of religious lunatics.
I’m certain that only momentary pragmatism and fear of prison or an armed neighbour would lead a person believing this stuff to respect the life, liberty and property of others.
I think that Charles Darwin was closer to understanding how we got here than Sarah Palin (who I assume to not have strong views either way), but I’d much rather have a government based on her principles than his.
One of the great ironies of Darwinism is that I consider it to be an unviable theory in Darwinian terms: people who believe in evolution don’t breed, people who believe in creationism do, therefore Darwinism is as absurd as the Shakers’ beliefs, in terms of assisting them to reproduce. Worse, because Darwinism increasingly depends on converts to survive, it can (and soon will in some countries) be seen as parasitic on the rest of humanity.
In short, the atheists need a God believer to drive the bus carrying the poster “There is No God”, because the atheists are aborting their future. I note that a British bus carrying an Islamic message is being driven around. Presumably no atheist driver, or none willing to defend his beliefs. What odds for atheism in Nigeria? Or Indonesia?
Final point, I don’t rate Dawkins as an honest debater, he often picks the weakest opponent, not the strongest. Consider Pope Leo XIII, writing in response to the publication of the Origin of the Species: he warned scientists not to jump onto a bandwaggon (think global warming!) without confirming evidence (this is the pope who re-introduced the Thomist tradition), also warned against rejecting what might turn out to be confirmed as true (he was trying to figure out how to handle apologising for Galileo and Copernicus, so creating a new martyr of science was out of the question). The pope deplored the ideological uses that this would lead to: racialism and socialism.
Does Dawkins confront such views? Of course not. He instead acts as creationism’s biggest recruiting tool: by picking on intellectual weaklings and bullying them (preferably after they’re dead). Dawkins almost convinces me to support intelligent design.
An interesting utilitarian argument. Believe in god because it improves the birth rate. Ok, but if I have to start believing I have an invisible imaginary friend, for the sake of the children of course, can I believe in Wotan, Freya and Thor instead please?
The Blind Watchmaker is the best non-fiction book I have read.
I have given away a number of copies as presents.
I disagree with Counting Cats about the readability of it.
I found the prose to be crystal clear. The ideas in the book are not easy to comprehend initially, but Dawkins illuminates them superbly.
This is the Dawkins to read, much of the rest just revisits The Blind Watchmaker themes.
There are some interesting patterns … or rather anti-patters.
Liberals are more likely to believe in evolution that Conservatives.
Liberals are more likely to pursue policies that, if Darwinism is true, would lead to an “idiocracy”: make sure that everyone, no matter how unfit, survives, and is able to have as many children as his little heard desires, even if he is totally incapable of any productive activity.
Liberals are more likely to consider any extinction of a species as a tragedy, which means that their view of pre-human history must be one of complete horror.
Liberals are more likely to believe that “intelligent design” of markets is possible or desirable, totally neglecting the power of the paradigm of decentralized “try everything and see what works” theory.
But part of this is because of the “strange bedfellows” created by the alliance of the “religious right” with the anticommunists who made up much of the Republican Party. Anticommunists, as these last eight years have proven, are may not be capitalists. They may be opposed to communism only because they see communism has hostile to their religion, and because they see voluntary charity as a good way to recruit people into their religion.
In action, there seems to be less contradiction. The Republican Party in America has been as willing to engage in Socialist bailouts when faced with the actual possibility of having an unfit company weeded out. They *do* believe in “intelligent design” of markets, so long as nobody kills the priests. They do *not* believe in free markets. They believe in having power, and mouthing whatever beliefs they think will get them power.
—–
Don’t blame me, I voted Libertarian.
I suspect that most of the folk who believe in creationism/ ID belong to lower socio-economic groups. It is a fact that the welfare state actively encourages such folk to overbreed. Destroying the welfare state would reduce this dysgenic effect.
Antoine,
…people who believe in evolution don’t breed…
Er, what?
Seriously, where the hell did that revelation come from?
Antoine,
You missed out an item on your first list.
7) God commanded me to conquer the world and force God’s law on everyone: to believe, or to submit to permanent humiliation. This cannot be argued with in any way because God demands unquestioning faith, and will horribly torture anyone who disobeys for all eternity.
And on your second list, number 4) should be:
4) Morality is an instinctive social behaviour, that has the effect of enabling larger societies to live together and cooperate, with clear survival advantages over genes coding for scattered individuals that do not.
People would not be moral if there was no evolutionary advantage to it. Just because you’re not conscious of such an advantage doesn’t mean there isn’t one. Nor does it require every individual instance of a morality to be so – the advantage need only be statistical.
The “Social Darwinism” error was corrected long ago. Morals, and such emotions as kindness and generosity, are an evolved feature of humanity.
And as demonstrated by the continual mutation of prevailing morals over our recorded history – despite the fervent efforts of churches and priesthoods to stop it – they do not originate with nor are they maintained by religion.
The fact that the universe is organized along a set of physical rules – such as the speed of light, gravitational constants, Newtonian laws of motion etc etc could be seen both as an argument for the existence of God and as a guide for the proper role of Government. Government is there to provide a framework for freedom, not to become a leech-like entity existing for its own sake or for some kind of utopian vision. All societies need a few rules to function and a few people to perform that role. . . it’s not a matter of no government or government but which kind of government.
