In Our Time - Chance and Design

Episode Date: February 13, 2003

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the theories of a grand design in the universe. The late evolutionary biologist Stephen Jay Gould argued that if you re-ran the tape of evolutionary history, an entirely different set of creatures would emerge. Man would not exist because the multitude of random changes that resulted in us would never be repeated exactly the same way. Others disagree, arguing that there is a pattern that points to some kind of direction – even, perhaps, a design, a sense that some things are pre-ordained. Who were the original proponents of the idea of a grand design? Were they deliberately setting out to find a scientific theory that could sit alongside religious faith? On the other hand, can the concept of contingency – or the randomness of evolution - be compatible with a belief in God? With Simon Conway Morris, Professor of Evolutionary Palaeobiology at Cambridge University and author of The Crucible of Creation – the Burgess Shale and the Rise of Animals; Sandy Knapp, botanist at the Natural History Museum; John Brooke, Andreas Idreos Professor of Science and Religion at Oxford University.

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or wherever you get your pods. Thanks for downloading the In Our Time podcast. For more details about In Our Time and for our terms of use, please go to BBC.co.com.uk forward slash radio four. I hope you enjoy the program. Hello, the evolutionary biologist, the late Stephen Jay Gould, argued that if you reran the tape of evolutionary history, an entirely different set of creatures would emerge.

Man wouldn't exist because the multitude of random changes that resulted in us would never be repeated. in exactly the same way. Others disagree, arguing that there's a pattern that points to some kind of direction, even perhaps a design, a sense that some things are ordained to be. Who were the original proponents of the idea of a grand design? Were they deliberately setting out to find a scientific theory that could sit alongside religious faith?

On the other hand, can the concept of contingency, or the randomness of evolution, be compatible with the pattern we see, or with a belief in God? With me, a Simon Conway Morris, professor of evolution, paleobiology at Cambridge University, an author of The Crucible of Creation, the Burgess Shale and the Rise of Animals, Sandinap, a botanist at the Natural History Museum,

and John Brooke, Andreas Idris Professor of Science and Religion at Oxford University. Simon Connemaris, can you set out the range of arguments, as it were, to sort of headline the programme, surrounding the issue of design? Well, certainly the problem is that at the basic level, evolution has to be a random process, because we know that the way in which organisms are selected through time

is effectively on the basis of random mutation. But on the other hand, any botanist or anybody else who studies biology at any level sees an extraordinary degree of engineering. And it's very difficult to imagine from the outset that this is somehow some sort of design. In other words, there are restricted possibilities in the way that organisms are actually built to operate. And this makes perfectly good sense because, after all, they live in a real world. And really the question is, how does such an organisation emerge from something which at heart is based on a random process of mutation? And that opens a whole set of questions because, of course, when we look around the world, it's almost eerily well suited, not only for ourselves but for all other organisms.

And is this at the heart of the matter actually something which is simply random, or do we actually detect in the end maybe a deeper structure to life? I think people will have picked up on the word eerily. Indeed, because as we learn more and more about organisms, and I should say in parenthesis, one of our problems without being ludicrous is that being alive ourselves, we take so much for granted. But if you look at the way things are organized, especially at the chemical level, the degree of precision, the absolute preciseness of way these things must work. And also what is much more interesting is that nearly all the other alternatives,

which you can imagine, you can sometimes even model in a laboratory, nearly always don't work at all. they're just complete and utter failures. So it turns out, in fact, there are actually very, very narrow windows through which life can actually operate. And we see this most clearly in the level of biochemistry. But then when you think about how all of this joins together

into a single operating organism, although we take it for granted, once a scientist begins to look at that, then one suddenly sees, in fact, that the possibilities are far more restricted than perhaps was once thought. Can you give us some idea of the differentiation between intelligent design

We'll use that as a summary of what you've been saying compared with creationism, which is a movement which is very strong in the United States of America. Can you dis-I was about to say disassociate the one from the other that was slip, or was it? No, I would disassociate myself in both the many cases. I mean, intelligent design is just a very superior sort of creationism which is based on an intellectual argument that says

that because things are so wonderfully designed, therefore they could not have evolved. Yet we know that evolution is 100% true. our question is how on earth do you get from point A to point B? And I think we could have a very interesting discussion about that in due cause. Creationists are effectively people who take to simplify a little bit. One aspect, usually of the religious scriptures of the Christians, but sometimes other groups as well,

and regard those as being the source of all truth, and therefore try and reconcile that with what scientific evidence presents. Now, intelligent design is something worth talking about, although I myself think it is completely and utterly wrong. They have a point, but the point can be addressed by science and it can be addressed by understanding evolution. Okay, John Brooke, how have these arguments about design developed over the last few hundred years? Well, let's start with the Greeks.

