The Greatest Show On Earth by Richard Dawkins: CHAPTER 3 'The Primrose Path to Macro-Evolution'
A seduction of the mind
“we are humans accustomed to making choices that are deliberate and planned. Are there other animals that do the same thing as human breeders, perhaps without deliberation or intention but with similar results? Yes, and they carry this book’s soften-up program steadily forward” p45
We begin this chapter with more softening-up of our minds in preparation for the presentation of his evidence, and in his own words, this chapter “embarks on a step-by-step seduction of the mind”
RD starts by telling us how “The flower of the rose…owed its very existence to millions of years of very similar sculpting by insect eyes and noses…”
There is though a nice little admission in this chapter, which I suspect is a little remark which is meant to be amusing, and a reply to some of the criticism of his last book, TGD.
Speaking of particular oil which was not banned during lent, he quips, “I – untutored in the profundities of theology – shall not presume to fathom…” the reason for this.
I suspect he said this was said with his tongue firmly in his cheek.
He goes on to tell us that “sunflowers…owed their very existence to selective breeding by insects. The same is true of most flowers…Not that all the work was done by insects-for some flowers…the initial selective breeding were hummingbirds, bats, even frogs-but the principle is the same.” P47
This chapter is filled with many wonderful examples of various creatures ‘assisting’ in the development of other creatures, from flowers to fish. This is RD answer to the ‘intelligent design’ of man’s artificial selection- the natural selection by means of various creatures is his ‘unintelligent design theory’.
As I say, it is wonderful to read of the beautiful examples he brings to our attention including how “Many flowers guide bees in to land by little runway markings, painted on the flower in ultraviolet pigments which the human eye cannot see.”
Now in my view this is a particularly nice touch of the ‘unintelligent designer’ of ‘random mutations’. How these random mutations were able to know how the insects saw them and was able to ‘select’ this type of ‘mutation’ over time to build up this nice runway is not fully explained, or understood, I suspect. There is no evidence to support this hypothesis; apart from the fact that, it is there, so it must have happened some way.
“Hummingbirds and sunbirds are not particularly closely related by the way. They look and behave alike each other because they have converged upon the same way of life.” P51
This is one of the interesting things about ‘evolution’. If things are different but ‘thought to be related’ this is ‘evidence’ of evolution i.e. the hippo and the whale are ‘thought to be related’ by use of DNA. However, if things are not ‘thought‘to be closely related, but they look very alike, then this is ‘evidence’ of ‘convergent evolution’. This is true of the many creatures which arise in completely different continents. Now, I guess that this is a classic case of being able to ‘have your cake, and eat it’, as no matter how things ‘develop’ you can claim they just ‘evolved’ that way. This is taken up again, in another chapter, so we will come back to it.
We are also told an interesting tale about a crab that seems to have a ‘face’ on its shell.
http://www.pollsb.com/polls/p13022-heike_crab_seems_samurai_face_back_explanation
This is explained by “the human brain is demonstrably eager to see faces in random patterns…”
We are then given some examples of “a vast list of animals that gain protection because they look lie something else: inedible…or something positively nasty like a snake…” and by reference to these many examples RD tells us that what:
“We are homing in on here is true natural selection and we are reaching the end of the progressive seduction that is in this chapter.” P61
Having read all of his examples, I can see his reasoning, but I do have some queries about it. I don’t think that his explanation does all that he claims that it does. Throughout this chapter we have been shown how ‘evolution by natural selection’ has shaped and molded things, and that insects, birds and plants have ‘evolved’ together, helping each other along the way. The means, by which selection is said to have worked, is by allowing ‘mutations’ to be selected which are beneficial to the organisms. These ‘mutations’ are said to be ‘random’. It seems to me, to be a little strange, how, for instance a plant, can remain virtually identical in every other way, yet, only has ‘mutations’, ‘randomly’ building up on one part of the plant, while leaving the rest of the plant untouched by any ‘mutations’, even those that are thought to be only ‘neutral mutations’. How can ‘random mutations’ modify a particular feature of a plant that it ends up attracting only one particular sex, of a particular SPECIES of bee, while the rest of the plant is left virtually unchanged? How do ‘random mutations’, build up, to form a resemblance to rotting meat, or a snake head? This sort of modification does not seem to be very ‘random’ to me, but there appears to be a direction, and they appear to have a goal.
“There are orchid that resemble female bees (or wasps or flies) well enough to fool males into attempting to copulate with them. To the extent that such mimics resemble females of one particular insect species, to that extent will males of those species serve as magic bullets, going from flower to flower of just one orchid species.” (Emphasis added) P77
This behaviour could equally be explained by the hypothesis that they were somehow ‘designed’ to co-exist together, but this can not be allowed for obvious reasons. RD explains that all these things came about purely by ‘random mutations’ and natural selection. I find this a little far fetched, perhaps his ‘seduction of the mind’ has not been as successful on me, and that I may need some additional softening-up. The process of an ‘intelligence’ designing these things seems to be just as ‘plausible’ as ‘random mutations’ crafting these organisms.
