The Blind Watchmaker

by Richard Dawkins

  Punctuationists, then, are really just as gradualist as Darwin or any other Darwinian; they just insert long periods of stasis between spurts of gradual evolution. As I said, the one respect in which punctuationists do differ from other schools of Darwinism is in their strong emphasis on stasis as something positive: as an active resistance to evolutionary change rather than as, simply, absence of evolutionary change. And this is the one respect in which they are quite probably wrong. It remains for me to clear up the mystery of why they thought they were so far from Darwin and neo-Darwinism.

  The answer lies in a confusion of two meanings of the word ‘gradual’, coupled with the confusion, which I have been at pains to dispel here but which lies at the back of many peoples’ minds, between punctuationism and saltationism. Darwin was a passionate antisaltationist, and this led him to stress, over and over again, the extreme gradualness of the evolutionary changes that he was proposing. The reason is that saltation, to him, meant what I have called Boeing 747 macromutation. It meant the sudden calling into existence, like Pallas Athene from the head of Zeus, of brand-new complex organs at a single stroke of the genetic wand. It meant fully formed, complex working eyes springing up from bare skin, in a single generation. The reason it meant these things to Darwin is that that is exactly what it meant to some of his most influential opponents, and they really believed in it as a major factor in evolution.

  The Duke of Argyll, for instance, accepted the evidence that evolution had happened, but he wanted to smuggle divine creation in by the back door. He wasn’t alone. Instead of a single, once and for all creation in the Garden of Eden, many Victorians thought that the deity had intervened repeatedly, at crucial points in evolution. Complex organs like eyes, instead of evolving from simpler ones by slow degrees as Darwin had it, were thought to have sprung into existence in a single instant. Such people rightly perceived that such instant ‘evolution’, if it occurred, would imply supernatural intervention: that is what they believed in. The reasons are the statistical ones I have discussed in connection with hurricanes and Boeing 747s. 747 saltationism is, indeed, just a watered-down form of creationism. Putting it the other way around, divine creation is the ultimate in saltation. It is the ultimate leap from inanimate clay to fully formed man. Darwin perceived this too. He wrote in a letter to Sir Charles Lyell, the leading geologist of his day:

  If I were convinced that I required such additions to the theory of natural selection, I would reject it as rubbish … I would give nothing for the theory of Natural selection, if it requires miraculous additions at any one stage of descent.

  This is no petty matter. In Darwin’s view, the whole point of the theory of evolution by natural selection was that it provided a non-miraculous account of the existence of complex adaptations. For what it is worth, it is also the whole point of this book. For Darwin, any evolution that had to be helped over the jumps by God was not evolution at all. It made a nonsense of the central point of evolution. In the light of this, it is easy to see why Darwin constantly reiterated the gradualness of evolution. It is easy to see why he wrote that sentence quoted in Chapter 4:

  If it could be demonstrated that any complex organ existed, which could not possibly have been formed by numerous, successive, slight modifications, my theory would absolutely break down.

  There is another way of looking at the fundamental importance of gradualness for Darwin. His contemporaries, like many people still today, had a hard time believing that the human body and other such complex entities could conceivably have come into being through evolutionary means. If you think of the single-celled Amoeba as our remote ancestor — as, until quite recently, it was fashionable to do — many people found it hard in their minds to bridge the gap between Amoeba and man. They found it inconceivable that from such simple beginnings something so complex could emerge. Darwin appealed to the idea of a gradual series of small steps as a means of overcoming this kind of incredulity. You may find it hard to imagine an Amoeba turning into a man, the argument runs; but you do not find it hard to imagine an Amoeba turning into a slightly different kind of Amoeba. From this it is not hard to imagine it turning into a slightly different kind of slightly different kind of …, and so on. As we saw in Chapter 3, this argument overcomes our incredulity only if we stress that there was an extremely large number of steps along the way, and only if each step is very tiny. Darwin was constantly battling against this source of incredulity, and he constantly made use of the same weapon: the emphasis on gradual, almost imperceptible change, spread out over countless generations.

  Incidentally, it is worth quoting J. B. S. Haldane’s characteristic piece of lateral thinking in combating the same source of incredulity. Something like the transition from Amoeba to man, he pointed out, goes on in every mother’s womb in a mere nine months. Development is admittedly a very different process from evolution but, nevertheless, anyone sceptical of the very possibility of a transition from single cell to man has only to contemplate his own foetal beginnings to have his doubts allayed. I hope I shall not be thought a pedant if I stress, by the way, that the choice of Amoeba for the title of honorary ancestor is simply following a whimsical tradition. A bacterium would be a better choice, but even bacteria, as we know them, are modern organisms.

  To resume the argument, Darwin laid great stress on the gradualness of evolution because of what he was arguing against: the misconceptions about evolution that were prevalent in the nineteenth century. The meaning of ‘gradual’, in the context of those times, was ‘opposite of saltation’. Eldredge and Gould, in the context of the late twentieth century, use ‘gradual’ in a very different sense. They in effect, though not explicitly, use it to mean ‘at a constant speed’, and they oppose to it their own notion of ‘punctuation’. They criticize gradualism in this sense of ‘constant speedism’. No doubt they are right to do so: in its extreme form it is as absurd as my Exodus parable.

