Darwin's Dangerous Idea (13 page)

give us important insights into the idea itself, but do no more to diminish its Cosmic coincidences on such a scale just don't happen.

value or threaten its objectivity than the humble origins of methane diminish The same burden of proof now reigns in biology, thanks to Darwin. What I its BTUs when it is put to use as a fuel.

am calling the Principle of Accumulation of Design doesn't logically
require
that all design (on this planet) descend via one branch or another from a single trunk (or root or seed), but it says that since each new designed thing 4. THE TOOLS FOR R AND D: SKYHOOKS OR CRANES?

that appears must have a large design investment in its etiology somewhere, the cheapest hypothesis will always be that the design is largely copied from The work of R and D is not like shoveling coal; it is somehow a sort of earlier designs, which are copied from earlier designs, and so forth, so that

"intellectual" work, and this fact grounds the other family of metaphors that actual R-and-D innovation is minimized. We know for a fact, of course, that has both enticed and upset, enlightened and confused, the thinkers who have many designs have been independently re-invented many times—eyes, for confronted Darwin's "strange inversion of reasoning": the apparent instance, dozens of times—but every case of such convergent evolution must attribution of intelligence to the very process of natural selection that Darwin insisted was
not
intelligent.

be proven against a background in which most of the design is copied. It is Was it not unfortunate, in fact, that Darwin had chosen to call his principle logically possible that all the life forms in South America were created

"natural
selection"
with its anthropomorphic connotations? Wouldn't it have independently of all the life forms in the rest of the world, but this is a wildly been better, as Asa Gray suggested to him, to replace the imagery about extravagant hypothesis that would need to be demonstrated, piece by piece.

"nature's Guiding Hand" with a discussion of the different ways of winning Suppose we discover, on some remote island, a novel species of bird. Even if life's race (Desmond and Moore 1991, p. 458)? Many people just didn't get we don't
yet
have direct confirmatory evidence that this bird is related to all it, and Darwin was inclined to blame himself: "I must be a very bad the other birds in the world, that is our overpoweringly secure default explainer," he said, conceding: "I suppose 'natural selection' was a bad term"

assumption, after Darwin, because birds are very special designs.4

(Desmond and Moore 1991, p. 492). Certainly this Janus-faced term has So the fact that organisms—and computers and books and other arti-encouraged more than a century of heated argument. A recent opponent of facts—are effects of very special chains of causation is not, after Darwin, a Darwin sums it up:

merely reliable generalization, but a deep fact out of which to build a theory.

Hume recognized the point—"Throw several pieces of steel together, without Life on Earth, initially thought to constitute a sort of prima facie case for a shape or form; they will never arrange themselves to compose a watch"—but creator, was, as a result of Darwin's idea, envisioned merely as being the he and other, earlier, thinkers thought they had to ground this deep fact in outcome of a process and a process mat was, according to Dobzhansky, Mind. Darwin came to see how to distribute
it
in vast spaces of Nonmind,

"blind, mechanical, automatic, impersonal," and, according to de Beer, was thanks to his ideas about how design innovations could be conserved and

"wasteful, blind, and blundering." But as soon as these criticisms [sic] were reproduced, and hence accumulated.

leveled at natural selection, the "blind process" itself was compared to a The idea that Design is something that has taken work to create, and poet, a composer, a sculptor, Shakespeare—to the very notion of creativity that the idea of natural selection had originally replaced. It is clear, I think, that there was something very, very wrong with such an idea. [Bethell 1976.]

4. Note, by the way, that it would not follow
logically
that the bird was related to other birds if we found that its DNA was almost identical in sequence to that of other birds!

