Intelligent Design Theory: Science or Religion?

In fact, it is not simply a survival advantage. Any individual which survives is by definition fit; a trait which will improve the individual's breeding opportunity will confer a survival advantage, of sorts, on the species. But individuals within the species may have varying traits, while having one or more survival advantage traits in common. All contribute to the survival advantage of the species, but their individual characteristics which are not all common with the survival advantage characteristic are going to spread through the gene pool. Once again, eye color is a good example, in that several varieties exist within the gene pool, but it is the relative visual acuity of the organ, working the nervous system and the relevant tissue in the brain which confer the advantages which provide better breeding opportunity for the individuals, and a survival advantage for the species. That is part of the flexibility of the gene pool, as well. Some individuals in any successful gene pool will have currently neutral characteristics which can become beneficial under the stress of any significant change in the environment of the species.

The atheist
Evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins explains why God is a delusion, religion is a virus, and America has slipped back into the Dark Ages.

By Gordy Slack

April 28, 2005 | Richard Dawkins is the world's most famous out-of-the-closet living atheist. He is also the world's most controversial evolutionary biologist. Publication of his 1976 book, "The Selfish Gene," thrust Dawkins into the limelight as the handsome, irascible, human face of scientific reductionism. The book provoked everything from outrage to glee by arguing that natural selection worked its creative powers only through genes, not species or individuals. Humans are merely "gene survival machines," he asserted in the book.

Dawkins stuck to his theme but expanded his territory in such subsequent books as "The Blind Watchmaker," "Unweaving the Rainbow" and "Climbing Mount Improbable." His recent work, "The Ancestor's Tale," traces human lineage back through time, stopping to ponder important forks in the evolutionary road.

Given his outspoken defense of Darwin, and natural selection as the force of life, Dawkins has assumed a new role: the religious right's Public Enemy No. 1. Yet Dawkins doesn't shy from controversy, nor does he suffer fools gladly. He recently met a minister who was on the opposite side of a British political debate. When the minister put out his hand, Dawkins kept his hands at his side and said, "You, sir, are an ignorant bigot."

Currently, Dawkins is the Charles Simonyi Professor of the Public Understanding of Science at Oxford University, a position created for him in 1995 by Charles Simonyi, a Microsoft millionaire. Earlier this year, Dawkins signed an agreement with British television to make a documentary about the destructive role of religion in modern history, tentatively titled "The Root of All Evil."

I met Dawkins in late March at the Atheist Alliance International annual conference in Los Angeles, where he presented the alliance's top honor, the Richard Dawkins Prize, to magicians Penn and Teller. During our conversation in my hotel room, Dawkins was as gracious as he was punctiliously dressed in a crisp white shirt and soft blazer.

Once again, evolution is under attack. Are there any questions at all about its validity?

It's often said that because evolution happened in the past, and we didn't see it happen, there is no direct evidence for it. That, of course, is nonsense. It's rather like a detective coming on the scene of a crime, obviously after the crime has been committed, and working out what must have happened by looking at the clues that remain. In the story of evolution, the clues are a billionfold.

There are clues from the distribution of DNA codes throughout the animal and plant kingdoms, of protein sequences, of morphological characters that have been analyzed in great detail. Everything fits with the idea that we have here a simple branching tree. The distribution of species on islands and continents throughout the world is exactly what you'd expect if evolution was a fact. The distribution of fossils in space and in time are exactly what you would expect if evolution were a fact. There are millions of facts all pointing in the same direction and no facts pointing in the wrong direction.

British scientist J.B.S. Haldane, when asked what would constitute evidence against evolution, famously said, "Fossil rabbits in the Precambrian." They've never been found. Nothing like that has ever been found. Evolution could be disproved by such facts. But all the fossils that have been found are in the right place. Of course there are plenty of gaps in the fossil record. There's nothing wrong with that. Why shouldn't there be? We're lucky to have fossils at all. But no fossils have been found in the wrong place, such as to disprove the fact of evolution. Evolution is a fact.

Still, so many people resist believing in evolution. Where does the resistance come from?