  But to couple this justifiable criticism with a criticism of Darwin is simply to confuse two quite separate meanings of the word ‘gradual’. In the sense in which Eldredge and Gould are opposed to gradualism, there is no particular reason to doubt that Darwin would have agreed with them. In the sense of the word in which Darwin was a passionate gradualist, Eldredge and Gould are also gradualists. The theory of punctuated equilibrium is a minor gloss on Darwinism, one which Darwin himself might well have approved if the issue had been discussed in his time. As a minor gloss, it does not deserve a particularly large measure of publicity. The reason it has in fact received such publicity, and why I have felt obliged to devote a whole chapter of this book to it, is simply that the theory has been sold — oversold by some journalists — as if it were radically opposed to the views of Darwin and his successors. Why has this happened?

  There are people in the world who desperately want not to have to believe in Darwinism. They seem to fall into three main classes. First, there are those who, for religious reasons, want evolution itself to be untrue. Second, there are those who have no reason to deny that evolution has happened but who, often for political or ideological reasons, find Darwin’s theory of its mechanism distasteful. Of these, some find the idea of natural selection unacceptably harsh and ruthless; others confuse natural selection with randomness, and hence ‘meaninglessness’, which offends their dignity; yet others confuse Darwinism with Social Darwinism, which has racist and other disagreeable overtones. Third, there are people, including many working in what they call (often as a singular noun) ‘the media’, who just like seeing applecarts upset, perhaps because it makes good journalistic copy; and Darwinism has become sufficiently established and respectable to be a tempting applecart.

  Whatever the motive, the consequence is that if a reputable scholar breathes so much as a hint of criticism of some detail of current Darwinian theory, the fact is eagerly seized on and blown up out of all proportion. So strong is this eagerness, it is as though there were a powerful amplifier, with a finely tuned microphone selectively listening o
ut for anything that sounds the tiniest bit like opposition to Darwinism. This is most unfortunate, for serious argument and criticism is a vitally important part of any science, and it would be tragic if scholars felt the need to muzzle themselves because of the microphones. Needless to say the amplifier, though powerful, is not hi-fi: there is plenty of distortion! A scientist who cautiously whispers some slight misgiving about a current nuance of Darwinism is liable to hear his distorted and barely recognizable words booming and echoing out through the eagerly waiting loudspeakers.

  Eldredge and Gould don’t whisper. They speak out, with eloquence and power! What they say is often pretty subtle, but the message that gets across is that something is wrong with Darwinism. Hallelujah, ‘the scientists’ said it themselves! The editor of Biblical Creation has written:

  it is undeniable that the credibility of our religious and scientific position has been greatly strengthened by the recent lapse in neo-Darwinian morale. And this is something we must exploit to the full.

  Eldredge and Gould have both been doughty champions in the fight against redneck creationism. They have shouted their complaints at the misuse of their own words, only to find that, for this part of their message, the microphones suddenly went dead on them. I can sympathize, for I have had a similar experience with a different set of microphones, in this case politically rather than religiously tuned.

  What needs to be said now, loud and clear, is the truth: that the theory of punctuated equilibrium lies firmly within the neo-Darwinian synthesis. It always did. It will take time to undo the damage wrought by the overblown rhetoric, but it will be undone. The theory of punctuated equilibrium will come to be seen in proportion, as an interesting but minor wrinkle on the surface of neo-Darwinian theory. It certainly provides no basis for any ‘lapse in neo-Darwinian morale’, and no basis whatever for Gould to claim that the synthetic theory (another name for neo-Darwinism) ‘is effectively dead’. It is as if the discovery that the Earth is not a perfect sphere but a slightly flattened spheroid were given banner treatment under the headline:

  COPERNICUS WRONG. FLAT EARTH THEORY VINDICATED.

  But, to be fair, Gould’s remark was aimed not so much at the alleged ‘gradualism’ of the Darwinian synthesis as at another of its claims. This is the claim, which Eldredge and Gould dispute, that all evolution, even on the grandest geological timescale, is an extrapolation of events that take place within populations or species. They believe that there is a higher form of selection which they call ‘species selection’. I am deferring this topic to the next chapter. The next chapter is also the place to deal with another school of biologists who, on equally flimsy grounds, have in some cases been passed off as anti-Darwinian, the so-called ‘transformed cladists’. These belong within the general field of taxonomy, the science of classification.

  CHAPTER 10

  The one true tree of life

  This book is mainly about evolution as the solution of the complex ‘design’ problem; evolution as the true explanation for the phenomena that Paley thought proved the existence of a divine watchmaker. This is why I keep going on about eyes and echolocation. But there is another whole range of things that the theory of evolution explains. These are the phenomena of diversity: the pattern of different animal and plant types distributed around the world, and the distribution of characteristics among them. Although I am mainly concerned with eyes and other pieces of complex machinery, I mustn’t neglect this other aspect of evolution’s role in helping us to understand nature. So this chapter is about taxonomy.

