Darwin's Dangerous Idea (12 page)

"the marvelous complexity of forces which appear to control matter, if not that it was good." Darwin had discovered a way to eliminate this retail actually to constitute it, are and must be mind-products" (Gould 1985, p.

application of Intelligent Quality Control; natural selection would take care 397). When, later in his life, Wallace converted to spiritualism and exempted of that without further intervention from God. (The seventeenth-century human consciousness altogether from the iron rule of philosopher Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz had defended a similar hands-off vision of God the Creator.) As Henry Ward Beecher put it, "Design by wholesale is grander than design by retail" (Rachels 1991, p. 99). Asa Gray, captivated by Darwin's new idea but trying to reconcile it with as much of "is traditional religious creed as possible, came up with this marriage of 1. This fascinating and even excruciating story has been well told many times, but still the convenience: God
intended
the "stream of variations" and
foresaw
just how controversies rage. Why did Darwin delay publication in the first place? Was his treatment of Wallace generous or monstrously unfair? The unsettled relations between Dar-the laws of nature He had laid down would prune this stream over the eons.

win and Wallace are not just a matter of Darwin's uneasy conscience about how he As John Dewey later aptly remarked, invoking yet another mercantile met-handled Wallace's innocent claim-jumping correspondence; as we see here, the two were aphor, "Gray held to what may be called design on the installment plan"

also separated by vast differences in insight and attitude about the idea they both dis-

(Dewey 1910, p. 12).

covered. For particularly good accounts, see Desmond and Moore 1991; Richards 1987, pp. 159-61.

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It is not unusual to find such metaphors, redolent of capitalism, in evo-Second Law, the universe is unwinding out of a more ordered state into the lutionary explanations. Examples are often gleefully recounted by those ultimately disordered state known as the heat death of the universe.2

critics and interpreters of Darwin who see this language as revealing—or What, then, are living things? They are things that defy this crumbling into should we say betraying—the social and political environment in which dust, at least for a while, by not being isolated—by taking in from their Darwin developed his ideas, thereby ( somehow ) discrediting their claim to environment the wherewithal to keep life and limb together. The psychol-scientific objectivity. It is certainly true that Darwin, being an ordinary ogist Richard Gregory summarizes the idea crisply:

mortal, was the inheritor of a huge manifold of concepts, modes of expres-Time's arrow given by Entropy—the loss of organization, or loss of tem-sion, attitudes, biases, and visions that went with his station in life (as a perature differences—is statistical and it is subject to local small-scale Victorian Englishman might put it), but it is also true that the economic reversals. Most striking: life is a systematic reversal of Entropy, and intel-metaphors that come so naturally to mind when one is thinking about ligence creates structures and energy differences against the supposed evolution get their power from one of the deepest features of Darwin's gradual 'death' through Entropy of the physical Universe. [Gregory 1981, discovery.

p. 136.]

Gregory goes on to credit Darwin with the fundamental enabling idea: "It 3. THE PRINCIPLE OF THE ACCUMULATION OF DESIGN

is the measure of the concept of Natural Selection that increases in the complexity and order of organisms in biological time can now be under-The key to understanding Darwin's contribution is
granting
the premise of stood." Not just individual organisms, but the whole process of evolution that the Argument from Design. What conclusion ought one to draw if one found creates them, thus can be seen as fundamental physical phenomena running a watch lying on the heath in the wilderness? As Paley ( and Hume's Clean-contrary to the larger trend of cosmic time, a feature captured by William thes before him ) insisted, a watch exhibits a tremendous amount of
work
Calvin in one of the meanings of the title of his classic exploration of the
done.
Watches and other designed objects don't just happen; they have to be relationship between evolution and cosmology,
The River That Flows Uphill:
the product of what modern industry calls "R and D"—research and
A Journey from the Big Bang to the Big Brain
(1986).