It comes, I'm sorry to say, from religion. And from bad religion. You won't find any opposition to the idea of evolution among sophisticated, educated theologians. It comes from an exceedingly retarded, primitive version of religion, which unfortunately is at present undergoing an epidemic in the United States. Not in Europe, not in Britain, but in the United States.

My American friends tell me that you are slipping towards a theocratic Dark Age. Which is very disagreeable for the very large number of educated, intelligent and right-thinking people in America. Unfortunately, at present, it's slightly outnumbered by the ignorant, uneducated people who voted Bush in.

But the broad direction of history is toward enlightenment, and so I think that what America is going through at the moment will prove to be a temporary reverse. I think there is great hope for the future. My advice would be, Don't despair, these things pass.

You delve into agnosticism in "The Ancestor's Tale." How does it differ from atheism?

It's said that the only rational stance is agnosticism because you can neither prove nor disprove the existence of the supernatural creator. I find that a weak position. It is true that you can't disprove anything but you can put a probability value on it. There's an infinite number of things that you can't disprove: unicorns, werewolves, and teapots in orbit around Mars. But we don't pay any heed to them unless there is some positive reason to think that they do exist.

Believing in God is like believing in a teapot orbiting Mars?

Yes. For a long time it seemed clear to just about everybody that the beauty and elegance of the world seemed to be prima facie evidence for a divine creator. But the philosopher David Hume already realized three centuries ago that this was a bad argument. It leads to an infinite regression. You can't statistically explain improbable things like living creatures by saying that they must have been designed because you're still left to explain the designer, who must be, if anything, an even more statistically improbable and elegant thing. Design can never be an ultimate explanation for anything. It can only be a proximate explanation. A plane or a car is explained by a designer but that's because the designer himself, the engineer, is explained by natural selection.

Those who embrace "intelligent design" -- the idea that living cells are too complex to have been created by nature alone -- say evolution isn't incompatible with the existence of God.

There is just no evidence for the existence of God. Evolution by natural selection is a process that works up from simple beginnings, and simple beginnings are easy to explain. The engineer or any other living thing is difficult to explain -- but it is explicable by evolution by natural selection. So the relevance of evolutionary biology to atheism is that evolutionary biology gives us the only known mechanism whereby the illusion of design, or apparent design, could ever come into the universe anywhere.

So why do we insist on believing in God?

From a biological point of view, there are lots of different theories about why we have this extraordinary predisposition to believe in supernatural things. One suggestion is that the child mind is, for very good Darwinian reasons, susceptible to infection the same way a computer is. In order to be useful, a computer has to be programmable, to obey whatever it's told to do. That automatically makes it vulnerable to computer viruses, which are programs that say, "Spread me, copy me, pass me on." Once a viral program gets started, there is nothing to stop it.

Similarly, the child brain is preprogrammed by natural selection to obey and believe what parents and other adults tell it. In general, it's a good thing that child brains should be susceptible to being taught what to do and what to believe by adults. But this necessarily carries the down side that bad ideas, useless ideas, waste of time ideas like rain dances and other religious customs, will also be passed down the generations. The child brain is very susceptible to this kind of infection. And it also spreads sideways by cross infection when a charismatic preacher goes around infecting new minds that were previously uninfected.

You've said that raising children in a religious tradition may even be a form of abuse.

What I think may be abuse is labeling children with religious labels like Catholic child and Muslim child. I find it very odd that in our civilization we're quite happy to speak of a Catholic child that is 4 years old or a Muslim of child that is 4, when these children are much too young to know what they think about the cosmos, life and morality. We wouldn't dream of speaking of a Keynesian child or a Marxist child. And yet, for some reason we make a privileged exception of religion. And, by the way, I think it would also be abuse to talk about an atheist child.

I agree with all of that. I guess I'm just saying that the eye color blue wouldn't come to dominate the gene pool displacing the other colors trhoughout the population for no reason.

I agree with all of that. I guess I'm just saying that the eye color blue wouldn't come to dominate the gene pool displacing the other colors trhoughout the population for no reason.

Brandon9000 wrote:

I agree with all of that. I guess I'm just saying that the eye color blue wouldn't come to dominate the gene pool displacing the other colors trhoughout the population for no reason.

