The blind watchmaker

Dawkins is one of the greatest defenders of Darwinism in its difficult times, he too, like the rest of us, does not understand why, many generations after its publication and proof beyond doubt, it still arouses objection * Chapter from the book The Blind Watch

For reasons that are not entirely clear to me, it seems that Darwin's theory needs a defense more than other, equally established truths, in other fields of science. Many of us do not understand anything about quantum theory, or about Einstein's two theories of relativity, the special and the general, but the fact of two in itself does not inspire them to oppose these theories. Darorin's theory, unlike Einstein's theory, for example, serves as a convenient target for critics - even if they do not know about it A thing and a half. I think one of the problems with Darwin's theory is, as Jacques Muny wittily remarked, that everyone thinks they understand it. Indeed, this is a remarkably simple theory.
Child's play, you would say. Compared to most of physics and mathematics. Basically, it boils down to the idea that there is non-random reproduction, instead of hereditary variation, there are far-reaching consequences, if only there is enough time for them to accumulate. But we have every reason to believe that this is a misleading simplification. We should not forget that despite the apparent simplicity of the theory, no one thought of it before Charles Darwin and Alfred Wallace, in the middle of the nineteenth century - almost 300 years after Newton's principles, more than 2,000 years after Artosthenes measured the circumference of a sphere Country.

How is it that intellectuals of the stature of Newton, Galileo, Descartes, Leibniz, Hume and Aristotle did not come up with such a simple idea? Why did she have to wait for two Victorian naturalists? What happened to those philosophers and mathematicians, who all ignored him? And how is it that such a great idea has not yet been assimilated, most of it as a whole, in the public's consciousness?

It's almost as if the human mind was specifically designed to misunderstand Darwin's theory, and find it difficult to believe it. Take for example the question of "coincidence", which is sometimes dramatically presented as blind chance. And the vast majority of those who attack Darwin's theory cling with inappropriate zeal to the mistaken idea that there is nothing more than completely random chance here. Since the complexity of life embodies the complete opposite of chance, anyone who thinks that Darwin's theory weighs against chance will certainly be very easy for him to disprove... One of the tasks I have taken upon myself is to refute the legend that people are so eager to believe, as if Darwin's theory is a theory of "coincidence ".

Another way in which we tend to freeze in Darwin's theory stems from the claim that our mind is built to handle events with a time scale that is completely different from that which characterizes evolutionary change.

We are able to probe into the depth of processes that last seconds, minutes, years, or at most decades, until they are completed. Darwin's theory is a theory of incremental changes so slow that thousands of decades, if not millions, are required to complete them. All our intuition considerations, about what is reasonable and what is not reasonable, turn out to be wrong by several orders of magnitude. The sophisticated mechanism we have been equipped with for skepticism and subjective probability errs by huge margins, because it is due to the irony of fate, it is evolution that directed it - to operate in the field of a few decades, the duration of human life. A great effort of the power of imagination is needed to go beyond the prison of the accepted time scale, and I will try to help the reader in this effort. A third aspect in which our minds are equipped with a predisposition to oppose Darwin's theory, stems from our multiple success as creative designers. Our world is full of engineering marvels and works of art. We are completely used to the idea that complex elegance indicates skillful design with first thought. This may be the reason for the belief, which was accepted by the majority of human beings who have ever lived, regarding the existence of some supernatural being. It took Darwin and Wallace a great embrace of the power of imagination to understand, contrary to all intuition, that there is another way - and after understanding it, much more plausible - for the emergence of complex "design" from primordial simplicity. This adoption of the power of imagination was so strong that even today, many are not ready to stand up to it.

The main purpose of this book is to help the reader spread the wings of his imagination. Every author hopes, of course, that his book will have an impact that is not merely transitory. But every advocate understands the need not only to present the eternal principles of his cause, but also to deal with the categories of his time, which present opposing, or apparently opposing, views. There is a danger that some of these arguments, even if they are presented with great fervor today, will seem terribly outdated in the decades to come. Many have pointed to the paradox that the first edition of the Origin of Species presented a better argument than the sixth edition. The reason is that Darwin found himself forced, in the later editions, to respond to criticisms that were hurled at him at the time when the first edition appeared - criticisms that seem so outdated to us today that the answers to them are only disturbing, and in some places even misleading.

Nevertheless, the temptation to ignore the criticism that wastes your time, which seems to you like a pigeon's cuckoo, is a temptation that should not be responded to for reasons of courtesy not only to the critics but also to their confused readers. Although I have my own private ideas on the question of which chapters in the book will eventually be revealed as temporary, I must entrust the judgment to the reader - and to time.