On the Watchmaker Argument

Today, William Paley made me late for English class.

That’s not as odd as it sounds, for anyone who’s wondering, “Why would Darwin’s major contemporary critic rise from the dead just to prevent you from going to class? Did you have to duel him? Was it for honour, or survival? Did he want to consume your ideology, or just your physical brain?” No, sorry, Paley would win. Besides, all good natural theologians have their bodies encased in concrete after death to prevent that precise eventuality. I mean, I assume they do.

What really happened was that my new chemistry prof, after an hour’s pleasant but uninspiring shpeil on why science is important, decided to ask a class of life sciences students to refute Paley’s Watchmaker argument. Bedlam Ensued.

My prof’s explanation was that religion and science don’t really intersect, and that it’s impossible to grasp either one from the perspective of the other. I’ve always viewed religion (Perhaps we should broaden that to ‘humanitarian and abstract philosophy’ or something. I'm turning out a pretty shit Agnostic.) as two sides of the same coin and both equally necessary, an old opinion originally applied to determinism vs. existentialism by Kant , I think (it’s always bloody Kant).  Anyway. The prof also expressed my main argument against the Watchmaker analogy, which naturally comes from Darwin – that what Paley called ‘Irreducible Complexity’ is only irreducible in retrospect.

Paley argued that the eye, like a watch, is too complex and too dependent on the orchestrated function of its many parts to have arisen in anything but its current form. But Paley didn’t consider that  simplistic versions of the eye could still have some function. Throughout the Animal Kingdom there are many modern examples of rudimentary ‘eyes’ that bear structural similarity to our own, even though they lack the sophistication of the human eye. Even watches began in inefficient mechanical forms that needed to be wound, before it was discovered that diamond or quartz could be carefully trimmed to vibrate at a set rate of cycles per second.  The ‘evolution’ of the watch isn’t quite analogous to Darwinian evolution, but we can see the same basic principle in action – useful adaptations to their design being preserved, problematic ones never being recreated. I can imagine a lot of dud watches that got scrapped because they did unhelpful things, like spontaneously implode, or things that weren't helpful after the mid-1970s, like contain hidden lasers and circular saws or unzip ladies' dresses or project an electromagnetic field that made the wearer appear human.

For the best and most elegant answer to Paley’s Watchmaker argument, take a look at what Darwin wrote on the subject. It couldn’t really be improved. Darwin doesn’t have all the evidence that has since been collected in his favour, but he doesn’t seem to need it. Darwin’s awesome like that. He was a genius not because of the complexity of his thinking – everything he said was really very simple – but because of its analytical and predictive power. Here was a man who looked at a species of bird in which the male was showier than the female and inferred not just that it had evolved that way, but that it had evolved that way because species was promiscuous, and, since female mating was limited while male mating was not, males had more to prove than the females. Here was a man who could look at these two flowers:

 and say, “Where’s the third? It should look like this:”

And that is just a tiny fragment of his revolutionary contribution to multiple fields. In short, a clever bastard. No wonder anyone from my department would jump him in an instant.

Not that I don’t respect Paley. He put into words (good words, too) the big problem that so many Creationists had, and still have, with Evolution. But logically, it didn’t stand the test of time, and it stuns me that Paley’s perspective is still so widely shared in the face of overwhelming evidence.

I also don’t mean to tell anybody what to think, though I make my own opinion pretty obvious in the header – only to think it in informed terms. I’ve yet to meet an outspoken Creationist I could respect intellectually, because none of them, if asked, could actually explain to me what the theory of Evolution was. I blame this not so much on xenophobic thinking as commonplace scientific illiteracy – it’s understandable to reject what you don’t understand. But ignorance is not a justification. I’d love to meet a Creationist who has studied Evolution thoroughly, grasps its point, and still does not accept it. Then, we would have a great deal to talk about.

Whatever you think, think it for a reason.

All credit to Spencer Barrett for the images of tristyly in Water Hyacinths, for explaining to us what the deuce it's all about, and for finding that missing one that Darwin predicted in a swamp in Brazil after decades of search. Read more here if you're interested.