In a comment on a recent blog of mine a person mentioned that she found the argument from design a persuasive one for God’s existence. She said:
I still, however, kinda like the design argument. Nature is very complex, as are all living things. It seems suspicious to me that a living creature is made so perfectly as to have complex systems for breathing, digesting, and processing energy. It's hard for my mind to grasp that this could have happen by accident, as well as to the other multitudes of living animals and plants and processes that make the Earth function as a whole. That's just me.
This is the argument from design. It has a long philosophical history. It was the fifth of Thomas Aquinas Five Ways arguments for God’s existence:
We see that things which lack knowledge, such as natural bodies, act for an end, and this is evident from their acting always, or nearly always, in the same way, so as to obtain the best result. Hence it is plain that they achieve their end, not fortuitously, but designedly. Now whatever lacks knowledge cannot move towards an end, unless it be directed by some being endowed with knowledge and intelligence; as the arrow is directed by the archer. Therefore some intelligent being exists by whom all natural things are directed to their end; and this being we call God (Aquinas, Summa Theologica, Article 3, Question 2).
However, the classical argument from design and to my mind, still the best is William Paley’s 1802 treatise Natural Theology. This is the famous watchmaker argument. Suppose you are walking in the countryside and you come across a rock. Some asks you, “Where did the rock from?” You might well reply that for all you knew, it might have been there forever. It is a natural object and for Paley it required no further explanation. However, suppose on your walk you find a watch. The same answer would not apply. You couldn’t claim that the watch was a natural object and therefore required no further explanation. Why not?
The watch is made up of numerous parts all fit together to perform a purpose. It is simply too complex to have come about by natural means. Thus, to explain a watch one needs to postulate a watchmaker … that is, an intelligence that designed and built the watch. But living things, argues Paley, are much more complex than are watches. In order to explain living things we must postulate a living-thing maker. In other words, we must postulate God.
However, today we know that we don’t have to do that. Living things are different from watches. Watches don’t reproduce themselves, living things do. We have a theory that explains how complexity arises in living things. That theory is, of course, the theory of evolution first put forth by Charles Darwin in his 1859 book On the Origin of Species.
Charles Darwin was well aware of Paley’s argument. Indeed if you click on the link to Paley’s book you will see that it is actually to the 12th edition of his book that was digitized from Charles Darwin’s own personal library. In his youth Darwin had read Paley and was by all accounts completely convinced by his argument. Later on in his life, even though he was largely responsible for the demise of the argument, Darwin spoke fondly of Paley’s book.
Darwin knew that there would be objections to his theory of evolution. Darwin was very upfront in addressing those problems. Chapter 6 was entitled, “Difficulties on Theory”, and a section of that chapter was on “Organs of extreme perfection”. It is from here that creationists get their oft-used Darwin quote:
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 possible degree.
Unfortunately they intentionally leave out the next sentence:
Yet reason tells me, that if numerous gradations from a perfect and complex eye to one very imperfect and simple, each grade being useful to its possessor, can be shown to exist; if further, the eye does vary ever so slightly, and the variations be inherited, which is certainly the case; and if any variation or modification in the organ be ever useful to an animal under changing conditions of life, then the difficulty of believing that a perfect and complex eye could be formed by natural selection, though insuperable by our imagination, can hardly be considered real.
They also neglect to inform their readers that Darwin spends the next few pages discussing organisms that have eyes which form the “numerous gradations from a perfect and complex eye to one very imperfect and simple” and how each is useful to its possessor.
Since Darwin dealt with eyes 150 years ago now, let me deal with some other system. Since the first complex system mentioned in the original objection to me was breathing, I will deal with the respiratory system.
Let’s take a look at it:
This picture shows the human respiratory system. The respiratory system has two main functions, (1) to get oxygen into the bloodstream, and (2) to remove gaseous waste products from the bloodstream.
It has two holes that can serve as intake portals (for inhalation) or as exit portals (for exhalation). These would be the nose and the mouth. There are tubes that transport the air; trachea, bronchi, and bronchioles. And it has the alveolar sacs which are the sites where gas exchange actually takes place.
The diaphragm (mainly) and the intercostals muscles (accessorily)increase the volume of the chest cavity when they contract. This causes air to be sucked into the lungs on inhalation. Exhalation is accomplished by either passive relaxation of the diaphragm and intercostals, or forced exhalation by contraction of the abdominal muscles which pushes the abdominal contents upward decreasing the volume of the chest cavity.
Here is a simple video that displays the process:
The lung has several adaptations that make the body much more efficient.
(1) The trachea is held open by C-shaped cartilage. The gap in the cartilage is in the back of the trachea. Right behind the trachea is the esophagus. Having the gap there allows the esophagus to more easily expand while swallowing food.
