The Blind Watchmaker

In one of my earlier posts, I had expressed confusion over the fact whether Darwin's theory could explain evolution without any reference to an intelligent force that lends Nature a direction in which to evolve. Given the extreme complexity of biological species, I had argued, it seemed very unlikely that there was no driving force behind their evolution. What would explain the fact that species over generations evolved in order to adapt to their environments. They became more and more articulate in living and making their ilk survive and reproduce.

The instinct of survival can be easily appreciated in the case of humans and other large animals -- all of them are driven by emotions and feelings and want to protect their families from the rest of the world. But, I have wondered many times, what reason or instinct drives reproduction in smaller organisms like viruses. They do not feel anything, do not have brains, do not have emotions nor insecurities that are attributable to larger animals. What, then, prompts them to reproduce, to evolve? Why has Nature programmed them as such? Does it have a purpose? Darwin says it does not.

The Blind Watchmaker by Richard Dawkins is a book that promises to answer all these questions convincingly. I want to be convinced, but am yet to be convinced. Interestingly, Dawkins has stated that anyone before Darwin's theory would either have believed the existence of God as creator of all beings or would have resigned with the inexplicable situation -- like the one I have described here and earlier. I am happy that at least I have reached this confusion -- if some others have faced similar conundrums, what I am not seeing is not very obvious. Hopefully, a reading of the book will convince me of the completeness of Darwin's theory. As I said, I want to be convinced, but so far I have not comprehended what Darwin came up with.

Darwin's Theory - Does it work without God? (Part 2)

This a comment I received from Paramanand (Pandy) on my posting Darwin's Theory - Does it work without God?:

My take on Darwinism is of course on the side of Darwin. And I find something confusing what you write here. You seem to think that Natural selection is actually some hidden force which actually selects life forms.

However this is not the case. If you have two organisms, then they are not alike in all respects and definitely in some circumstances one will be better at survival than other and it will be selected. There is no force as such as work (or the hand of God).

To take an analogy, you have a sieve and some particles of various sizes. if you throw them all in sieve some will be filtered out and some will pass through. Now the sieve here is the natural environment which includes other organisms like predators, and members of species competing for mate. And in real world the sieve is highly dynamic. So a property which might have been good for survival once in past might be useless in future.

So the selection itself is undirected. But the random mutations which add to survival are preserved and accumulate over the millions and billions of years.

It is this marvellous process of natural selection which integrates (remember calculus) the small luck at each stage and generates blogger.com in 21st century from lifeless matters billions of years ago. What a transition!! Almost unimaginable by the proponents of Intelligent Design.

You can read the works of Richard Dawkins to get further enlightenment on this subject.

Pandy has made some good points but at the same time, I feel, I can write more on what I meant in light of his comments.

The sieve example does model Nature to the extent that the fit survive in Nature, as the smaller stones pass through the sieve. But do the stones that have passed through the sieve carry any memory or information that they passed through the sieve because they had such and such properties? If so, how? In the same manner, the fitter might survive, very well. But how does one explain the fact that the survivors pass on the genetic code (or the information of what made them survive) to the next generation? Nature could have kept on experimenting like this without ever evolving into more complex life forms. Some forms of amoeba and algae could have survived one time and some other forms at other times. There has to be some inherent intelligence that gives a sense of direction to evolution and that prefers survival more than extinction. After all, Nature would not be affected if all life ceased to exist.

Let me take an example. Consider a moulding machine that is used to give a particular shape to molten glass. Each piece of glass that is moulded is of the same shape. Then each piece is pushed on to a treadmill one after the other at the end of which they are collected by a person and packed into boxes. Consider a situation in which the moulding machine has been programmed in such a manner that the glass pieces it makes are very fragile. So fragile that they break when one glass piece touches the other one on the treadmill. If we compare it to the sieve example, the moulding machine is working in the manner it is supposed to work - giving the shape as programmed. However, the glasses are not strong enough and break when they come into contact with each other on the treadmill. Now, in this case, the moulding machine is in no position to change the settings on its own so that the glasses coming out are thicker/stronger and do not break when they come into contact with each other on the treadmill. So, the glasses it produces will continue to break while the machine will never stop making the same glasses. This is something that does not happen. Why? Because there is no transfer of information from treadmill to the machine that the glasses it is producing are too fragile and it needs to change the way it produces them.

Coming back to evolution, if I try to ask the question why the "beneficial" random mutations are preserved by Nature when it does not have to (that is, it is not bound by the laws of physics to) create self-sustaining life, I do not find a ready answer.

Not only has Nature evolved, but it has evolved so much as to produce intelligent beings!! This is something amazing and again not guaranteed by Darwin's theory.

What I tried to say in was that if the existence of God (an invisible intelligent force, if God seems to be too controversial) is not assumed, Darwin's theory seems to leave an unexplained gap. Now, this does not prove that God is enabling evolution but it does mean that there might be something which Darwin and scientific theory has left unexamined.

Darwin's Theory - Does it work without God?

Before going through this post, you might want to go through my earlier related post How God Makes Lives Easier...

Charles Darwin seems to be the ideal victim of all religious philosophers' ire for proposing the Theory of Evolution. Such people believe that, by proposing the theory, Darwin went against the premise that God created the Universe, the Earth, all life on Earth and so on. Before taking sides with Darwin or God (or more important to find whether they actually form a part of opposite teams!), let us see what the theory says:

Darwin's Theory of Evolution - The Premise
Darwin's Theory of Evolution is the widely held notion that all life is related and has descended from a common ancestor: the birds and the bananas, the fishes and the flowers -- all related. Darwin's general theory presumes the development of life from non-life and stresses a purely naturalistic (undirected) "descent with modification". That is, complex creatures evolve from more simplistic ancestors naturally over time. In a nutshell, as random genetic mutations occur within an organism's genetic code, the beneficial mutations are preserved because they aid survival -- a process known as "natural selection." These beneficial mutations are passed on to the next generation. Over time, beneficial mutations accumulate and the result is an entirely different organism (not just a variation of the original, but an entirely different creature)
Source: http://www.darwins-theory-of-evolution.com/

Notice the use of words "beneficial" and "preserved". The first question that comes to mind is who decides what is beneficial for the organism's genetic code and what is not? Who "preserves"? The process is conveniently called "natural selection". Now, what is nature? Does nature have a will? Is nature intelligent? After all, if, as Darwin proposes, mutations occur randomly AND nature did not have a will (or intelligence) sufficient to decide whether a particular kind of genetic code is good enough to be passed on to the next generation, we could find in nature a large number of organisms with different genetic codes - both beneficial and non-beneficial and that too in varying degrees. However, that, clearly, does not happen. Nature controls the number of bad or non-beneficial species by eliminating them - by blocking that genetic code from passing on to next generations of the same species. This means, there is a force that works behind the scenes to increase chances of survival of a species and helps life to evolve!!! This force might be something that is commonly called God or Nature. So, Darwin's theory may need the presence of God to work as it does.

This conclusion is perplexing to me. It really makes me think if Darwin actually did presuppose (even though unknowingly - I do not know of his actual stance on the existence of God/Nature) the existence of an intelligent force in order for life to survive and evolve on earth.

This further prompts a look at the theory of Intelligent Design that proposes: "while evidence pointing to the nature of an "intelligent cause or agent" may not be directly observable, its effects on nature can be detected."

Even though the theory of Intelligent Design is not a scientific theory because it is not based on experiments, we ought to keep our minds open to the idea that the currently accepted scientific theories of evolution might not be sufficient to explain the evolution of life on earth.