Consciousness

• seCtIon FoUR: eVoLUtIon
  purpose for which it was constructed – telling the time. If any pieces were missing
  or in the wrong place or material, the watch would not work. He could not see
  how these many complex pieces could have come together by accident, nor by
  the effects of natural forces such as wind or rain, so he concluded

that the watch must have had a maker: that there must have existed,

at some time, and at some place or other, an artificer or artificers who

formed it for the purpose which we find it actually to answer: who

comprehended its construction, and designed its use.

(Paley, 1802, p. 3)

He thought it self-evident that ‘There cannot be design without a designer;

contrivance, without a contriver; order, without choice’. The arrangement of the

functioning parts must ‘imply the presence of intelligence and mind’ (Paley, p. 13).

So it is, he said, with the wonders of nature: the intricate design of the eye for see-

ing, the ways in which animals attract their mates, the design of valves to aid the

circulation of the blood – all these show complex design for a purpose and hence

they must have had a designer. In this way, the

argument from design becomes evidence for

the existence of God.

Paley was wrong. We now understand, as he

could not have, that design does not need a

designer. As Oxford biologist Richard Dawkins

puts it, ‘Paley’s argument is made with pas-

sionate sincerity and is informed by the best

biological scholarship of his day, but it is wrong,

gloriously and utterly wrong’ (Dawkins, 1986, p.

5). There are not just two possibilities – accident,

or design by a conscious intelligent designer.

There is a third that no one could have known

about in Paley’s day. Design for function can

appear without a designer, and Darwin’s theory

of evolution by natural selection showed how.

‘Evolution’ means gradual change, and the idea that living things might, in this

general sense, evolve was already current in Darwin’s time. His own grandfather,

Erasmus Darwin, had questioned the prevailing assumption that species were fixed

by God. And Sir Charles Lyell’s theory that geological forces could carve landscapes,

shape rivers, and throw up mountains already threatened the idea that God had

designed the earth just as we find it today. The fossil record suggested gradual

change in living things, and this demanded explanation. What was missing was any

mechanism to explain how evolution worked. This is what Darwin provided, in his

1859 book The Origin of Species. Its full title is On the Origin of Species by Means of

Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life.

His idea was this. If, over a long period of time, creatures vary (as he showed they

did), and if there is sometimes a severe struggle for life (which could not be dis-

puted – he had read Malthus’s Essay on Population), then occasionally some vari-

ation in structure or habits must occur that is advantageous to a creature. When

this happens, individuals with that characteristic have the best chance of being

FIGURE 10.1 • These are some of the finches
that Darwin collected in the
Galapagos Islands in 1835.
Each species has a different
shape of beak – essentially a
tool designed for a specific job,
from picking tiny seeds out of
crevices to crushing nuts or shells.
At the time it seemed obvious
that God must have designed
each one. As Darwin put it in
his memoir The Voyage of the
Beagle (1839/1909, p. 402),
‘one might really fancy that...
one species had been taken and
modified for different ends’. But
in 1859 Darwin explained how
beaks, finches, and the entire
natural world could have been
designed without a designer – by
natural selection.