(2) The cells lining the trachea and bronchioles are ciliated. That is, they have tiny hairs that continually sweep up toward the nose and mouth. This allows small foreign particles, bacteria, and mucus to be expelled from the lungs.
(3) The alveolar sacs are lined with a substance, surfactant, that makes breathing possible. The alveolar sacs are often said to be inflated like small balloons. This isn’t quite correct. Anybody who has tried to blow up a balloon knows that most effort must be applied at the beginning to inflate the balloon. Once the balloon is partially inflated much less effort is required to get more air in there. If the alveoli were like a balloon, then the first alveolar sac that inflated would have the least resistance to further inflation. It would continue to inflate while surrounding alveolar sacs wouldn’t. Eventually that alveolar sac would burst and no gas exchange would occur. Surfactant makes it such that there is very little resistance to inflation at the beginning.
(4) The nose contains chemoreceptors that allow for the sense of smell.
(5) The larynx contains vocal cords that allow us to vocalize.
Thus, the respiratory system is composed of many interactive parts. It does its job amazingly well. It is easy to see how one might call it an organ system of extreme perfection. However, as we shall shortly see, this view is based on a selective and superficial view of the system. When we look at it closely, it becomes apparent that the best explanation for its existence is naturalistic evolution, not intelligent design.
Before we do that, let’s look at the differences in what we should expect from the two processes. Evolution is a naturalistic process. There is no brain directing the outcome. Furthermore, it is a process that is constrained by history. If species B evolved from species A then anything as complex as an organ system in species B must have had its roots in structures found in species A.
Intelligent design on the other hand postulates a thinking designer. This designer can anticipate problems to be overcome. The designer can design new systems de novo. There is no a priori reason for it to be constrained by history the way naturalistic evolution is.
Because of this difference, we should expect the results to be different if the respiratory system arose from intelligent design than if it arose by naturalistic evolution. Which model does the results best fit? Let’s look more closely.
As good as the human respiratory system is, there are better ones. The human respiratory system is typical of mammalian respiratory systems. There is a problem with mixing fresh air with CO2-laden air from the lungs.
If a normal male fills his lungs as full as he can get them, he will have about 6 liters of air in there. That volume is called Total Lung Capacity. If he then forces all the air out of his lungs that he can possibly force, there will still be a volume of about 1.2 liters. This volume is called the Residual Volume. The difference between the total lung capacity and the residual volume is called the Vital Capacity. It is the most amount of new fresh air he can take into his body, and for a normal male it is about 4.8 liters.
But the vital capacity is marked by extremes – the most air a normal male can possibly take in and the most air a normal male can possibly expel. During regular breathing we do not take in or expel as much as we possibly could. For a normal male during regular breathing there is a change in the lung volume of about ½ liter (500 mL). This is called the Tidal Volume. The difference between the height of the tidal volume and the total lung capacity is called the Inspiratory Reserve Volume and for a normal male is about 3 liters. The difference between the lowest point of the tidal volume and the reserve volume is called the Expiratory Reserve Volume and for a normal male is about 1.2 liters.
Thus, under maximal breathing there will be 4.8 liters of fresh air mixing with 1.2 liters of CO2-laden air. Under normal regular breathing there will be 500 mL of fresh air mixing with 2.4 liters of CO2-laden air. Thus, the air getting to the alveoli is not as oxygenated as is the outside air we breath.
The respiratory system of birds do not have this problem. When birds inhale, the air does not go directly into the lungs. It first goes into air sacs.
When the bird exhales CO2-laden air gets expelled and the fully oxygenated air comes into the lungs from the air sacs without having to mix with the CO2-laden air.
This is an improvement over the mammalian system, so perhaps our respiratory system is not the organ of extreme perfection we first thought it was. This is not what we would expect from an intelligent designer. Given the options, why not give mammals the same efficient respiratory system of birds?
Under naturalistic evolutionary theory this is not surprising. Flight, the characteristic most associated with birds, is a very energy intensive activity. One would expect anything having to do with energy utilization would be under strong selective pressures. The bird respiratory system offers the bird two very big advantages in that regard. (1) The more efficient oxygenation of the blood allows the bird to produce cellular energy through oxidative phosphorylation more efficiently, and (2) the air sacs are often found inside bones. This makes the bones hollow and minimizes the bird’s weight that it would have to carry during flight. It is easy to see how these advantages would be strongly selected for during bird evolution.
However, one may argue that it makes sense from an intelligent design point of view as well. The designer gave birds the more efficient respiratory system because they needed it. Mammals don’t need that efficient of a respiratory system so he didn’t give that to them. And it probably wouldn’t surprise you that creationists make just such an argument.
