Darwin's Dangerous Idea - Evolution and the Meaning of Life

152 PRIMING DARWIN'S PUMP Back Beyond Darwin's Frontier 153
Maybe, it is argued, the Creator does not control the day-to-day succession
of evolutionary events, maybe he did not frame the tiger and the lamb,
maybe he did not make a tree, but he did set up the original machinery of
replication and replicator power, the original machinery of DNA and protein
that made cumulative selection, and hence all of evolution, possible.
This is a transparently feeble argument, indeed it is obviously selfdefeating.
Organized complexity is the thing we are having difficulty explaining.
Once we are allowed simply to postulate organized complexity, if
only the organized complexity of the DNA/protein replicating engine, it is
relatively easy to invoke it as a generator of yet more organized complexity....
But of course any God capable of intelligently designing something
as complex as the DNA/protein replicating machine must have been at least
as complex and organized as the machine itself. [Dawkins 1986a, p. 141.]
As Dawkins goes on to say (p. 316), "The one thing that makes evolution
such a neat theory is that it explains how organized complexity can arise out
of primeval simplicity." This is one of the key strengths of Darwin's idea, and
the key weakness of the alternatives. In fact, I once argued, it is unlikely that
any other theory could have this strength:
FIGURE 7.1
But how could this process get started? Denton (p. 323) goes to some
lengths to calculate the improbability of such a start-up, and arrives at a
suitably mind-numbing number.
To get a cell by chance would require at least one hundred functional
proteins to appear simultaneously in one place. That is one hundred simultaneous
events each of an independent probability which could hardly
be more than 10- 20 giving a maximum combined probability of 10 2000
This probability is Vanishing indeed—next to impossible. And it looks at
first as if the standard Darwinian response to such a challenge could not as a
matter of logic avail us, since the very preconditions for its success—a
system of replication with variation—are precisely what only its success
would permit us to explain. Evolutionary theory appears to have dug itself
into a deep pit, from which it cannot escape. Surely the only thing that could
save it would be a skyhook! This was Asa Gray's fond hope, and the more we
have learned about the intricacies of DNA replication, the more enticing this
idea has become to those who are searching for a place to bail out science
with some help from religion. One might say that it has appeared to many to
be a godsend. Forget it, says Richard Dawkins:
Darwin explains a world of final causes and teleological laws with a principle
that is, to be sure, mechanistic but—more fundamentally—utterly
independent of "meaning" or "purpose". It assumes a world that is absurd
in the existentialist's sense of the term: not ludicrous but pointless, and this
assumption is a necessary condition of any non-question-begging account
of purpose. Whether we can imagine a non-mechanistic but also nonquestion-begging
principle for explaining design in the biological world is
doubtful; it is tempting to see the commitment to non-question-begging
accounts here as tantamount to a commitment to mechanistic materialism,
but the priority of these commitments is clear ___ One argues: Darwin's
materialistic theory may not be the only non-question-begging theory of
these matters, but it is one such theory, and the only one we have found,
which is quite a good reason for espousing materialism. [Dennett 1975, pp.
171-72.]
Is that a fair or even an appropriate criticism of the religious alternatives?
One reader of an early draft of this chapter complained at this point, saying
that by treating the hypothesis of God as just one more scientific hypothesis,
to be evaluated by the standards of science in particular and rational thought
in general, Dawkins and I are ignoring the very widespread claim by believers
in God that their faith is quite beyond reason, not a matter to which
such mundane methods of testing applies. It is not just unsympathetic, he
claimed, but strictly unwarranted for me simply to assume that the scientific
method continues to apply with full force in this domain of faith.