Darwin, Design, and the devil in the details

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Darwin, Design, and the devil in the details
Evolution has such intimate significance for our
daily life that it creates immensely great
psychological resistances to seeing even the most
obvious truth. Garrett Hardin, 1959.

• Joseph V. Siry
• Environmental Studies
• Rollins College
• January, 2006

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Darwins insight

• Darwin, himself, wrote
• When it was first said that the sun stood still
  and the world turned round, the common sense of
  mankind declared the doctrine false but the old
  saying of Vox populi, vox Dei, as every
  philosopher knows, cannot be trusted in science.
• "As buds give rise by growth by growth to fresh
  buds, and these, if vigorous, branch out and
  overtop on all sides many a feebler branch, so by
  generation I believe it has been with the great
  Tree of Life, which fills with its dead and
  broken branches the crust of the earth, and
  covers the surface with its ever branching and
  beautiful ramifications."
• Chapters 4 and 6, The Origin of Species, (1859)

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Revolutions in ideas

• "Modern science is the product of two great
  revolutions in thought, one that we call the
  Newtonian revolution, the other the Darwinian. It
  is often implied that the principle distinction
  between these two is that one took place in
  physics
• "The Darwinian revolution involved a far more
  profound reassessment of the sense of the world,
  resulting in a view that no merely verbal
  substitution could make consonant with the old.
• G. Hardin, Nature Man's Fate, p. 259

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The context of the Darwinian Revolution

• The Naturalists
• William Paley, Natural Theology
• The Bridgewater Treatises
• Modern Biology
• Loren Eisley
• Garrett Hardin
• Ernst Mayr
• Stephen J. Gould
• Lynn Margulis
• Edward O. Wilson
• RNA, DNA and Proteins

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Natural Theology

• John Ray, 1680s
• The Wisdom of God Manifest in Creation
• Newtons faith in one God, reason, math
• Gravity was a key to the Creators rationality
• Mathematics was Gods language.
• William Paley, 1802
• Introduced the concept of good for the species
• Undermined Aristotelian perspective
• life was designed because it was so perfectly
  fitted to the conditions of existence

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Early education

• Alexander Von Humboldt traveled to South America
  popularized naturalist travel.
• Darwin studied for the Ministry in 1827, He too
  was an orthodox Christian.
• As I did not then in the least doubt the strict
  and literal truth of every word in in the Bible.
  (Charles Darwin, Autobiography, p.
  57.)
• Discoveries raised objections in his mind to what
  clearly the Bible fails to address.
• Ernst Mayr, One on Argument, 1992

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Paley made naturalists

• Paley made Naturalists, Darwin was one of them.
• Darwin once remarked, I do not think I hardly
  ever admired a book more than Paleys Natural
  Theology. I could almost formerly have said it by
  heart.
• Paley used the eye as an example of perfection.
  Then Darwin, in chapter six, used the eye as
  evidence for natural selections power to
  exquisitely shape organs. Yet Helmholtz, 50 years
  later, said the eye was a poor optical
  instrument!
• Hardin, Nature and Mans Fate, pp, 58-59.,

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The Voyage
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Bridgewater Treatises

• 8th Earl of Bridgewater was Francis Henry Egerton
• His 1829 bequest of 8,000 was for a work or
  works that promoted the argument from design.
• The bequest paid for works on the power, wisdom,
  and goodness of God as manifested in Creation.
• From 1833-36 eight volumes promoted the idea of a
  divine designer.
• Evidence of design in the world about us implies
  an intelligent designer.

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Humans are not well designed

• Too many teeth for the jaw or mandibular arch
• Upright posture strained the back
• Infants head and womans pelvic girth
• Rapid enlargement of cerebral cortex, especially
  prefrontal and frontal lobes growth
• Esophagus and windpipe converge exacerbating
  choking to death
• Appendix and other vestigial organs
• Genetic disorders tay sachs, huntingtons
  chorea, hemophilia

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Darwins Origin of Species

• When we reflect on these facts, here given much
  too briefly, with respect to the wide,
  diversified, and graduated range of structure in
  the eyes of the lower animals and when we bear
  in mind how small the number of all living forms
  must be in comparison with those which have
  become extinct, the difficulty ceases to be very
  great in believing that natural selection may
  have converted the simple apparatus of an optic
  nerve, coated with pigment and invested by
  transparent membrane, into an optical instrument
  as perfect as is possessed by any member of the
  articulate class.

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The Eye

• He who will go thus far, ought not to hesitate
  to go one step further, if he finds on finishing
  this volume that large bodies of facts, otherwise
  inexplicable, can be explained by the theory of
  modification through natural selection he ought
  to admit that a structure even as perfect as an
  eagle's eye might thus be formed, although in
  this case he does not know the transitional
  states.
• Chapter Six, On the Origin of Species

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Five Kingdoms of life

• Monera
• Protictista
• Fungi
• Plants
• Animals

 "...such trees are idealized representations of
the past. In reality the tree of life often grows
in on itself." Lynn Margulis
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What is Natural Selection?

• Natural selection is the process by which the
  forms of organisms in a population that are best
  adapted to the environment increase in frequency
  relative to less well adapted forms over a number
  of generations.
• this process can explain both evolution and
  adaptation.
• Mark Ridley, Evolution, Third edition.
  http//www.blackwellpublishing.com/ridley/a-z/Natu
  ral_selection.asp. 11/19/05 1245 PM

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What Drives Evolution?

• Darwin's theory requires
• 1) variation in traits (eye color) to exist
  across any population
• 2) the inheritability of traits from parents to
  offspring
• 3) differential reproductive success among
  individual offspring
• "The fundamental evolutionary event is a change
  in the frequency of genes and chromosome
  configurations in a population.
• "Individuals and their immediate descendants do
  not evolve. Populations evolve, in the sense that
  the proportions of carriers of different genes
  change through time.
• "All beings alive today are equally evolved."
• Wilson, p. , Margulis, p. 20.

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Natural Selection is too complicated

• Not based on mutations.
• Population thinking replaced typological thought
  of Aristotle.
• Various traits mediated by RNA and protein
  synthesis generate potential for changes.
• Adaptive changes persist.

perfect adaptation to the conditions of
existence Alfred Russel Wallace.
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Intelligent design is not science

• Examples of poor design are too numerous
• RNA and Natural Selection are complicated enough
• Genetic evidence in DNA sequencing for
• Common ancestors and shared protein pathways,
• Mitochondrial DNA is a maternal inheritance,
• Eukaryotic organisms arose from ancestral
  Prokaryots.
• There is no evidence to test in intelligent
  design
• Experiments needed to negate the hypothesis.
• Theoretical, gedanken or thought experiment is
  wanting.
• Design belongs appropriately in a history or
  sociology of the life sciences class, not
  biology.

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Conclusion

• "It is interesting to contemplate an entangled
  bank, clothed with many plants of many kinds,
  with birds singing on the bushes, with various
  insects flitting about, and with worms crawling
  through the damp earth, and to reflect that these
  elaborately constructed forms, so different from
  each other, and dependent on each other in so
  complex a manner, have all been produced by laws
  acting around us.
• There is a grandeur in this view of life, with
  its several powers, having been originally
  breathed into a few forms or into one and that,
  whilst this planet has gone cycling on according
  to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a
  beginning endless forms most beautiful and most
  wonderful have been, and are being, evolved.
• On the Origin of Species, 489-490.