But what they don’t realize is that explanation is a testable hypothesis … and when we do test the hypothesis it fails. First, not all birds fly. Ratites like ostrich, rheas, and emus are huge birds that do not fly. Their oxygen demands are more mammal-like. Yet they have the efficient bird respiratory system. Second, some mammals DO fly. Bats fly and their oxygen demands are more bird-like. Yet bats have the mammalian respiratory system, not the efficient bird one.
This makes no sense under the intelligent designer scenario. But it is easy to see under the naturalistic evolutionary model. The reason ostrich have the efficient bird respiratory system is because they evolved from bird ancestors who needed it. The reason bats have the less efficient mammalian respiratory system is because they evolved from mammals who did quite fine with the less efficient mammalian system.
But there is an even more significant problem related to the mammalian respiratory system. The larynx is part of the respiratory system. But it is also a part of the digestive system. Both air and food go through it. Sometimes they don’t go the right way. In the United States an estimated 17,000 people per year are treated in emergency rooms for choking. About 80% of these are children 4 years old and younger. Several thousand die.
If we were to spot something in a car that a simple change in design would eliminate 17,000 visits to the emergency room each year we would certainly call that a design flaw. We would demand cars be recalled and the design change implemented. If we are going to be fair, we would have to say that the larynx is a design flaw. It doesn’t have to be that way. Dolphins don’t have one. Their blow hole is completely separate from their digestive tracts.
Looking at the larynx from the perspective of intelligent design, it seems to be an unconsciousably poor design. How do we explain it from a naturalistic evolutionary perspective?
The answer to that goes back to fish. If you ask someone what the main respiratory organ is in fish, he would almost certainly answer, “the gills”. But gills don’t function the same way as lungs. Gills don’t share morphological similarities with lungs. Gills do not develop embryologically the same way as lungs. There are some fish (lungfish) that have both lungs and gills. What this means is that the lungs definitely did not evolve from gills. So where did they come from?
There is a never-ending argument in evolutionary biology concerning that. One hypothesis is that lungs evolved from a structure in fish that shows structural similarities and occupies roughly the same position as does the lungs of lungfish, the swim bladder. Others say, no … it is the other way around, the swim bladder evolved from lungs. My guess is that swim bladders and lungs represent different evolutionary paths from a common structure and neither explicitly evolved from the other.
Fish are classified into 3 groups, jawless fish, sharks and bony fish. Jawless fish first made their appearance about 500 million years ago. They were at one time the dominant sea creatures. Today they are represented by two rather lowly representatives, the hagfish and the lamprey. None of these have swim bladders or lungs.
The bony fish and sharks appear in the fossil record about 450 million years ago. Both groups are well represented in today’s fauna. No shark has a swim bladder or a lung. It is only in the bony fish that swim bladders and lungs developed. The only bony fish that do not have swim bladders are the lungfish. Lungfish have lungs instead. Embryologically both the swim bladder and lungs of fish (as well as reptilian, mammalian and avian lungs) arise from an outpouching of the digestive tract. Their histology is very similar. Thus, swim bladders and lungs appear to be homologous, that is they arose from a common ancestor.
One problem with being a fish is that oxygen is a gas in its natural state. Thus, most oxygen is in the air. Very little of it is in water. In order to extract enough oxygen from the water to support life fish need to pump a great deal of water across their gills. Even then if oxygen levels in the water drop, it isn’t always enough.
Warming the water will lower oxygen levels. Organic pollutants and pH changes can lower oxygen levels. Prolonged ice cover on lakes can cause oxygen levels to drop. It is easy for oxygen levels to drop below that need even to support life for fish.
This is a picture of a fish kill resulting from deoxygenated water.
Under conditions of oxygen stress fish will often come to the surface and take a gulp of air through their mouth. This bolus of air will be very oxygen rich compared to the water. Some of that oxygen will cross into the fish’s blood through its digestive tract. In that way the fish is able to supplement its oxygen intake from the gills.
If the fish wanted to be more buoyant, it could do the same thing. The bolus of air in the digestive tract would cause the fish to float a little higher in the water column. But in either case, the fish takes in air through its mouth.
It is thought that some early bony fish had a pouch in its digestive tract. This would have given it a selective advantage. Air could be stored in the pouch without compromising function of the digestive system. This air could be used to either increase the fish’s buoyancy or supplement its oxygen intake.
Over time one branch of fish developed adaptation that led to the pouch becoming a lung, and another branch led to the pouch becoming swim bladder. But for the purposes of this discussion the important thing is that the lung was derived from the digestive tract. The remnant of that connection in us is the larynx. The reason why several thousand of us die each year from choking is because of that historical constraint of naturalistic evolution imposed upon us over 400 million years ago.