As for the evolution debate one major problem with Darwin’s theory is that it does not (and neither does Dawkins) explain the very beginning of life. Once upon a time we assume there was no life. . . and then there was life. What are the chances that 500 or so proteins would align themselves in just the right manner and then replicate themselves? Pretty small. And why would inanimate pieces of matter desire to do so? Even Dawkins says the chances are infinitesimal in the beginning “Selfish Gene” but then he goes on to build an entire book based on the assumption that the event which had a very small chance of happening happened. Seems almost unscientific.
“What are the chances that 500 or so proteins would…”
Virtually nil, of course, which is how we know it didn’t happen that way. The first replicators were certainly much smaller, simple polymer chains able to form cross-links, maybe half a dozen links long.
I could go on for a bit spinning hypotheses about how it might have happened, and speaking of Spiegelman’s monster, but it would miss the point. We don’t know exactly how it happened. There are several plausible theories, and certainly nobody thinks the truth will require such a remarkable coincidence as you suggest, but there is undoubtedly a gap in our understanding there, and I will not be able to persuade you it has been filled yet.
But the emphasis is very much on that “yet”. The argument you are putting forward is a combination of an argument from ignorance – we don’t know how it could have happened, therefore it is not possible that it could have happened – and the false dichotomy – it clearly didn’t happen this way, with 500 proteins randomly self-assembling, so it must have happened that way; there can be no other possibility we simply haven’t thought of. I agree that it didn’t happen initially with anything so large, and I agree we don’t know, but I don’t agree that this rules out any non-miraculous process.
One of those odd features of science, that many of the religious seem to find particularly hard to accept, is that in science it is perfectly OK to say “I don’t know.” We don’t need to have an answer to everything to be happy with where we are. Finding the answers to such questions is what science is for, and when we’ve found them, we always have more questions. What science will never accept, though, is “we can’t know.”
Creationism has exactly the same “primal cause” problem of course – where did God come from? How did God come to be? Because if you think a 500-protein replicator is unlikely to self-assemble, how much more unlikely is it that a fully functional deity will do so? But the point of a deity is that one is not required to answer any questions about it – “it just is”. Because a God can be anything it wants to be, there are no rules and regularities; God’s properties cannot be explained, nothing can be deduced, or excluded.
It fills the hunger for answers with an infinitely flexible answer that can fit any question: “Because God chose to.” Where did the light come from for the first three days of creation? God’s will. And if the sun had been created on the first day, that would be God’s will too. An explanation that can explain anything explains nothing.
To a scientist, it matters more that the answer be right than that there is a ready answer. To a religious person, a world with no plan, no answers, nobody in control is terrifying. Even if you don’t know the answer, you want to feel that somebody, somewhere, does.
Neither of us will ever persuade the other, because we’re looking for different things. Truth or certainty; you can’t have both.
A very common argument indeed, in fact, possibly the most common class of anti-market argument out there. Can we coin it the “polar bear” argument? Just so we don’t have to keep describing it in excruciating detail, and may someday have a single place to point the theostatists toward for a consistent refutation…
Pa Annoyed makes excellent points, and quite eloquently, too. I especially like his last line: “Truth or certainty; you can’t have both.” Sort of a “Heisenbergian” principle for theological arguments.
I would also add that persons making the “What are the chances that 500 or so proteins would . . .” type of argument, just as those making the “polar bear” anti-evolution agrument, aren’t really making any rational argument in support of their theist position, but rather are simply demonstrating that they can’t internalize just how long a billion years is. We all tend to think in anthropocentric terms; to us, a human lifetime seems a reasonably long period of time. In geocentric terms, though, it’s infinitessimly short. Your 500 proteins merely have to bump into each other once, and then life is off and running. I would argue that if those proteins are present, over span of a few billion years it would be extremely unlikely that they would not combine.
The Tasks of Communist Education(Link), Leon Trotsky
“Truth or certainty; you can’t have both.”
Are you certain? 😉
But then Trotsky only ever about certainty. Truth was whatever the Party said it was. If ever there was a man who did not understand the scientific method, it was our old chum with the icepick in his head 🙂
And where is the evidence that Dawkins is a free market person? That is not the impression I have of him when I have heard him speak – but I may have picked up a false impression.
As for his arguments on religion:
R.D. refutes Paley well enough. However, Paley was creating a fairly new theology in the late 18th and early 19th centuries – and his innovations were rejected by John Henry Newman (and other mainstream theologians) long before Darwin came along.
R.D. seems to be a victim of Cambridge ism – as Paley was a major work at Cambridge and is still seen as an important thinker in the history of Christianity in his old university.
As for evolution:
It was accepted by such conservative Protestant American theologians as James McCosh and Noah Porter back in the 19th century – as well as by the very theologian who used the term “the fundamentals” to launch the “fundamentalist” movement.
So why do so many Christians in the United States now reject evolution? Perhaps because so many fools tell that it is not compatible with Christianity.
As for “Social Darwinism”.
Herbert Spencer (the man who created the term “survival of the fittest”) was a man who spent his life opposing war and oppression (on racial or any other grounds).
The twisting of Social Darwinism to mean what people now think it means is an odd story indeed.
Just as the twisting of William Graham Sumner’s “The Forgotten Man” from meaning the taxpayer, the welfare grabber, is an odd story.
Both stories involve early 20th century “progressives” (Nazis, New Dealers and so on) – people to whom truth was an alien concept.
You are correct Paul, Dawkins is a statist who once said he wished it was illegal for parents to teach religion to their children. Clearly he does not believe in a free market for ideas.
I agree with much Dawkins says but he is no friend of liberty.