development—and R and D is costly, in both time and energy. Before DarA
designed
thing, then, is either a living thing or a part of a living thing, or win, the only model we had of a process by which this sort of R-and-D work the artifact of a living thing, organized in any case in aid of this battle against could be done was an Intelligent Artificer. What Darwin saw was that in disorder. It is not impossible to oppose the trend of the Second Law, but it is principle the same work could be done by a different sort of process that costly. Consider iron. Iron is a very useful element, essential for our bodily
distributed
that work over huge amounts of time, by thriftily conserving the health, and also valuable as the major component of steel, that wonderful design work that had been accomplished at each stage, so that it didn't have building material. Our planet used to have vast reserves of iron ore, but they to be done over again. In other words, Darwin had hit upon what we might are gradually being depleted. Does this mean that the Earth is running out of call the Principle of Accumulation of Design. Things in the world (such as iron? Hardly. With the trivial exception of a few tons that have recently been watches and organisms and who knows what else) may be seen as products launched out of Earth's effective gravitational field in the form of space-embodying a certain amount of Design, and one way or another, that Design probe components, there is just as much iron on the planet today as there had to have been created by a process of R and D. Utter undesignedness—

ever was. The trouble is that more and more of it is scattered about in the pure chaos in the old-fashioned sense—was the null or starting point.

form of rust (molecules of iron oxide), and other low-grade, low-A more recent idea about the difference—and tight relation—between concentration materials. In principle, it could all be recovered, but that would Design and Order will help clarify the picture. This is the proposal, first take enormous amounts of energy, craftily focused on the particular project popularized by the physicist Erwin Schrodinger (1967), that Life can be of extracting and reconcentrating the iron.

defined in terms of the Second Law of Thermodynamics. In physics, order or It is the organization of just such sophisticated processes that constitutes organization can be measured in terms
of heat differences
between regions of space time;
entropy
is simply disorder, the opposite of order, and according to the Second Law, the entropy of any isolated system increases with time. In other words, things run down, inevitably. According to the 2. And where did the initial order come from? The best discussion I have encountered of

"is good question is "Cosmology and the Arrow of Time," ch. 7 of Penrose 1989.

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the hallmark of life. Gregory dramatizes this with an unforgettable example.

noted: If God created and designed all these wonderful things, who created A standard textbook expression of the directionality imposed by the Second God? Supergod? And who created Supergod? Superdupergod? Or did God Law of Thermodynamics is the claim that you can't unscramble an egg. Well, create Himself? Was it hard work? Did it take time? Don't ask! Well, then, we not that you absolutely can't, but that it would be an extremely costly, may ask instead whether this bland embrace of mystery is any improvement sophisticated task, uphill all the way against the Second Law. Now consider: over just denying the principle that intelligence (or design) must spring from how expensive would it be to make a device that would take scrambled eggs Intelligence. Darwin offered an explanatory path that actually honored as input and deliver unscrambled eggs as output? There is one ready solution: Paley's insight: real work went into designing this watch, and work isn't free.

put a live hen in the box! Feed it scrambled eggs, and it will be able to make How much design does a thing exhibit? No one has yet offered a system of eggs for you—for a while. Hens don't normally strike us as near-design quantification that meets all our needs. Theoretical work that bears on miraculously sophisticated entities, but here is one thing a hen can do, thanks this interesting question is under way in several disciplines,3 and in chapter 6

to the Design that has organized it, that is still way beyond the reach of the we will consider a natural metric that provides a neat solution to special devices created by human engineers.

cases—but in the meantime we have a powerful intuitive sense of different

The more Design a thing exhibits, the more R-and-D work had to have amounts of design. Automobiles contain more design than bicycles, sharks occurred to produce it. Like any good revolutionary, Darwin exploits as contain more design than amoebas, and even a short poem contains more much as possible of the old system: the vertical dimension of the Cosmic design than a "Keep Off the Grass" sign. (I can hear the skeptical reader Pyramid is retained, and becomes the measure of how much Design has gone saying, "Whoa! Slow down! Is this supposed to be uncon-troversial?" Not by into the items at that level. In Darwin's scheme, as in the traditional Pyramid, a long shot. In due course I will attempt to justify these claims, but for the Minds do end up near the top, among the most designed of entities (in part time being I want to draw attention to, and build on, some familiar—but because they are the self-redesigning things, as we shall see in chapter 13).

admittedly unreliable—intuitions.)