Thus, when we look at lungs closely we find silly design flaws, homologies with other organs system in other organisms, and a distribution of traits that stongly suggest naturalistic evolution. While it is possible that an intelligent designer could have chosen to design things like this, it is not what we would expect. But modern evolutionary theory demands we see things like this since the mechanisms underlying evolution (natural selection, neutral selection, multilevel selection, mutation, etc.) have no foresight. They cannot foresee problems and prevent them, they see only the here and now with respect to an organism’s local environment.
Evolutionary theory even tells us how long the lungs have been evolving … about 400 million years. That is a very long time. Certainly that is long enough for a huge number of traits that confer slight selective advantages to be concentrated in the gene pool. Get enough of those traits and Ouila, you get the evolution of complex structures.
The final point that I would like to end on is addressing the person’s statement, “It's hard for my mind to grasp that this could have happen by accident, …”. It didn’t happen by accident. All complex adaptations are the product of natural selection. Certain traits work better in a particular environment. Organisms possessing that trait will survive better and produce more offspring who have a greater chance of also possessing that trait, than will organisms that don’t have that trait. There is no accident there. It follows naturally. Just as it is no accident that rain falls down and not up. It happens naturally.
Perhaps I should have rephrased the "accidentally" into "naturally", but you get what I was trying to say. And I did get my argument from the Design Argument (and like most arguments, it has it's objections). You could also bring up David Hume's problem of evil theory, and the idea of how evil and pain should never exist in a world with a supreme being watching over it.
I get the objections. I understand my anatomy (although some of the finer details were not discussed in my high school class) and I certainly don't believe that all these processes are fueled only by magic. I know the inner workings. I just question how they got there.
From the natural selection standpoint, I have to say how does it happen? I do believe in evolution, believe it or not, and understand how a animals changed drastically over a huge length of time. The problem I see is this: the animals did not choose to change. They did not think "my lungs are inefficient, I should grow some new ones". My belief is that some outside force enabled the change. Sure, the world isn't perfect. We could always point out a multitude of imperfections in the human body or the workings of the world.
One analogy along these lines is of an architect, who certainly would forsee possible flaws and build something that could work around them. But wouldn't a perfect world be a terrible place to live? It just doesn't seem like it would work to me. Prey animals need to be able to be caught by prey, rather than having a perfect adaption that always allows them to get away. A perfect world seems to me to be the most imperfect. Because there'd be no flaws, there'd also be no food for predators and nothing dieing early and perhaps severe overpopulation of species that in reality don't produce many young.
Ah, you see I'm blathering on and on. I should probably just end it here.
DB's story went something like this:
-Fish sometimes digest oxygen by gulping it. This helps them survive water pollution.
-Ancient fish who gulped efficiently were more likely to survive and reproduce.
-Efficient gulping correlates with lung-like adaptations.
-Lungs develop over many generations of air-gulping fish. Enter the lungfish.
They might think "AAH CANT BREATHE NEED AIR" but it is survival-of-the-fittest which leads to lungs. And hearts, brains, eyes, etc: everything that makes us human can be sensibly explained by evolution. Even conscious thought, it stands to reason, evolved from imagination, which evolved from memory. Each step is a variation of the one before. Each makes you more likely to pass on your genes.
EDIT: ...And, each is genetic (heritability is essential for evolution!). Except conscious thought, which seems to be the imagination of language. Since language is learned, this could not have evolved biologically (social evolution is another story). We evolved a brain capable of complex language and memory-blending, and conscious thought is the result.
What does perfection mean? Evolutionary perfection, we agree, isn't moral perfection. Nonetheless, the cruelty, inefficiency, and naturalistic explainability of evolution suggest the complete absence of any purpose, morally perfect or otherwise.
Excellent blog. It reminds me of the old joke:
God the Engineer
Three men are arguing in a bar. The first says, God must be a mechanical engineer ”just look at the amazing joints and muscles in the human body.
The second says, God is an electrical engineer look at the nervous system and our magnificent brain.
The third says, God has to be a civil engineer who else would run a waste disposal pipeline through a perfectly good recreational area?
Didn't want you to think I ignored this blog...
I read this around when it was put on the front page and made a lengthy comment to it. Unfortunately, that was one of the many times that the page timed out and deleted my response. Frustrated, I decided to avoid commenting altogether. Sorry bout that.
Anyway, without blathering on like I did in that last deleted comment, I'll just say "No hard feelings" (not that you assumed there were any). I'll continue to see both sides of the argument because although I'm one of those semi-religious loop-de-loos, I still am a sort of closet science geek and can't see how anyone doesn't believe in evolution or how dinosaurs existed...etc. You get the idea.
I still really like your blogs. Regarding your newest blog about blog quality on the site, I'll admit that you are definitely one of the few who write A+ quality blogs. Fully researched, well explained, and best of all well written. It's nice to see people who actually PUNCTUATE their blogs all the time. :)
In your argument, you implicitly assumed (you gave evidence for your assumption) that a designer would not use Natural Selection as the mechanism for the diversification of life, because Natural Selection would create species that would be inferior to species that the said designer could have just "poofed" into existence.
