The Blind Watch Maker - Book

More than a decade ago, a colleague of mine gave me a hard copy containing an argument that has for more than two centuries been the bulwark of Creationism or Intelligent Design. I unfortunately do not have that paper, but I will try to recall the substance of it from memory. The argument goes somewhat as follows:

A man was walking along the beach and came across this rock. As he was looking at it it was hit by a bolt of lightning which melted the rock. Now a part of it formed a round concave metal disc, the inside face had inscription which looked liked number 1 through 12 spaced evenly. Other pieces of molten metal formed into various shapes, such as Click Spring, Winding Wheel, Stud, Fourth Wheel etc. One part of the rock was made of quartz like material that resulted in a round transparent piece that somehow fitted exactly on top of the original round metal. All these pieces then serendipitously fell in such a manner that in the end it looked like a watch. While this was happening a cow happened to fall near the rock and piece of its skin tore off and shaped itself like the strap and attached itself to the watch. The man then waited for the watch to cool and when he wound the watch, lo behold it worked as any watch would!!

There are various version of this story and various other variants too (imagine an empty Boeing factory, a tornado rips through it and when it leaves, instead of mayhem, a fully finished functional 747 is ready!!) All such arguments can be summed up like this: a watch or an airplane or any other such human artifact show design, which means there was a designer.

The watch analogy is attributed to an 18th century philosopher William Paley. It may be interesting to note that Charles Darwin was deeply affected by his views and yet went on to propound the Theory of Evolution. Why are we talking about William Paley and his famous analogy? Well it, not surprisingly, leads to another perennial favorite of mine (and yes I have read this book many times too, in fact let us assume I have read all the books I recommend many times) which is

The Blind Watch Maker by Richard Dawkins

Dawkins is, in my opinion, one of the most influential scientist of the last few decades. He is an even better writer which can be seen by the popularity of his books starting with his seminal book The Selfish Gene (which I will surely inflict on you in the future).

Coming back to the book, the central thesis of this book is simply this: Evolution is a mindless algorithmic process that over millions and billions of years creates complicated structures that give the appearance of purposeful design. Yes evolution is a watch maker but astonishingly, it is not trying to make a watch, in fact it is not even trying to make anything!! It has no foresight, in fact he has no sight. It is the Blind Watch Maker. Other times, it starts out on the path of making a watch and ends up making a microwave oven instead!!

Dawkins starts with the eye. The eye, even a child can tell, shows amazing engineering. It can detect shades of brightness, colors, shapes. On the contrary Dawkins shows how the human eye is a hack, a biological hack.

Any engineer would naturally assume that the photocells would point towards the light, with their wires leading backwards towards the brain. He would laugh at any suggestion that the photocells might point away from the light, with their wires departing on the side nearest the light. Yet this is exactly what happens in all vertebrate retinas. Each photocell is, in effect, wired in backwards, with its wire sticking out on the side nearest the light. The wire has to travel over the surface of the retina, to a point where it dives through a hole in the retina (the so-called ‘blind spot’) to join the optic nerve. This means that the light, instead of being granted an unrestricted passage to the photocells, has to pass through a forest of connecting wires, presumably suffering at least some attenuation and distortion (actually probably not much but, still, it is the principle of the thing that would offend any tidy-minded engineer!). I don’t know the exact explanation for this strange state of affairs. The relevant period of evolution is so long ago.

If we model the world as having optimal solutions for various engineering problems, with the optimal solution representing a global maxima, the problem is, evolution never looks for global maximas. All an organism is trying to do is get that immediate advantage that helps it have enough babies before it dies. It has no time for global maximas, it needs merely a small advantage that will help it replicate more than its siblings and cousins (contrary to popular myth, a wildebeest's competitor is not a Lion it is in fact another wildebeest). But we all know what happens when we choose that small change, we are stuck in a sub-optimal solution and once a step in a particular direction is taken that gives its owner an advantage, he is propelled in a path which may preclude taking an alternate path. To go back means leaving a local maxima, which leads to creatures which are poorer in design than the current ones!! So at some point the eyes of ancestor of all vetebrates took a turn which led us to this eye of ours with all its limitations.

There are several other examples taken up in the book. The author copies Paley's style in describing amazing number of engineering problems that nature has solved. He describes echolocation (how bats naviage in the dark using sonar). In fact he takes the engineering problem of sonar and describes the problem in detail and explains how bats solve the same problem.

Bottom line Intelligent Design and Creationism is psuedo-science and Darwin's Theory of Evolution is the only one capable of explaining life in all its variety as we see it today.

Please read this book.

Other references
Darwin and Paley Meet the Invisible Hand, by Stephen J Gould
Inverted Human Eye a Poor Design? and its rebuttal
Evolutional Theory Misunderstood