But this means that they are among the most advanced
ejfects
(to date) of the Patent law, including the law of copyright, is a repository of our practical creative process, not—as in the old version—its cause or source. Their grasp of the question. How much novelty of design counts as enough to products in turn—the human artifacts that were our initial model—must justify a patent? How much can one borrow from the intellectual products of count as more designed still. This may seem counterintuitive at first. A Keats others without recompense or acknowledgment? These are slippery slopes on ode may seem to have some claim to having a grander R and D pedigree than which we have had to construct some rather arbitrary terraces, codifying a nightingale—at least it might seem so to a poet ignorant of biology—but what otherwise would be a matter of interminable dispute. The burden of what about a paper clip? Surely a paper clip is a trivial product of design proof in these disputes is fixed by our intuitive sense of how much design is compared with any living thing, however rudimentary. In one obvious sense, too much design to be mere coincidence. Our intuitions here
are very strong yes, but reflect for a moment. Put yourself in Paley's shoes, but walking and, I promise to show, sound. Suppose an author is accused of plagiarism, along the apparently deserted beach on an alien planet. Which discovery and the evidence is, say, a single paragraph that is almost identical to a would excite you the most: a clam or a clam-rake? Before the planet could paragraph in the putative source. Might this be just a coincidence? It depends make a clam-rake, it would have to make a clam-rake-maker, and that is a crucially on how mundane and formulaic the paragraph is, but most more designed thing by far than a clam.

paragraph-length passages of text are "special" enough (in ways we will soon Only a theory with the logical shape of Darwin's could
explain
how explore) to make independent creation highly unlikely. No reasonable jury designed things came to exist, because any other sort of explanation would be would require the prosecutor in a plagiarism case to demonstrate exactly the either a vicious circle or an infinite regress ( Dennett 1975 ). The old way, causal pathway by which the alleged copying took place. The defendant Locke's Mind-first way, endorsed the principle that it takes an Intelligence to would clearly have the burden of establishing that his work was, remarkably, make an intelligence. This idea must have always seemed self-evident to our an independent work rather than a copying of work already done.

ancestors, the artifact-makers, going back to
Homo habilis,
the "handy" man, A similar burden of proof falls on the defendant in an industrial-espionage from whom
Homo sapiens,
the "knowing" man, descended. Nobody ever saw a spear fashion a hunter out of raw materials. Children chant, "It takes one to know one," but an even more persuasive slogan would seem to be "It takes a 3. For accessible overviews of some of the ideas, see Pagels 1988, Stewart and Golubitsky greater one to make a lesser one." Any view inspired by this slogan 1992, and Langton et al. 1992.

immediately faces an embarrassing question, however, as Hume had 72 UNIVERSAL ACID

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case: the interior of the defendant's new line of widgets looks suspiciously hence has value at least in the sense that it is something that might be similar in design to that of the plaintiff's line of widgets—is this an innocent conserved (and then stolen or sold), finds robust expression in economic case of convergent evolution of design? Really the only way to prove your terms. Had Darwin not had the benefit of being born into a mercantile world innocence in such a case is to show clear evidence of actually having done that had already created its Adam Smith and its Thomas Malthus, he would the necessary R-and-D work (old blueprints, rough drafts, early models and not have been in position to find ready-made pieces he could put together meckups, memos about the problems encountered, etc.). In the absence of into a new, value-added product. (You see, the idea applies to itself very such evidence, but also in the absence of any physical evidence of your nicely.) The various sources of the Design that went into Darwin's grand idea espionage activities, you would be convicted—and you'd deserve to be!