In order to refute or justify this, we need to decide what the intentions of the designer are. If it is to create perfectly designed life, then on the basis of the evidence something seems to have slipped up (at least on the purely material level). However, we cannot scientifically know what the designer's intentions are, therefore from the evidence we cannot view your exposition as proof that a designer does not exist.
Interestingly enough, a few months back I found myself in an argument with one of my friends dads. He said that evolution could not have happened, because God was perfect and God would not create something that needed to get better. I'm not representing his argument very well, mainly because I don't remember the specifics. Either way, he basically argued what you are arguing in reverse. God exists thus evolution could not have happened. Anyway, he was not happy when I informed him that I was agnostic on evolution.
Going back to the argument of design. It could never be considered proof for the existence of a designer. Natural Selection seems to explain the diversification of life, but as I understand it there are certain problems with evolutionary thought in some micro-organisms. But with Natural Selection, we no longer need a designer to explain life on this planet, as long as we are comfortable with long odds. (As a caveat, I heard in class that the odds may not be that long, based on limited possibilities. I.E. from a thermodynamics standpoint, certain energy levels in an Einstein solid are far more likely to happen then others. So from an evolutionary standpoint, certain combinations of proteins/DNA are far more likely to happen then others. Correct me please, if protein/DNA is not the right thing.)
However, just because we can describe our universe and its processes, without the need of a designer, does not mean we do not have one.
I was wondering if you could recommend a good, convincing, and understandable book on evolution. One that confronts without misrepresenting anti-evolution arguments head on. I tried to read a book after my conversation with my buddies dad, but I found that it assumed I knew a bunch of biochem, which I dont.
Sorry for the hodge-podge nature of this post. I'm a tired graduate student now, so my focus is not at its best. Anyway, I hope I was able to make myself understandable.
"It is not worth an intelligent man's time to be in the majority. By definition, there are already enough people to do that. "-G.H. Hardy
In your argument, you implicitly assumed (you gave evidence for your assumption) that a designer would not use Natural Selection as the mechanism for the diversification of life, because Natural Selection would create species that would be inferior to species that the said designer could have just "poofed" into existence.
Not quite. The argument from design is an argument for the existence of God. This blog gives some reasons why I do not accept it as valid. What the argument from design says is that living things show evidence of design that COULD NOT HAVE ARISEN without an intelligent designer. In other words, it says that natural processes could not have produced adaptations such as the respiratory system.
This blog is saying that natural processes most certainly can and almost certainly DID produce the respiratory system. This blog is a blog not against the existence of God so much as it is against the validity of the argument from design.
Of course you can argue that God decided to use a natural process that would lead to these types of adaptations. For the purposes of this blog ... fine. But if you do that then you have conceded that the argument from design is not valid. You have conceded that natural processes CAN produce these complex system that have the initial appearance of intelligent design.
In order to refute or justify this, we need to decide what the intentions of the designer are. If it is to create perfectly designed life, then on the basis of the evidence something seems to have slipped up (at least on the purely material level). However, we cannot scientifically know what the designer's intentions are, therefore from the evidence we cannot view your exposition as proof that a designer does not exist.
This is the classical defense against instances of suboptimal design that we see so much of in nature. The idea is that the elegant adaptations are evidence that an intelligent designer did it, but the completely ridiculous ones are not evidence that intelligent designer didn't do it. Because for all we know, that may be exactly how the intelligent designer wanted it done.
Here is why I am not sympathetic to the argument:
Most importantly ... it misses the point of the argument. The point is that these inelegancies, such as having the larynx be part of both the digestive and respiratory tracts, are perfectly explained by naturallistic evolution. The lung evolved from an outpouching of the digestive tract. Therefore, it is historically constrained to share components with the digestive tract. If evolutionary theory is correct, we SHOULD see instances of inelegant design exactly like this.
While an intelligent designer COULD have chosen to make an inelegant design, there is no apparent reason for it. This makes the alternate explanation ... the intelligent designer did it that way for reasons that we cannot fathom. But that is no different than saying "I don't have a clue".
Sorry but when one theory explains a whole host of phenomena very well, and the counter theory boils down to "I don't have a clue"; the theory with the better explanation wins hands down.
Now, like I said in the blog ... some people HAVE tried to explain some of the inelegancies. For instance, they say that the reason birds have the more efficient respiratory system is because of their increased energy needs due to flight. So it makes sense that an intelligent designer would have given them a more efficient respiratory system. That is a testable hypothesis. And it doesn't withstand the test ... flightless birds whose energy requirements fall in line with typical mammals still have the efficient system; flying mammals whose energy requirements fall in line with typical birds do not have the efficient system.