Did they have arguments about, is there a history of arguments of design? There's most certainly a history, a fascinating one too. In fact, it's one of the issues that divides the Stoics and the Epicureans in antiquity. Cicero says that one would actually be less than a human being if one denier. the existence of design in nature. He points to the heavens, the wonderfully orderly motions, the regularity, the interconnections between things that make life possible. And even says, incidentally, that there is a great beauty in creation.

And that's an important facet of appeals to design, I think, which we may want to return to. Cicero compares the workings of the heavens with human artefacts, aurorae. clocks, machines of that kind. And I think that's an important clue to why the argument resurfaced in the 17th century, particularly the latter part of the 17th century, where arguments for design in nature were in some measure a response to attacks on religion

in that period, but they're also actually in response to innovations in science as well. There are responses to new forms of science in that there was a revival of atomism in the 17th century. And atomic theories of matter in antiquity had been associated with non-theistic positions in which everything had simply emerged through chance. So in order to remove that threat from their science,

17th century natural philosophers frequently appealed to design in nature. But as I say, the science provided important clues. I think one can see this certainly, for example, in Isaac Newton, who is an atomist, but he believes that God's in control. The laws of nature point to design. And for Newton, there's also a very exquisite calculation that God has made to ensure that the planets go into their orbits. You said something like God certainly knew his mathematics or something like...

That's right. patronising God in this stuff. Quite good at math. It argues a deity very well skilled in mechanics and geometry. That was Newton's view of the deity, and you can see a certain self-projection in that, of course. But one other scientific development that was really significant at the 17th century was the microscope.

And I just like to say a little about that, because the revelation of a new world and the richness and diversity of creation revealed through the microscope, created a genuine sense of awe. And among some of the early philosophers in England, like Robert Boyle, for example, he was just absolutely smitten by the fact that God could have concentrated life in such a minute thing as a might. So one has this sense that looking through natural objects, looking through the microscope at natural objects, you saw all their perfection. If you looked at man-made things through the microscope, something like a very finely home needle,

it would appear to be a botched job. It lacked that elegance, that perfection, which natural objects seemed to have. And so one could construct an argument by analogy to suggest that the natural world is a series of artefacts, but they are of exquisite design compared with man-made things. You talked to Martin Udner, We could talk about Hume and about Kant,

but I'd like to move on to Paley, because Darwin in his early years was bolstered by Paley. Can you tell us what Paley's, the period of time that Paley ideas were strong and what he was saying? Yes, sure. Paley published his natural theology, which is perhaps his most well-known text in 1802.

In many ways, his book is a resuscitation of arguments that had been urged before. It begins with that very well-known analogy in which he says that the world is essentially like a piece of clockwork in the sense that things conspire together for ends and purposes. And he sees all these things conspiring to create a viable world. The argument he most enjoys, I think, and celebrates, rests on anatomical structures. He thinks if you examine,

Even things like the hinges on the wings of an earwig or the human epiglottis, you see such intricate craftsmanship. No alderman, he says, I've ever choked at a feast because the epiglottis is so wonderfully designed. Now, of course, it's... If they did, they wouldn't live to tell the tell. Well, they wouldn't live to tell the tell. And we may come to them. But in Paley's defence, because we do smile, I agree at the naivety of some of these arguments,

particularly from a post-Darwinian perspective. But I think Paley is often caricatured because there were other facets to his argument, some of which were arguably less refutable from a Darwinian perspective. For example, he celebrates the law-likeness of nature, the regularities, the order, the uniformity of nature, which he explains in terms of the constancy of the divine will. He also talks a lot about the unity of nature. nature. And these are aspects of the world which are arguably less vulnerable to criticism. Standing up, Darwin published on the Origin of Species in 1859, sort of 57 years after the

Paley's thing. Did that contain a wholesale rejection of Paley's views on design? I think that changes towards Paley's views were happening decades before the publication of the origin of species. In the 1820s, Robert Grant and the... the medical schools in Edinburgh, really started to look at anatomy in a very, very different way. And Adrian Desmond, in his book, The Politics of Evolution, really stresses how the social fabric of the gentry versus radical London really drove a lot of the ideas of evolution forward, really long before Darwin came, wrote the origin of species. I think Paley's ideas were seen even within the church at the time as being really of not much use

to keeping people faithful. You know, it really wasn't, they weren't really much use anymore scientifically and couldn't be used by the church either. So I think, I think Darwin's, the publication of Darwin's book wasn't what really caused the rejection of Paley's ideas.