Or something very, very right. It seems to skeptics like Bethell that there

"Just a coincidence, not plagiarism," would be a logical possibility—but one that nobody is something willfully paradoxical in calling the process of evolution the would take seriously.

blind watchmaker" (Dawkins 1986a), for this takes away with the left hand

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The Tools for R and D: Skyhooks or Cranes?
75

("blind") the very discernment, purpose, and foresight it gives with the right There are cranes, however. Cranes can do the lifting work our imaginary hand. But others see that this manner of speaking—and we shall find that it is skyhooks might do, and they do it in an honest, non-question-begging not just ubiquitous but irreplaceable in contemporary biology—is just the fashion. They are expensive, however. They have to be designed and built, right way to express the myriads of detailed discoveries that Darwinian from everyday parts already on hand, and they have to be located on a firm theory helps to expose. There is simply no denying the breathtaking base of existing ground. Skyhooks are miraculous lifters, unsupported and brilliance of the designs to be found in nature. Time and again, biologists insupportable. Cranes are no less excellent as lifters, and they have the baffled by some apparently futile or maladroit bit of bad design in nature decided advantage of being real. Anyone who is, like me, a lifelong onlooker have eventually come to see that they have underestimated the ingenuity, the at construction sites will have noticed with some satisfaction that it sheer brilliance, the depth of insight to be discovered in one of Mother sometimes takes a small crane to set up a big crane. And it must have Nature's creations. Francis Crick has mischievously baptized this trend in the occurred to many other onlookers that in principle this big crane could be name of his colleague Leslie Orgel, speaking of what he calls "Orgel's used to enable or speed up the building of a still more spectacular crane.

Second Rule: Evolution is cleverer than you are." (An alternative formula-Cascading cranes is a tactic that seldom if ever gets used more than once in tion: Evolution is cleverer than Leslie Orgel!)

real-world construction projects, but in principle there is no limit to the Darwin shows us how to climb from "Absolute Ignorance" (as his outnumber of cranes that could be organized in series to accomplish some raged critic said ) to creative genius without begging any questions, but we mighty end.

must tread very carefully, as we shall see. Among the controversies that swirl Now imagine all the "lifting" that has to get done in Design Space to around us, most if not all consist of different challenges to Darwin's claim create the magnificent organisms and (other) artifacts we encounter in our that he can take us all the way to
here
(the wonderful world we inhabit) from world. Vast distances must have been traversed since the dawn of life with
there
(the world of chaos or utter undesignedness) in the time available the earliest, simplest self-replicating entities, spreading outward (diversity) without invoking anything beyond the mindless mechanicity of the and upward (excellence). Darwin has offered us an account of the crudest, algorithmic processes he had proposed. Since we have reserved the vertical most rudimentary, stupidest imaginable lifting process—the wedge of natural dimension of the traditional Cosmic Pyramid as a measure of (intuitive ) selection. By taking tiny—the tiniest possible—steps, this process can designedness, we can dramatize the challenge with the aid of another fantasy gradually, over eons, traverse these huge distances. Or so he claims. At no item drawn from folklore.

point would anything miraculous—from on high—be needed. Each step has
skyhook,
orig. Aeronaut. An imaginary contrivance for attachment to the been accomplished by brute, mechanical, algorithmic climbing, from the sky; an imaginary means of suspension in the sky.
[Oxford English Dictio-base already built by the efforts of earlier climbing.

nary.}

It does seem incredible. Could it really have happened? Or did the process need a "leg up" now and then (perhaps only at the very beginning) from one The first use noted by the
OED
is from 1915: "an aeroplane pilot commanded sort of skyhook or another? For over a century, skeptics have been trying to to remain in place (aloft) for another hour, replies 'the machine is not fitted find a proof that Darwin's idea just can't work, at least not
all the way.
They with skyhooks.' " The skyhook concept is perhaps a descendant of the
dens
have been hoping for, hunting for, praying for skyhooks, as exceptions to
ex machina
of ancient Greek dramaturgy, when second-rate playwrights what they see as the bleak vision of Darwin's algorithm churning away. And found their plots leading their heroes into inescapable difficulties, they were time and again, they have come up with truly interesting challenges—leaps often tempted to crank down a god onto the scene, like Super-man, to save and gaps and other marvels that do seem, at first, to need the situation supernaturally. Or skyhooks may be an entirely independent creation of convergent folkloric evolution. Skyhooks would be wonderful things to have, great for lifting unwieldy objects out of difficult circumstances, and speeding up all sorts of construction projects. Sad to say, makes them financially sound investments—is that we often do want very much to attach they are impossible.5

something (such as an antenna or a camera or telescope) to a place high in the sky.