Again, this situation is EXACTLY what we would expect if the design was done by a naturalistic process like natural selection. Ratites like ostrich, emus and rheas have the efficient respiratory system because they evolved from ancestors who had that efficient system. Bats have a typical mammalian respiratory system because they evolved from mammals who had the typical mammalian respiratory system.
Again, the alternate explanation is that the intelligent designer did it that way on purpose for reasons that we cannot fathom. Again that boils down to, "I don't have a clue". Again the evolutionary explantion wins hands down.
There are literally thousands of examples like this ... perhaps hundreds of thousands if we look close enough at nature. At some point the evidence should become so overwhelming that holding the idea that the intelligent designer could have made it that way becomes untenable for any reasonable person.
Interestingly enough, a few months back I found myself in an argument with one of my friends dads. He said that evolution could not have happened, because God was perfect and God would not create something that needed to get better. I'm not representing his argument very well, mainly because I don't remember the specifics. Either way, he basically argued what you are arguing in reverse. God exists thus evolution could not have happened. Anyway, he was not happy when I informed him that I was agnostic on evolution.
Interestingly, when fossils were first discovered THAT argument was used to make the claim that they did not represent the remains of organisms that had lived in the past. For many fossils, the remains could not have come from an organism living today. That would mean that the species would have had to have gone extinct. God was perfect ... he would never make an organism that would die out. Thus, fossils could not represent remains of organisms that had lived in the past.
What were they then? One hypothesis was that they were organisms that Satan had made up and God had prevented from coming up to the surface. That explained why they were found underground.
Another hypothesis was that God had made the world with a spirit to form life spontaneously and that these things were leftover remnants of life that was spontaneously forming. Given the context of the time that it was proposed this is not as ridiculous as it sounds. People believed that complex lifeforms DID arise spontaneously every day. There were even recipes on how to make them. For instance, to make a rat:
(1) Throw some old dirty rags in the corner of a barn.
(2) Wait a couple of weeks
(3) Ouila ... you've got rats.
So fossils would represent the beginnings of some new lifeform that was in the process of erupting.
Perhaps my favorite notion though came just right before Darwin published On the Origin of Species. It was published by Philip Henry Gosse. There had been many people before Darwin to propose that species changed into other species. Just looking at life had given some people the idea. What no one ever did successfully before Darwin was to give a plausible explanation for HOW this occurred. Gosse decided that species only LOOKED like they changed one into another. They really didn't. He came to that conclusion by contemplating the navel.
A common rhetorical question of today is, "If a tree falls in the forest and no one hears it, did it really make a sound?" Back in Gosse's day a common rhetorical question was, "Did Adam really have bellybutton?" Gosse decided Adam did. He reckoned that Adam must have been made as a young adult. The Garden of Eden was made in full bloom. All the animals were made as adults. So God must then have made things with the appearance of age. Thus, God made Adam with the appearance as though he had gone through normal development. In other words, Adam had a bellybutton.
But what this meant for the earth is that God had made the earth with the appearance of age as well. Thus, fossils were there to give the appearance that the earth was old. It really wasn't, it was only 6,000 as the bible said, but since God made things with the appearance of age ... it looked old. So while fossils may look like they are the remains of extinct organisms, God never actually made these failed organisms, they are there only because of the need for the appearance of age. Gosse called his theory "Omphalos" which is Greek for "bellybutton".
Going back to the argument of design. It could never be considered proof for the existence of a designer. Natural Selection seems to explain the diversification of life, but as I understand it there are certain problems with evolutionary thought in some micro-organisms. But with Natural Selection, we no longer need a designer to explain life on this planet, as long as we are comfortable with long odds. (As a caveat, I heard in class that the odds may not be that long, based on limited possibilities. I.E. from a thermodynamics standpoint, certain energy levels in an Einstein solid are far more likely to happen then others. So from an evolutionary standpoint, certain combinations of proteins/DNA are far more likely to happen then others. Correct me please, if protein/DNA is not the right thing.)
You seem to be conflating two arguments used by evolution deniers, the second law of thermodynamics and the probability argument.
The second law of thermodynamics (2LoT) is a terrible argument against evolution. Evolution deniers never get it right, and unfortunately evolution defenders don't understand it particularly well either. With respect to the origin of life, what the 2LoT mandates is that for each reaction necessary for the formation of life the total amount of usable energy after the reaction has taken place must be equal to or less than the total amount of usable energy before the reaction takes place. There are an abundant number of scenarios in which this is possible. It simply isn't a problem for the origin of life.