  Taxonomy is the science of classification. For some people it has an undeservedly dull reputation, a subconscious association with dusty museums and the smell of preserving fluid, almost as though it were being confused with taxidermy. In fact it is anything but dull. It is, for reasons that I do not fully understand, one of the most acrimoniously controversial fields in all of biology. It is of interest to philosophers and historians. It has an important role to play in any discussion of evolution. And from within the ranks of taxonomists have come some of the most outspoken of those modern biologists who pretend to be anti-Darwinian.

  Although taxonomists mostly study animals or plants, all sorts of other things can be classified: rocks, warships, books in a library, stars, languages. Orderly classification is often represented as a measure of convenience, a practical necessity, and this is indeed a part of the truth. The books in a large library are nearly useless unless they are organized in some nonrandom way so that books on a particular subject can be found when you want them. The science, or it may be an art, of librarianship is an exercise in applied taxonomy. For the same kind of reason, biologists find their life made easier if they can pigeonhole animals and plants in agreed categories with names. But to say that this is the only reason for animal and plant taxonomy would be to miss most of the point. For evolutionary biologists there is something very special about the classification of living organisms, something that is not true of any other kind of taxonomy. It follows from the idea of evolution that there is one uniquely correct branching family tree of all living things, and we can base our taxonomy upon it. In addition to its uniqueness, this taxonomy has the singular property that I shall call perfect nesting. What this means, and why it is so important, is a major theme of this chapter.

  Let us use the library as an example of nonbiological taxonomy. There is no single, unique, correct solution to the problem of how the books in a library or a bookshop should be classified. One librarian might divide his collection up into the following major categories: science, history, literature, other arts, foreign works, etc. Each of these major departments of the library would be subdivided. The science wing of the library might have subdivisions into biology, geology, chemistry, physics, and so on. The books in the biology section of the science wing might be subdivided into shelves devoted to physiology, anatomy, biochemistry, entomology, and so on. Finally, within each shelf, the books might be housed in alphabetical order. Other major wings of the library, the history wing, the literature wing, the foreign-language wing, and so on, would be subdivided in similar ways. The library is, therefore, hierarchically divided in a way that makes it possible for a reader to home in on the book that he wants. Hierarchical classification is convenient because it enables the borrower to find his way around the collection of books quickly. It is for the same kind of reason that the words in dictionaries are arranged in alphabetical order.

  But there is no unique hierarchy by which the books in a library must be arranged. A different librarian might choose to organize the same collection of books in a different, but still hierarchical, way. He might not, for instance, have a separate foreign-language wing, but might prefer to house books, regardless of language, in their appropriate subject areas: German biology books in the biology section, German history books in the history section, and so on. A third librarian might adopt the radical policy of housing all books, on whatever subject, in chronological order of publication, relying on card indexes (or computer equivalents) to find books on desired topics.

  These three library plans are quite different from each other, but they would probably all work adequately and would be thought acceptable by many readers, though not, incidentally, by the choleric, elderly London clubman whom I once heard on the radio berating his club’s committee for employing a librarian. The library had got along for a hundred years without organization, and he didn’t see why it needed organizing now. The interviewer mildly asked him how he thought the books ought to be arranged. ‘Tallest on the left, shortest on the right!’, he roared without hesitation. Popular bookshops classify their books into major sections that reflect popular demand. Instead of science, history, literature, geography, and so on, their major departments are gardening, cookery, ‘TV titles’, the occult, and I once saw a shelf prominently labelled ‘RELIGION AND UFOs’.

  So, there is no correct solution to the problem of how to classify books. Librarians can have sensible disagreements with one anot
her about classification policy, but the criteria by which arguments are won or lost will not include the ‘truth’ or ‘correctness’ of one classification system relative to another. Rather, the criteria that are bandied about in argument will be ‘convenience for library users’, ‘speed of finding books’, and so on. In this sense the taxonomy of books in a library can be said to be arbitrary. This doesn’t imply that it is unimportant to devise a good classification system; far from it. What it does mean is that there is no single classification system which, in a world of perfect information, would be universally agreed as the only correct classification. The taxonomy of living creatures on the other hand, as we shall see, does have this strong property that the taxonomy of books lacks; at least it does if we take up an evolutionary standpoint.

  It is, of course, possible to devise any number of systems for classifying living creatures, but I shall show that all but one of these are just as arbitrary as any librarian’s taxonomy. If it is simply convenience that is required, a museum keeper might classify his specimens according to size and keeping conditions: large stuffed specimens; small dried specimens pinned on cork boards in trays; pickled ones in bottles; microscopic ones on slides, and so on. Such groupings of convenience are common in zoos. In the London Zoo rhinos are housed in the ‘Elephant House’ for no better reason than that they need the same kind of stoutly fortified cages as elephants. An applied biologist might classify animals into harmful (subdivided into medical pests, agricultural pests and directly dangerous biters or stingers), beneficial (subdivided in similar ways) and neutral. A nutritionist might classify animals according to the food value of their meat to humans, again with elaborate subdivision of categories. My grandmother once embroidered a cloth book about animals for children, which classified them by their feet. Anthropologists have documented numerous elaborate systems of animal taxonomy used by tribes around the world.