Obviously, his explanation is a little different from mine.
“Without any kind of choosing agent those individuals that are ‘chosen’ by the fact that they happen to possess superior equipment to survive are the most likely to reproduce, and therefore to pass on the genes for possessing superior equipment. Therefore every gene pool, in every species, tends to become filled with genes for making superior equipment for survival and reproduction.” P63
Though, I can see why this ‘seduction of the mind’ is so persuasive, as it sounds very plausible, this book is not supposed to be about ‘plausible’ explanations, that are ‘seductive’, but rather it is supposed to be about ‘evidence’ that shows that this plausible explanation is the way it ACTUALLY happened. He takes some observations of things we can see in the present, and extrapolates how they MAY have happened- he provides no ‘evidence’ to show it has happened the way he says it did. He does an excellent job of giving us well written explanations, of how things may have happened, but this is not ‘scientific evidence’.
It is an evolutionary view point, but he has not presented us with any ‘fossil evidence’ or the like to show that it is ‘historically accurate.
“Artificial selection is not just an analogy for natural selection. Artificial selection constitutes a true experimental- as opposed to observational test of the hypothesis that selection causes evolutionary change.” P66
“The ultimate test of a ‘scientific hypothesis is experiment…Experimental inference is of enormous importance, because without it you can never be sure that a correlation you observe has any casual significance.” P66
At last! Finally we are, at least briefly, going to leave the world of the ‘imagination’ and get to some experimental results.
He now quotes some results from experiments with oil content in maize, and tooth decay in rats. He shows us a few graphs from which he acknowledges that though there are trends and variability in them, there are also natural limits and boundaries to the variations studied.
This is actually where the problems with evolutionists and creationists begin.
Creationists do not have any problem with natural selection. RD acknowledges in chapter 2 that other scientists that were creationists had written about natural selection before Darwin. Creationists believe that God created all organisms with a range of variability, which is demonstrated by the fact that though there are billions of people presently on the Earth, and billions have lived before, as far as we can tell, no 2 are the same, excluding ‘identical’ siblings, and even these are different, they are not 100% identical. I doubt that even RD would say that some people living, are of a ‘different species’ from the rest of humanity, even though he may be tempted to think that some (those that agree with him) are more highly ‘evolved’ than others.
Evolutionists seem to believe that you can take a ‘variation’ and extrapolate it indefinitely, and thereby ‘evolve’ into a different species. Creationists accept that there are vast ‘variability’ built into each organism, but that these variations have limit and boundaries which cannot be crossed.
“The lesson applies to all living creatures. We can expect bodies to be well equipped to survive, but this does not mean they should be perfect with respect to any one dimension.” P70
In this passage, which I agree with, RD answers a question he poses in another chapter, so I will leave my response to then. He is telling us that there are “trade-offs” with every aspect of an organisms make up. All things have a “price tag”, for instance energy drain etc.
There is an interesting discussion about, ‘flight distance’, how close an animal will approach another. This is illustrated with relation to the ‘domestication’ of dogs from wolves.
There is mention of “a widespread phenomenon called ‘pleiotropy’ whereby genes have more than one effect, seemingly unconnected. The stress being on the word ‘seemingly’.”
There are some more nice illustrations of ‘symbiotic relationship’ of flowers and wasps which are also apparently shown in the Christmas Lecture for Children – The Ultraviolet Garden. http://richarddawkins.net/growingupintheuniverse
“The intimate relationship between flowers and their pollinators is a lovely example of what is called co-evolution- evolution together. Co-evolution often occurs between organisms that have something to gain from each other…” p80
Of course in the ‘evolutionary view’ there has to be some naturalistic way of explaining this, as it would not be acceptable to suggest they were ‘designed’ to exist together. Therefore it is necessary to have unintelligent ‘random mutations’ working solely on one aspect of an organism, so that it can ‘select’ a particular ‘SPECIES’ of insect to pollinate it.
So we come to the conclusion of this chapter, having been given a softening- up program which has been given as a “seduction of the mind”.
We have been shown how plants, birds, fish and of course dogs have changed over time,- a concept that almost everyone, including the creationists. We end the chapter with a hint of what he is going to discuss in the next chapter, how long has this process all taken?
“How many millennia do we have available to us in accounting for the whole history of life...The answer is that life began not just centuries ago. The measured age of our planet is about 4.6 billion years or about 46 million centuries.”
So, in the view of the author there has been plenty of time for his’ journey of imagination’, to have taken place, so it is not only plausible, but possible.
“it would do just as well to think about the difference between any one breed of dog and any other…Bear this order of evolutionary change, and then EXTRAPOLATE backwards TWENTY THOUSAND times as far into the past. It becomes rather easy to accept that evolution could accomplish the amount of change that it took to transform a fish into a human.”p82 (emphasis added)
Once again, RD has made it easy for us to IMAGINE and accept evolution- it only requires us to take some things, which we observe in the present, and then extrapolate these things back 20,000 times to reach his point of view.