Sinopsis
If anything is true about nature, it is that plants and animals seem intricately and almost perfectly designed for living their lives. Squids and flatfish change color and pattern to blend in with their surroundings, becoming invisible to predator and prey. Bats have radar to home in on insects at night. Hummingbirds, which can hover in place and change position in an instant, are far more agile than any human helicopter, and have long tongues to sip nectar lying deep within flowers. And the flowers they visit also appear designed—to use hummingbirds as sex aids. For, while the hummingbird is busy sipping nectar, the flower attaches pollen to its bill, enabling it to fertilize the next flower that the bird visits. Nature resembles a well-oiled machine, with every species an intricate cog or gear.
What does all this seem to imply? A master mechanic, of course. This conclusion was most famously expressed by the eighteenth-century English philosopher William Paley. If we came across a watch lying on the ground, he said, we would certainly recognize it as the work of a watchmaker. Likewise, the existence of well-adapted organisms and their intricate features surely implied a conscious, celestial designer—God. Let’s look at Paley’s argument, one of the most famous in the history of philosophy:
When we come to inspect the watch, we perceive . . . that its several parts are framed and put together for a purpose, e.g. that they are so formed and adjusted as to produce motion, and that motion so regulated as to point out the hour of the day; that, if the different parts had been differently shaped from what they are, if a different size from what they are, or placed after any other manner, or in any other order than that in which they are placed, either no motion at all would have been carried on in the machine, or none which would have answered the use that is now served by it. . . . Every indication of contrivance, every manifestation of design, which existed in the watch, exists in the works of nature; with the difference, on the side of nature, of being greater and more, and that in a degree which exceeds all computation.
The argument Paley put forward so eloquently was both commonsensical and ancient. When he and his fellow “natural theologians” described plants and animals, they believed that they were cataloging the grandeur and ingenuity of God manifested in his well-designed creatures.
Content
- What Is Evolution?
- Written in the Rocks
- Remnants: Vestiges, Embryos, and Bad Design
- The Geography of Life
- The Engine of Evolution
- How Sex Drives Evolution
- The Origin of Species
- What About Us?
- Evolution Redux
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