It was in the air. But as I understand it, Darwin began by being supported by Paley's ideas and then his own work turned him against them. I think that's true. I think Paley's ideas were very much a part of that level of society

in which Darwin lived and worked. It was natural theology, it was Cambridge, it was those kind of aristocratic scientists, gentlemen scientists, and definitely not the sort of rabble scientists that were kind of roaming around in London. And I think natural theology was still used to teach science in universities,

but not in medical schools. Alfred Wallace was credited with discovering the mechanics of evolution independently of Darwin. How did these discover as impact on the two men's religious perspectives? Well, I think not only was he credited, but he did. He wrote two amazing papers from the Malay archipelago, one in 1855, again long before

the publication of the origin and another one in 1858. And he wrote interestingly in a letter to his brother-in-law, right, from, again, just after the publication of the origin of species. and he says he's been amongst many men and seen many lands and he's weighed all the evidence and he remains an utter disbeliever in all the things that you hold sacred. So Wallace came to his materialistic sort of his discovery of the mechanism of evolution, which is natural selection, by being completely a disbeliever. Whereas Darwin's religious views, I think, are a little bit more obscure.

I'm not sure they ever really come out. And he's never quite so emphatically says, I believe this or I believe that, as Wallace does. Now, John, I wanted to ask you, if you can just briefly tell us in the mid-late 19th century, the religious, the consequences inside the church, let's say, of this, it's been said before, but I think we must have it as part of this discussion here now as well. Right, how did the church respond to evolution? It's a very big question. There is a standard caricature, of course, which just lines up all the scientists on one side

and the theologians on the other and says this was a scrap, perhaps the major scrap in the history of Western culture. In the context of the church, one detects a huge range of reactions from outright opposition, which we still see in the world today, but also a willingness to embrace evolutionary ideas. The standard anecdote, of course, is the famous British Association meeting in Oxford in 1860, where the Bishop of Oxford, Samuel Wilberforce, thought he might score a point against the Darwinians by asking Huxley whether he preferred to think of himself descended from an ape on his grandmothers or his grandfather's side.

And the legend, of course, is that Huxley began to rub his hands, whispered to a neighbour, the Lord hath delivered him into mine hands, and then promptly said he would rather have an ape for an ancestor than a bishop, or words to that effect. This story has become a kind of foundation myth for scientific professionalism as the scientist vanquished the bishop. But if I could just say one thing further about this, the official sermon preached in Oxford during that meeting of the British Association was not given by the Bishop of Oxford. It was given by Frederick Temple. And Temple actually gave a sermon in which he really created the space from the theological side for the acceptance of Darwinian.

theory. Can we move now, Simon Cawain to the Burgess Shale? I began this program by referring to Stephen J. Gould, and he wrote about the Burgess Shale in his wonderful life. You too have written about it, and you've challenged Gould's findings. Now, I know this is tricky to condense all this, but here we go. Could you just say what the Burgess Shale was, what Gould's taken it was, and why you opposed that?

Certainly, with the greatest of pleasure. I have 30 seconds. Now you've got more than that. Off we go. Steve and J. Gould wrote a book, partly about our work in Cambridge, which was an investigation to a fossil deposit in Canada, which is effectively one of these small, narrow windows,

which is in a blank wall, and when you open that window, you suddenly see beyond it the most fabulous landscape, and this landscape was full of extinct and wonderful animals, and these lived about half a billion years ago. Half a billion years ago, yeah. 500 million, give or take. And in any event, partly drawing on,

some work which I and a number of others had done. He took it very much further and said, gosh, there's such a diversity of forms, and the thing which at that time was thought to evolve effectively via a long chain of circumstances, fish and something like a frog and something like a lizard and something like a shrew to ourselves, that first ancestor, if it had just accidentally gone extinct, then, of course, we wouldn't be here. And therefore he built up this enormous edifice,

which was very much in keeping, I believe, with his world pictures of whole, that evolution, as I mentioned right at the beginning of the programme, is, in one sense, deeply random, and therefore all the accidents of history confer on the whole process a complete unpredictability. And therefore, he argued, humans are a historical accident, or an evolutionary accident,

and therefore we are not meant to be here. Well, I think scientifically that has to be true. If you therefore decide that because we are here by accident, we can then, if you like, and I wouldn't say Gould would argue that, but some people may wish to, we can now make the world as we wish. In other words, we are not beholden to anything else.