The probability argument is a bit different. It goes something like this ... If we generalize from living things that we see today, organisms must possess at a minimum DNA and proteins in order to survive. The simplest organisms capable of reproducing nowadays is still so complex that the likelihood of random processes to producing it are on the order of the likelihood of a tornado going through a junkyard and producing a fully functional Boeing 747. And that could have never happened.
The problem with it is that NO ONE ever said (or even postulated) that a fully functional cell sprang up out of nowhere. What is believed is that components of life sprang up by natural processes. They believe that these components eventually became involved in reactions that produced a variety of products but eventually one of the products was a regeneration of the original product. This is called a hypercycle. In living organisms today the prototypical hyper cycle is the Kreb cycle
Hypercycles can be initiated in testtubes quite easily. Just dump in a variety of chemicals and eventually you are going to get one to going. The importance of hypercycles are that they are in essence replicators. Any replicator is subject to natural selection. And once you have natural selection you no longer have a random process.
Furthermore, we know that amino acids (which are the building blocks of proteins) are easily produced under a number of conditions that could have been present on the young earth. We also know that there are thousands upon thousands of potential amino acids, but life tends to use the ones most easily produced by abiotically. So the probability that is very high that those amino acids would be available in a prebiotic soup.
The same goes for the nucleotides that make up RNA and DNA. So yes, there is a skewed probability that life arising naturally would use the amino acids and nucleotides we see today.
However, just because we can describe our universe and its processes, without the need of a designer, does not mean we do not have one.
But it does eliminate the need for one.
I was wondering if you could recommend a good, convincing, and understandable book on evolution. One that confronts without misrepresenting anti-evolution arguments head on. I tried to read a book after my conversation with my buddies dad, but I found that it assumed I knew a bunch of biochem, which I dont.
LOL ... the debate is so contentious that no matter what book is written it is going to be accused of misrepresentation. For instance, any book that alludes to the intelligent designer as God, will be accused of misrepresentation. The intelligent designer COULD be some advanced space aliens or even some time-travelling biologists. (But Raelians who view the Intelligent Designer as space aliens are generally agreed by both sides to be wackaloons)
Another example: Mainstream scientists believe that ID proponent, Michael Behe's idea of irreducible complexity being the sin qua non of intelligent design has been absolutely and devastatingly debunked. His prime example was the bacterial flagellum. Biologists have shown that virtually all the proteins involved in the flagellum have sequence homologies to other proteins that do simpler functions. They say that this indicates that all those proteins developed from genes that were copied and eventually mutated to form the genes that code for the proteins in the flagellum.
Behe rejects that of course. He says that unless evolutionary theory can come up with a point-by-point list of mutations, the selection pressures that made them favored by natural selection, how the genes come to be expressed together, etc. then his IC example still stands. This demand is unreasonable ... that level of detail is unobtainable for anything.
So no matter what book you look at, it is likely going to be accused of misrepresentation. Having said that here is a list of books that I think are very good:
(1) Richard Dawkins The Greatest Show on Earth
Dawkins is an excellent science popularizer. He writes well and has a nack of explaining complex things in non-technical terms. He is however a strident atheist (even more so than I am) and that will come across in places.
(2) Jerry Coyne Why Evolution is True
Coyne is (like Dawson) an evolutionary biologist and in this book he gives a very convincing case of the evidence. He too is an atheist, however.
(3) Kenneth R. Miller Finding Darwin's God
Miller is a Catholic so you may find his writings more to your liking. He is an ardent defender of modern evolutionary theory (arguably the most effective -- especially in court cases). He diametrically opposes Michael Behe. I really enjoyed the first part of this book -- the part that dealt with science. I wasn't thrilled with the last part -- the part that deals with his religious beliefs, but perhaps you wouldn't.
It was written in 1996 if I recall correctly, so it is getting to be a bit dated.
(4) Francis Collins The Language of God
Collins is an evangelical Christian, so you may like his writings the best. I found the science dealing with DNA very good. I found his religious exegesis and his dealings with "moral law" sophomoric and insulting to one's intelligence.
(5) Neil Shubin Your Inner Fish
A truly great book. It deals with only one aspect of evolutionary theory, but it prevents a very compelling case for macroevolution --- from fish to humans. I think it would be OK for a layman.
(6) Richard Dawkins Ancestor's Tale
Discusses our evolutionary lineage all the way back to bacteria. Does so in a style inspired by Chaucer's Canterbury Tales. I don't remember any of Dawkin's atheism shining through this one.
(7) Carl Zimmer Smithsonian Intimate Guide to Human Origins
Zimmer is a science journalist. This is a good introduction to the evidence for human evolution. Not too detailed.
(8) Carl Zimmer A Tangle Bank
Here Zimmer has written a textbook. It gives a good overview of evolutionary theory and unlike other textbooks (specifically by Douglas Futuyma) I don't think it is too technical for laymen.
