Sceptic Watch: Non-Random Evolution

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Richard Dawkins (1941)

[Fred Hoyle (1915 – 2001) compared] the spontaneous formation by ‘chance’ of a working enzyme is like a hurricane blowing through a junkyard and spontaneously having the luck to put together a Boeing 747. …

[To] invoke chance, on its own, as an explanation [for objects such as eyes and protein molecules], is equivalent to vaulting from the bottom to the top of Mount Improbable’s steepest cliff in one bound.
And what corresponds to inching up the kindly, grassy slopes on the other side of the mountain?
It is the slow, cumulative, one-step-at-a-time, non-random survival of random variants that Darwin called natural selection.
The metaphor of Mount Improbable dramatizes the mistake of the sceptics quoted at the beginning of this chapter.
Where they went wrong was to keep their eyes fixed on the vertical precipice and its dramatic height.
They assumed that the sheer cliff was the only way up to the summit on which are perched eyes and protein molecules and other supremely improbable arrangements of parts.
It was Darwin’s great achievement to discover the gentle gradients winding up the other side of the mountain. …

Darwinism is widely misunderstood as a theory of pure chance. …
One stage in the Darwinian process is indeed a chance process—mutation.
Mutation is the process by which fresh genetic variation is offered up for selection and it is usually described as random.
But Darwinians make the fuss that they do about the ‘randomness’ of mutation only in order to contrast it to the non-randomness of selection, the other side of the process.
It is not necessary that mutation should be random in order for natural selection to work.
Selection can still do its work whether mutation is directed or not.
Emphasizing that mutation can be random is our way of calling attention to the crucial fact that, by contrast, selection is sublimely and quintessentially non-random.
It is ironic that this emphasis on the contrast between mutation and the non-randomness of selection has led people to think that the whole theory is a theory of chance. …

The Darwinian explanation for why living things are so good at doing what they do is very simple.
They are good because of the accumulated wisdom of their ancestors.
But it is not wisdom that they have learned or acquired.
It is wisdom that they chanced upon by lucky random mutations, wisdom that was then selectively, non-randomly, recorded in the genetic database of the species.
In each generation the amount of luck was not very great …
But, because the luck has been accumulated over so many generations, we are eventually very impressed by the apparent improbability of the end product. …
[Heredity] the basic ingredient [of] Darwinism, and hence life, will follow, more or less inevitably, on any planet in the universe where something equivalent to heredity arises. …

The message from the mountain is threefold.
First is the message we have already introduced: there can be no sudden leaps upward—no precipitous increases in ordered complexity.
Second, there can be no going downhill—species can’t get worse as a prelude to getting better.
Third, there may be more than one peak—more than one way of solving the same problem, all flourishing in the world.

Take any part of any animal or plant, and … ask: how that part has been formed by gradual transformation from some other part of an earlier ancestor? …
A famous example is the gradual derivation of our mammalian ear bones …
Fossil evidence clearly shows that these three bones, called the hammer, the anvil and the stirrup, are lineally descended from three corresponding bones that, in our reptile ancestors, formed the jaw joint.

(Climbing Mount Improbable, 1996)

Charles Darwin (1809 – 82)

Under nature, the slightest difference of structure or constitution may well turn the nicely-balanced scale in the struggle for life, and so be preserved.
How fleeting are the wishes and efforts of man! how short his time! and consequently how poor will his products be, compared with those accumulated by nature during whole geological periods.
Can we wonder, then,

that nature’s productions should be far ‘truer’ in character than man’s productions;
that they should be infinitely better adapted to the most complex conditions of life, and should plainly bear the stamp of far higher workmanship?

It may be said that natural selection is daily and hourly:

scrutinising, throughout the world, every variation, even the slightest;
rejecting that which is bad, preserving and adding up all that is good;
silently and insensibly working, whenever and wherever opportunity offers, at the improvement of each organic being in relation to its organic and inorganic conditions of life.

We see nothing of these slow changes in progress, until the hand of time has marked the long lapse of ages, and then so imperfect is our view into long past geological ages, that we only see that the forms of life are now different from what they formerly were.

(On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, 1859)

The Final Victory

Christian Krause:
Where cities once bloomed, the ruins reach up to the sky.
The war is our destiny.
We must accept it.
And it is proof of our unique greatness that we are not prepared to give in to our enemies.
Better dead than a slave!
Our task is to mature for victory or death.
(1945)

Margarete Krause:
The Führer is there, where the danger is greatest.
He is true to himself.
Should we not be true to him, unto victory or ruin?
We have no choice!
We must fulfil the destiny he gies us with our bravest hearts, with the best we have, loyal, upright, without hesitating or wavering.
(1945)

Johannes Tuchal {German Resistance Memorial Centre]:
The people supported the dictatorship.
At no point did a majority of Germans ever turn against Hitler.
It was always a very, very small minority of the German people who turned against him and grasped what the dictatorship had done to Germany.

Claus von Stauffenberg (1907 – 44):
It is time for something to be done.
Anyone who dares to do something must accept that he will probably go down in German history as a traitor.
But if he fails to act, he would be a traitor to his own conscience.

Adolf Hitler (1889 – 1945):
However great the crisis of the moment may be, we will master it in the end through our unbreakable will.
(30 January 1945)

Seven Days On Mars