there's no other structure to which we should acknowledge, then we enter into some fairly deep waters. My take on it has differed and has also evolved naturally enough over the years. And I'm very struck indeed by the fact that you can rerun the tape of life to use Stephen J. Gould's famous metaphor as many times as you like, and my argument is you're actually going to end up with a planet which will be, again, using that word very carefully, eerily like the one we see, simply because the constraints of life are such that not only,

only do you see emerging complexity, which builds on each other. You know, the whole world changes forever, and it's changed forever, of course, in the last 100,000 years when we started roaming around in large numbers and became successful agriculturalists and technology purveyors. But in all other respects, in other words, I would say, please show me an example which has not evolved twice. I'm very hard pushed to think of anything which has not evolved more than once. That brings us to the idea of convergence and things evolving more than once, in other two or three

times are very central to your thinking. Now, can you just develop that a bit more? You don't have to rush, just because it's very, very important. The famous example, which is used by most biologists, is to do with the eye. If we look at the way our eye works, it's a little bit like a camera.

If we look at a squid or an octopus, that eye is effectively identical, but we know beyond doubt that it evolved completely independently. There is an argument about the genetic underpinning, which I do not think is material. If we have time, we can talk about it. But it's much more interesting that in fact because there are certain

groups of insects they of course have the ability to smell. They use olfaction. It turns out the process of olfaction in the insect is basically identical to ours. It has to use the same neurological mechanisms. Similarly with hearing, there are only a few ways you can do it. Similarly there's some weird fish

which live in deep inky water, some of the places where Wallace worked in the Amazon for example, which scents their surrounding world not through sight so much as by generating electric fields like the famous electric eel. These live in entire electrical world. That's evolved completely independently in Africa

and in South America. So what it really excites me at the moment with regards to evolution is Darwinism is true. Wallace was right also. But it's really trying to see if we can find some deeper structures in evolution which will provide if you like a sort of road map for where things must go because we have

this vast number of theoretical alternatives but in fact curiously enough on this planet we find that again and again it's a sort of eternal return albeit built on levels of continuing emerging complexity. So what you've drawn from the Burgessau from your own other studies is randomness is not tenable. There are deep structures which force their way through to convergences

which illustrate, well, what do you think they illustrate, Saniana? Well, I think it's important to keep in mind that there's randomness and there's randomness. You know, there's complete randomness where every single event is a random event. So you reach into a bag and every bull is a different color. Or there is a level of randomness at which you draw out a color of a bull, and then the events after that carry on from that original random event. Now, I think just the complete randomness of things seems a bit of a silly paradigm

because we know that evolution by natural selection works, and it works on reproductive things. witness. So if I have more offspring than you, then my genes will carry on and the characteristics that I have will be present in more generations beyond this one than yours well. So that's a very directed kind of process. I mean, not directed in the sense of there's somebody up there with a stick and a marionette doing it, but it is an inexorable process. I think convergence, to me, anyone who studies biology is struck by the fact that solutions to problems have appeared in several different ways. Take cacti, for example. I mean, we all know cacti have spines and are kind of

big fat bodies. There are things called euphorbias, which are related to poinsettias, which have essentially come up with the same sort of, they have fat bodies and spines. Now, but they've arrived at that sort of somewhat superficial convergence. I mean, it's quite convergent in very different ways because the spines are derived from different underlying structures. But it's really then a question of when you end up with a complex thing, does it really matter where it comes from. So if you're, for instance, talking about the major problems like intelligence or even consciousness, to take another example, dolphins, wonderful example, they have a mammalian brain because we're mammals like they are. But actually, as a friend of mine in America, Laurie Marina has shown very, very clearly, the deep structure of that brain is really extremely different from ours. It has a different sort of neurology, it has different lobes. And yet overall, it's general sort of intelligence quotient and the way it behaves and the sorts of things it does in terms of memorizing. things in terms of listening to instructions and doing things in the right syntactic order, basically come out the same way.