Sorry for the hodge-podge nature of this post. I'm a tired graduate student now, so my focus is not at its best. Anyway, I hope I was able to make myself understandable.
No probs ...
Cheers,
DB
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If a million people say a foolish thing, it is still a foolish thing. - Anatole France
Not quite. The argument from design is an argument for the existence of God. This blog gives some reasons why I do not accept it as valid. What the argument from design says is that living things show evidence of design that COULD NOT HAVE ARISEN without an intelligent designer. In other words, it says that natural processes could not have produced adaptations such as the respiratory system.
This blog is saying that natural processes most certainly can and almost certainly DID produce the respiratory system. This blog is a blog not against the existence of God so much as it is against the validity of the argument from design.
Of course you can argue that God decided to use a natural process that would lead to these types of adaptations. For the purposes of this blog ... fine. But if you do that then you have conceded that the argument from design is not valid. You have conceded that natural processes CAN produce these complex system that have the initial appearance of intelligent design.
I agree with you that since we can explain explain life through natural processes that a designer is not necessary, and that the argument form design does not hold from a position of pure logic.
However, there are also two other ways to look at the design argument. One, is purely aesthetic. The universe is often thought of as a beautiful/artistic place. This leads to the idea of a Divine Artist. This has numerous problems, but when people are attached to the teleological argument, I think part of the reason is this.
The other way to look at the design argument is from a probabilistic point of view. You dealt with that here:
The probability argument is a bit different. It goes something like this ... If we generalize from living things that we see today, organisms must possess at a minimum DNA and proteins in order to survive. The simplest organisms capable of reproducing nowadays is still so complex that the likelihood of random processes to producing it are on the order of the likelihood of a tornado going through a junkyard and producing a fully functional Boeing 747. And that could have never happened.
The problem with it is that NO ONE ever said (or even postulated) that a fully functional cell sprang up out of nowhere. What is believed is that components of life sprang up by natural processes. They believe that these components eventually became involved in reactions that produced a variety of products but eventually one of the products was a regeneration of the original product. This is called a hypercycle. In living organisms today the prototypical hyper cycle is the Kreb cycle
Hypercycles can be initiated in testtubes quite easily. Just dump in a variety of chemicals and eventually you are going to get one to going. The importance of hypercycles are that they are in essence replicators. Any replicator is subject to natural selection. And once you have natural selection you no longer have a random process.
Furthermore, we know that amino acids (which are the building blocks of proteins) are easily produced under a number of conditions that could have been present on the young earth. We also know that there are thousands upon thousands of potential amino acids, but life tends to use the ones most easily produced by abiotically. So the probability that is very high that those amino acids would be available in a prebiotic soup.
The same goes for the nucleotides that make up RNA and DNA. So yes, there is a skewed probability that life arising naturally would use the amino acids and nucleotides we see today.
This was essentially my point in my comment, I just did not know the correct biological terms. In an Einstein solid there are certain energy combinations that the solid could have, Some of these are far more likely then others.
I was saying that it was certainly possible that protiens forming in complex chains could be a high probability occurrence just based on physical laws. We do not know the probability of DNA forming, because it could be that DNA structures are a likely way for proteins to combine, just like water is a likely way for Hydrogen and Oxygen to come together.
Therefore, the design argument fails from a probabilistic standpoint as well, if the evolutionary events are likely, which they very well could be.
The one evolutionary event (from my limited knowledge) that I would say is very unlikely is the ascent of man. Without the meteor hitting the earth, and destroying the dinosaurs we would never have come into existence. A meteor destroying life on earth is 1 in a billion. This statistic i pulled from one of Stephen Jay Gould's books. I read it a while ago so it could be 1 in a million. Either way, it is a very low probabilistic event. However, I would still not consider this to be evidence for a designer, because in order to construe it as such you would need to assume your conclusion.
In my opinion the design argument fails, unless we could measure/compute the probability of carbon based life forms coming into existence, and find this probability to be small. Then i would say the design argument becomes a greater force to be reckoned with.
The second law of thermodynamics (2LoT) is a terrible argument against evolution. Evolution deniers never get it right, and unfortunately evolution defenders don't understand it particularly well either. With respect to the origin of life, what the 2LoT mandates is that for each reaction necessary for the formation of life the total amount of usable energy after the reaction has taken place must be equal to or less than the total amount of usable energy before the reaction takes place. There are an abundant number of scenarios in which this is possible. It simply isn't a problem for the origin of life.
I agree with you, I'm taking thermodynamics right now. I brought up thermo as a segway into Einstein solids.
Thanks for the book list. I check out a couple over break. By the way, I'm not an evangelical, and atheists don't bother me.
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"It is not worth an intelligent man's time to be in the majority. By definition, there are already enough people to do that. "-G.H. Hardy