Science of Discworld III Read Free Page A

done, in this case, the manufacture of living creatures. But the Bible-Belters, in their unsophisticated fundamentalist manner, recognise a threat, and they’re right. The sophisticated reconciliation of evolution with God is a wishy-washy compromise, a cop-out. Why? Because evolution knocks an enormous hole in what otherwise might be the best argument yet devised for convincing people of the existence of God, and that is the ‘argument from design’. 1
    The universe is awesome in its size, astonishing in its intricacy. Every part of it fits neatly with every other part. Consider an ant, an anteater, an antirrhinum. Each is perfectly suited to its role (or ‘purpose’). The ant exists to be eaten by anteaters, the anteater exists to eat ants, and the antirrhinum … well, bees like it, and that’s a good thing. Each organism shows clear evidence of ‘design’, as if it had been made specifically to carry out some purpose. Ants are just the right size for anteaters’ tongues to lick up, anteaters have long tongues to get into ants’ nests. Antirrhinums are exactly the shape tobe pollinated by visiting bees. And if we observe design, then surely a designer can’t be far away.
    Many people find this argument compelling, especially when it is developed at length and in detail, and ‘designer’ is given a capital ‘D’. But Darwin’s ‘dangerous idea’, as Daniel Dennett characterised it in his book with that title, puts a very big spoke into the wheel of cosmic design. It provides an alternative, very plausible, and apparently simple process, in which there is no role for design and no need for a designer. Darwin called that process ‘natural selection’; nowadays we call it ‘evolution’.
    There are many aspects of evolution that scientists don’t yet understand. The details behind Darwin’s theory are still up for grabs, and every year brings new shifts of opinion as scientists try to improve their understanding. Bible-Belters understand even less about evolution, and they typically distort it into a caricature: ‘blind chance’. They have no interest whatsoever in improving their understanding. But they do understand, far better than effete Europeans, that the theory of evolution constitutes a very dangerous attack on the psychology of religious belief. Not on its substance (because anything that science discovers can be attributed to the Deity and viewed as His mechanism for bringing the associated events about) but on its attitude. Once God is removed from the day-to-day running of the planet, and installed somewhere behind DNA biochemistry and the Second Law of Thermodynamics, it is no longer so obvious that He must be fundamental to people’s daily lives. In particular, there is no special reason to believe that He affects those lives in any way, or would wish to, so the fundamentalist preachers could well be out of a job. Which is how Darwin’s lack of a Nobel can become a debating point on American local radio. It is also the general line along which Darwin’s own thinking evolved – he began his adult life as a theology student and ended it as a somewhat tormented agnostic.
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    Seen from outside, and even more so from within, the process of scientific research is disorderly and confusing. It is tempting to deduce that scientists themselves are disorderly and confused. In a way, they are – that’s what research involves. If you knew what you. were doing it wouldn’t be research. But that’s just an apology, and there are better reasons for expecting, indeed, for valuing, that kind of confusion. The best reason is that it’s an extremely effective way of understanding the world, and having a fair degree of confidence in that understanding.
    In her book Defending Science – Reason the philosopher Susan Haack illuminates the messiness of science with a simple metaphor, the crossword puzzle. Enthusiasts know that solving a crossword puzzle is a messy business. You don’t solve the clues in