Blind watchmaker

Author: (British) Richard Dawkins
Publisher:
Publish Date: 2005-05-01
Features: "The Clockmaker's Viewpoint" was first proposed by the 18th-century theologian Paley, who, as a supporter of creationism, put forward this famous argument: just as a precise and complex object like a watch could never come into existence out of nothing and appear suddenly, the complexity of all living organisms far exceeds that of a watch, and it must undoubtedly have been deliberately created by a skilled hand. However, Darwin's theory of natural selection emphasizes that the evolution of species has no special purpose. The French biologist Jacob once said: nature is a skillful tinkerer, not a masterful inventor. Therefore, if we still want to compare nature to a clockmaker, we can only say it is a "blind" clockmaker. The renowned British popular science writer Dawkins, following up on his breakthrough work The Selfish Gene, once again presents his compelling arguments on evolutionary biology. Regarding the origin of life, whether you believe in creationism or natural selection, Dawkins combines the missionary fervor of clergy with a pragmatic scientific spirit, using nearly 250,000 words to interpret the mysteries of life's history, making it one of the most important books on evolution since Darwin. The translator of this book, Mr. Wang Daohuan, said: "If you only want to read one book about evolution in your entire life, this is the one!" Evolution is a fact of Earth's life history, and the theory that explains it is the theory of evolution. However, there is only one theory of evolution that adheres to scientific principles and known biological principles, and that is Darwin's theory of evolution. The Chinese generally only know the maxim "survival of the fittest" when it comes to evolution, but they are less familiar with the content of the theory itself. This book is the most popular textbook on evolution in the English-speaking world and has been translated into many foreign languages. It is the only book in the Chinese-speaking world that provides a detailed theoretical explanation of the theory of evolution. The book has won the Royal Society of Literature's Best Non-Fiction Book Award in the UK and the Los Angeles Times Literary Prize in the United States. The author, Dawkins, is one of the most famous evolutionary biology theorists in the UK and is currently a professor at the Oxford University Chair of Science Education. The term "clock" in the title of this book is a metaphor for biology, emphasizing that the structure and functional mechanisms of living organisms are both complex and intricate. In Western academic tradition, "clock" is also a metaphor for the "mode of operation of the world," symbolizing that the mechanisms of nature are interconnected and meticulous. The "clockmaker" was originally a fragment of the "Creator": animals are the most complex things known in the universe. It goes without saying that the universe we know is just a drop in the ocean compared to the true universe. There may be more complex things on other planets, and some of them may even know us, though it remains uncertain. But this will not change the argument I want to propose. Complex things, wherever they are, require a special explanation. We want to know how they came into being and why they are so complex. I will argue that the explanation for complex things in the universe, wherever they appear, is likely the same; it applies to us, chimpanzees, worms, oak trees, and monsters in outer space. On the other hand, the "simple" things I refer to have different explanations, such as rocks, clouds, rivers, galaxies, and quarks. These are all playthings of physics. Chimpanzees, dogs, bats, cockroaches, humans, insects, dandelions, bacteria, and extraterrestrials are playthings of biology. The difference lies in the complexity of design. Biology studies complex things that make us feel as if they were designed for a specific purpose. Physics studies simple things that do not make us feel as if they were designed. At first glance, artificial things like computers and cars seem to be exceptions. They are complex and clearly designed, but they are not alive; they are made of metal and plastic, not muscle and blood. In this book, I will firmly regard them as objects of biological study. The reader might ask, "You can do that, but are they really?" Words are servants, not masters. For different purposes, we find it convenient to use words in different ways. Most cooking books regard lobsters as fish. Zoologists are very critical of this practice. They point out that calling lobsters "humansfish" would be fairer, as fish are more closely related to humans than to lobsters. Speaking of fairness and lobsters, I know that the court must now rule whether lobsters are insects or "animals," which concerns whether humans can throw them alive into boiling water. In my zoological jargon, lobsters are certainly not insects. They are animals, but so are insects and humans. It is unnecessary to get worked up about different people using words in different ways, although I do get angry when I encounter people who boil live lobsters in my daily life. Chefs and lawyers have their own ways of using words, and in this book, I also have my own. Are computers and cars "really" biological? Don't be picky! I mean: if we found complex things like computers and cars on a planet, we should conclude without hesitation that there is or has been life there. Machines are the direct products of life; they are complex and designed because they were created by living beings. They are indicators of the existence of life. Fossils, skeletons, and corpses are the same. I mentioned earlier that physics studies simple things, which might sound strange. Physics seems to be a complex subject because our understanding of physical concepts is difficult. Our brains are designed for hunting, gathering, mating, and raising children; the world our brains are adapted to is composed of medium-sized things moving at moderate speeds in three dimensions. We lack the appropriate "equipment" to understand extremely small and extremely large things; things that exist for durations measured in picoseconds (one-trillionth of a second) or billions of years; particles without position; forces and fields that we cannot see or touch (we can only know them because they affect what we can see and touch). We think physics is complex because it is difficult for us to understand, and also because physics books are full of difficult mathematics. However, the objects that physicists study are still fundamentally simple. For example, clouds composed of gas or particles, or small pieces of uniform matter like crystals, are merely repeated atomic patterns. At least by biological standards, they lack complex operating components. Even large physical objects like stars have only a relatively limited number of components, and their organization is somewhat random. The behavior of non-biological objects in physics is very simple, which is why existing mathematical language can describe them, and this is why physics books are full of mathematics. Physics books may be complex, but they are the same as computers and cars—they are products of the human brain. The objects and phenomena described in a physics book are simpler than a single cell in the author's body. That author's body contains a trillion such cells, divided into many types, organized according to intricate blueprints and completed with fine engineering, to create a working machine capable of writing a book. Whenever things are at extremes—physics at extreme scales (the atom and the universe) and other difficult extremes, or biology at the extreme of "complexity"—our brains struggle to cope. No one has yet invented a mathematics that can describe a physicist like this, including even a single cell of his. What we can do is find some universal principles to understand the physiology and existence of living things. This is where we start. We want to know why we and all other complex things exist. Now we can answer that question in principle, even if we don't yet grasp the details of "complexity." To illustrate, most of us don't understand the details of how airplanes work. Perhaps the people who built them don't fully understand either: engine experts don't understand wings, and wing experts have only a vague concept of engines. Even wing experts don't fully understand wings and cannot describe them precisely mathematically: they can predict wing behavior in airflow only because they have studied the behavior of wing models in wind tunnels or simulated them on computers. Biologists can also adopt this approach to understand animals. However, even though our knowledge of airplanes is incomplete, we all know roughly the process by which they came into being. First, someone designed them on a drawing board. Then, others manufactured parts according to the blueprints, and even more people assembled the parts into a complete machine using various tools. Essentially, the process of an airplane's emergence is not considered a mystery by us, because it was created by humans. Designing for a specific purpose and systematically assembling parts according to the design are things we all know and understand, because we all have some experience with them, even if it's just playing with Lego toys as children. So what about our bodies? We are all machines, like airplanes, but more complex. Are we also designed and assembled by a skilled engineer on a drawing board? Not at all. This answer is surprising, and we only arrived at it a little over a century ago. The first person to propose this answer was Darwin. At the time, many people were unwilling or unable to understand his explanation. When I first heard of Darwin's theory as a child, I flatly rejected it. Until the second half of the 19th century, almost everyone in history firmly believed in the opposite answer—the "conscious designer" theory. Many still believe it today, perhaps because the true explanation—Darwin's theory—is still not a standard part of national education. Shocking, isn't it? It is certain that misunderstandings of Darwin's theory are still widely prevalent.