So, again, there's an emergent property here which ultimately goes above, if your spine and your cactus comes from one place, that's actually fine. But of course, the spine is there for a very particular reason. Well, that's what's interesting about that. There's a ravenous herbivore there who doesn't want to have a lip full of these things. But that's what actually has fascinated biologists all these decades for, well, centuries about conversion. And the other thing which fascinates me in that respect is when you read the scientific literature, and these remote libraries in Oxford and Cambridge and London and so forth,

and you open these dusty volumes and you find a particular example of convergence, nearly always the person who's describing it uses a word like remarkable, uncanny, astonishing. And I find that very interesting because it sort of underpins the sense that it's almost going back to a design argument where people are a little bit uneasy and think, well, why are they so similar? Why do they use those adjectives again and again and again? But you see, I think those adjectives really are the wrong adjectives to be using. But they're used by all the workers. One of the things that, to my mind, comes up again and again with design arguments

is that we invoke design when we don't understand something. And not understanding it is possibly... I don't think that's not a simple thing. I don't quite agree with that. Well, not that we don't understand, but we came to a point where we just can't quite... You know, nobody's come up with the idea of this. That's what I mean. That's the way intelligent design goes.

But nevertheless, I think that they're the whole set of scaffoldings at all sorts of levels from, you know, what appears to be simple a cell to what appears to be complicated like a brain, which actually are integrated in such a way, which is genuinely awe-inspiring. It's totally astonishing to see the way these things actually operate. In this last lap, as it were out of the programme, can I ask, if it isn't designed,

there seems to be from what you're saying, a feeling of, a sense of direction. Is this, does this connect in any way, I'm going to ask the three of you, Simon, does this connect in any way with a theological view of life? For you, John Brooks. start with? I think for those who think within a particular religious tradition and who are used to thinking of God as some transcendent super person, and it's very difficult within the main religious traditions not to think in that way, then I think there is often an attempt to understand how such a supra person could in some sense be expressing his or her creativity. in the world.

For those who look at this problem, as it were, from a secular point of view, there has to be a suspension of disbelief to see how anybody could want to look at the issue that way, and I fully understand that. My particular concern from the recent discussion has been that we may be perhaps at risk of conflating two different concepts of design. When Simon has been, in my view,

entirely rightly distancing himself from the intelligent design, He's distanced himself from a position which is expressed by Dempsey in these words. To attribute an event to design is to say that it cannot plausibly be referred to either law or chance. Now, I find from a theological point of view, this unacceptable because it presupposes, quite apart from the fact that it wants to exploit our ignorance, it presupposes that you cannot combine the notion of law, with the notion of design. And Darwin himself said he was inclined to view the world

as if it were the result of designed laws, but with the details left to chance. I have a lot of sympathy with that view and less with Dempsey's. I also perhaps slightly off the wall on this regard actually have a view of science, which is sometimes lessen fashionable, is it's one of the great adventures we can undertake. And the reason why it's such a great adventure

is actually because it allows us to see the world it is, either at an astronomical level or biological level, as an extraordinarily well-organized place in all sorts of respects. And from that, some people may wish to derive theological comfort. I do, but you don't have to. But that's actually immaterial to the argument. There's no reason why you can't take an entirely secular view of what's going on there. But I think you have to still stand back.

And when you look at the whole setup, to again use Fred Hoyle's term, where I have more sympathy with him this time, it's a set-up job. I mean, it's a very, very peculiar set-up. And the more we learn, especially about the biochemistry and especially about the embryology, it turns out, in fact, that, you know, again, the ways you can do it are extraordinarily limited. And that could all be by accident.

It could all be just the way the world is. It could be a brute fact, and we have no other choice than to accept it. Or you might just have a sort of thing at the back of you might say, well, hang on a moment. All this is just a little too odd. The whole thing is just, well, let's think about this a bit further. But that takes us away from science.

That is not a scientific program. Sandy Doe. I think one of the problems about thinking about direction is that we're talking about us. And it's very, very hard to distance ourselves from talking about ourselves because in a way we want to make ourselves be seen in the best light. And I think one of the reasons that sometimes people want to put directions on things is we want to end up near the top of the tree. But if you think then of the most famous example

of an animal which makes tools, which is the closest to the humans, it is not the apes, it's not the chimp, it's the New Caledonian crow. Well, exactly. It's streets ahead of the other guys. And I think, but I agree with Simon. So it's getting there by itself.

I agree with Simon that there is science and there is faith. And science can explain a lot of things. And if you want to believe in something, that's fine. Well, thank you very much. It's a good ending for us. Because next week we're doing something on the Lindisfarne gospel, so we maybe just carry on the discussion in a different way. Thank you all very much, and thank you for listening.

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