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

154 PRIMING DARWIN'S PUMP
Very well, let's consider the objection. I doubt that the defender of religion
will find it attractive, once we explore it carefully. The philosopher Ronald
de Sousa once memorably described philosophical theology as "intellectual
tennis without a net," and I readily allow that I have indeed been assuming
without comment or question up to now that the net of rational judgment was
up. But we can lower it if you really want to. It's your serve. Whatever you
serve, suppose I return service rudely as follows: "What you say implies that
God is a ham sandwich wrapped in tinfoil. That's not much of a God to
worship!" If you then volley back, demanding to know how I can logically
justify my claim that your serve has such a preposterous implication, I will
reply: "Oh, do you want the net up for my returns, but not for your serves?
Either the net stays up, or it stays down. If the net is down, there are no rules
and anybody can say anything, a mug's game if there ever was one. I have
been giving you the benefit of the assumption that you would not waste your
own time or mine by playing with the net down."
Now if you want to reason about faith, and offer a reasoned (and reasonresponsive)
defense of faith as an extra category of belief worthy of special
consideration, I'm eager to play. I certainly grant the existence of the phenomenon
of faith; what I want to see is a reasoned ground for taking faith
seriously as a way of getting to the truth, and not, say, just as a way people
comfort themselves and each other (a worthy function that I do take seriously).
But you must not expect me to go along with your defense of faith as
a path to truth if at any point you appeal to the very dispensation you are
supposedly trying to justify. Before you appeal to faith when reason has you
backed into a corner, think about whether you really want to abandon reason
when reason is on your side. You are sightseeing with a loved one in a
foreign land, and your loved one is brutally murdered in front of your eyes. At
the trial it turns out that in this land friends of the accused may be called as
witnesses for the defense, testifying about their faith in his innocence. You
watch the parade of his moist-eyed friends, obviously sincere, proudly
proclaiming their undying faith in the innocence of the man you saw commit
the terrible deed. The judge listens intently and respectfully, obviously more
moved by this outpouring than by all the evidence presented by the
prosecution. Is this not a nightmare? Would you be willing to live in such a
land? Or would you be willing to be operated on by a surgeon who tells you
that whenever a little voice in him tells him to disregard his medical training,
he listens to the little voice? I know it passes in polite company to let people
have it both ways, and under most circumstances I wholeheartedly cooperate
with this benign arrangement. But we're seriously trying to get at the truth
here, and if you think that this common but unspoken understanding about
faith is anything better than socially useful obfuscation to avoid mutual
embarrassment and loss of face, you have either seen much more deeply into
this issue than any philosopher ever has (for none has ever
Molecular Evolution 15 5
come up with a good defense of this) or you are kidding yourself. (The ball
is now in your court.)
Dawkins' retort to the theorist who would call on God to jump-start die
evolution process is an unrebuttable refutation, as devastating today as when
Philo used it to trounce Cleanthes in Hume's Dialogues two centuries earlier.
A skyhook would at best simply postpone the solution to the problem, but
Hume couldn't think of any cranes, so he caved in. Darwin came up with
some magnificent cranes to do middle-level lifting, but can the principles that
worked so well once be applied again to do the lifting required to get the
booms of Darwin's cranes off the ground in the first place? Yes. Just when it
might appear that the Darwinian idea has come to the end of its resources, it
jumps niftily down a level and keeps right on going, not just one idea but
many, multiplying like the brooms of the sorcerer's apprentice.
If you want to understand this trick, which at first glance seems unimaginable,
you have to wrestle with some difficult ideas and a raft of details, both
mathematical and molecular. This is not the book, and I am not the author,
you should consult for those details, and nothing less could really secure your
understanding, so what follows comes with a warning: although I will try to
acquaint you with these ideas, you won't really know them unless you study
them in the primary literature. (My own grasp on them is that of an amateur.)
Imaginative theoretical and experimental explorations of the possibilities are
now being conducted by so many different researchers that it practically
constitutes a subdiscipline at the boundary between biology and physics.
Since I cannot hope to demonstrate to you the validity of these ideas—and
you shouldn't trust me if I claimed to do so—why am I presenting them?
Because my purpose is philosophical: I wish to break down a prejudice, the
conviction that a certain sort of theory couldn't possibly work. We have seen
how Hume's philosophical trajectory got deflected by his inability to take
seriously an opening in the wall that he dimly saw. He thought he knew that
there was no point in heading any further in that direction, and, as Socrates
never tired of pointing out, thinking you know when you don't is the main
cause of philosophical paralysis. If I can show that it is conceivable that the
Darwinian idea can carry through "all the way down," this will pre-empt a
family of glib dismissals that is all too familiar, and open our minds to other
possibilities.
2. MOLECULAR EVOLUTION
The smallest catalytically active protein molecules of the living cell
consist of at least a hundred amino acids. For even such a short molecule,
there exist 20'°° ~ 10 13 ° alternative arrangements of the twenty
basic monomers. This shows mat already on the lowest level of com-