Well, and what i am saying is that the eye color blue, even were it become dominant, would not necessarily exclude all other eye colors. Since neither of us likely have an explanation as to how that would confer either an individual breeding opportunity, or a survival advantage for a species, let's look at something else.

Suppose you have a population of herbivorous ungulates, which occupy a temperate climate in the northern hemisphere. The majority have a coat of a moderate length; some have short coats, some have shaggy coats. Were the climate to become significantly warmer, the shaggy coated individuals would be at a disadvantage. Either that trait disappears, or the shaggy-coated population move north, perhaps eventually to produce a new species. The short coated individuals now have an enhanced breeding opportunity, and that trait would become dominant, due to more successful breeding by individuals with that characteristic. But the moderate length coat of other individuals, imposing no disadvantage, would remain available to the gene pool.

Similarly, if the climate became significantly cooler, the shaggy coated individuals would enjoy the enhanced breeding opportunity. Those with moderate length coats or short coats would either gradually disappear from the gene pool, or be obliged to move south, with perhaps a new species arising. Perhaps due to significant variations in the climate, this population might eventually give rise to buffalo with a shaggy coat in its northern range, and antelope with a short coat in its southern range.

You have been objecting that traits which confer no advantage would not be in the gene pool. That's too black and white a point of view. Rather, only those traits which hinder an individual's breeding opportunity will disappear. There is absolutely no reason why many, many traits which confer no individual advantage in breeding, and no survival advantage for the species cannot be present in the gene pool. Although you seem poised to change your story, you have been basically denying that a trait could be prevelant if it confers no advantage, and all that i and others have been saying is that many traits can be present which confer no advantage, so long as said trait does not impose a disadvantage.

I do not think that Dawkins should dwell on the belief in God as being erroneous. I liked it better when he characterized opposition to evolution as "bad religion".

Charles Darwin mentioned that his colleagues were reluctant to employ natural selection as an explanation of the evolution of the eye. Even though Darwin was talking about his nineteenth century critics, I believe that the main area of contention for intelligent design advocates also is the evolution of complex organs such as the eye.

Perhaps we're misunderstanding each other. I agree that a trait can be present which confers no advantage, I am only saying that it won't become unanimous. That is, in a situation in which animals with short, moderate, and long coats are about equally well suited for the climate, the short coats won't suddenly become the only variant present.

To create some trait, evolution needs two things. The trait must confer a survival advantage, and there must be a path to the trait such that each step along the way confers additional advantage. That's proably why there are no creatures with treads like a tractor - a partial tread is not an advantage. There is no path to it.

Please stop arguing with Gunga.

He has openly suggested using the Christian Bible as a science textbook. This argument will not go any further than that.

You don't need to worry that anyone is going to be fooled. Ignore him and you give him less of a platform.

Arguing with Gunga screws up the more interesting nuanced discussion on this topic.

What is "PREVELANT".

If you can not spell.....

Brandon9000 wrote:

Perhaps we're misunderstanding each other. I agree that a trait can be present which confers no advantage, I am only saying that it won't become unanimous. That is, in a situation in which animals with short, moderate, and long coats are about equally well suited for the climate, the short coats won't suddenly become the only variant present.

The statement you originally wrote which started this sub-thread is as follows:

Brandon9000 wrote:

To create some trait, evolution needs two things. The trait must confer a survival advantage, and there must be a path to the trait such that each step along the way confers additional advantage. That's proably why there are no creatures with treads like a tractor - a partial tread is not an advantage. There is no path to it.

Maybe Setanta and I misunderstood what you meant by that. Care to re-phrase it in light of the recent exchanges?

rosborne-The Kansas yahoonyms are getting my goat. They now are probably going to toss out all objects that rely upon quantum theory . So the entire field of modern Analytical chemistry(where we rely on how "average" bundles of particles are affected by an EMF field) might as well packit in since theres nothing observable in atomic drift spectrographs, just a graph and a math solution that it works.

If we suppose that tractor type treads would be beneficial in some environment, they are nonetheless not likely to evolve, because a fractional tractor tread would be completely non-functional.

Rosborne, if in the process, you do stumble across a method of transmuting lead into gold, i would just like you to know that i have a large quantity of lead, and have always greatly admired you.