Satellites are impractical for
lifting,
alas, because they have to be placed so high in the sky. The idea has been carefully explored. It turns out that a rope of the strongest artificial fiber yet made would have to be over a hundred meters in diameter at the top—it could 5. Well, not quite impossible. Geostationary satellites, orbiting in unison with the Earth's taper to a nearly invisible fishing line on its way down—just to suspend its own weight, rotation, are a kind of real, nonmiraculous skyhook. What makes them so valuable—what let alone any payload. Even if you could spin such a cable, you wouldn't want it falling out of orbit onto the city below!

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The Tools for R and D: Skyhooks or Cranes?
77

skyhooks. But then along have come the cranes, discovered in many cases by
earlier, slower evolutionary processes.
If the creationists were right that the very skeptics who were hoping to find a skyhook.

mankind is a species unto itself, divine and inaccessible via brute Darwinian It is time for some more careful definitions. Let us understand that a paths, then genetic engineering would not be a crane after all, having been
skyhook
is a "mind-first" force or power or process, an exception to the created with the help of a major skyhook. I don't imagine that any genetic principle that all design, and apparent design, is ultimately the result of engineers think of themselves this way, but it is a logically available perch, mindless, motiveless mechanicity. A
crane,
in contrast, is a subprocess or however precarious. Less obviously silly is this idea: if the bodies of genetic special feature of a design process that can be demonstrated to permit the engineers are products of evolution, but their
minds
can do creative things local speeding up of the basic, slow process of natural selection,
and
that can that are irreducibly nonalgorithmic or inaccessible by all algorithmic paths, be demonstrated to be itself the predictable (or retrospectively explicable ) then the leaps of genetic engineering might involve a skyhook. Exploring product of the basic process. Some cranes are obvious and uncon-troversial; this prospect will be the central topic of chapter 15.

others are still being argued about, very fruitfully. Just to give a general sense A crane with a particularly interesting history is theBaldwin-Effect, named of the breadth and application of the concept, let me point to three very for one of its discoverers, James Mark Baldwin (1896), but more or less different examples.

simultaneously discovered by two other early Darwinians, Conwy Lloyd It is now generally agreed among evolutionary theorists that
sex
is a crane.

Morgan (famed for Lloyd Morgan's Canon of Parsimony [for discussion, see That is, species that reproduce sexually can move through Design Space at a Dennett 1983]) and H. F. Osborn. Baldwin was an enthusiastic Darwinian, much greater speed than that achieved by organisms that reproduce asexually.

but he was oppressed by the prospect that Darwin's theory would leave Mind Moreover, they can "discern" design improvements along the way that are all with an insufficiently important and originating role in the (redesign of but "invisible" to asexually reproducing organisms ( Holland 1975 ). This organisms. So he set out to demonstrate that animals,
by dint of their own
cannot be the
raison d'etre
of sex, however. Evolution cannot see way down
clever activities in the world,
might hasten or guide the further evolution of the road, so anything it builds must have an immediate payoff to their species. Here is what he asked himself: how could it be that individual counterbalance the cost. As recent theorists have insisted, the "choice" of animals, by solving problems in their own lifetimes, could change the reproducing sexually carries a huge
immediate
cost: organisms send along conditions of competition for their own offspring, making those problems only 50 percent of their genes in any one transaction (to say nothing of the easier to solve in the future? And he came to realize that this was in fact effort and risk involved in securing a transaction in the first place). So the possible, under certain conditions, which we can illustrate with a simple
long-term
payoff of heightened efficiency, acuity, and speed of the redesign example (drawn, with revisions, from Dennett 1991a).