The Creature on the Heath

"In crossing a heath, suppose I pitched my foot against a stone and were asked how the stone came to be there, I might possibly answer that for anything I knew to the contrary it had lain there forever; nor would it, perhaps, be very easy to show the absurdity of this answer. But suppose I had found a watch upon the ground, and it should be inquired how the watch happened to be in that place, I should hardly think of the answer which I had before given, that for anything I knew the watch might have always been there. Yet why should not this answer serve for the watch as well as for the stone? Why is it not as admissible in the second case as in the first? For this reason, and for no other, namely, that when we come to inspect the watch, we perceive -- what we could not discover in the stone -- that its several parts are framed and put together for a purpose." [William Paley, Natural Theology, Chapter Four]

Paley is, in many ways, the 18th century forerunner of today's Intelligent Design movement. His example of finding something a clearly designed as a watch lying on the heath is restated, in more complex form, by Michael Behe. In inspecting the watch, Behe would point out that the watch was irreducibly complex (that it could not function with even one of its parts missing) and William Dembski would add that it also displays specified complexity (that it must be as configured to function and is sufficiently complex that it could not be the result of chance).

However, the fact remains, the debate between evolution and intelligent design isn't about watches (or even mousetraps) but rather about animals. A lot of people, impressed by Behe and Dembski's lectures, and liking the idea of empirically proving the existence of God, enjoy saying that intuiting design from irreducible complexity or specified complexity is so incredibly obvious that one has to make an active effort to suppress this assumption.

Maybe so, maybe not. Let us embark upon the heath, and rather than sinking into despair and madness like Lear, Fool and Kent, let us instead imagine that we come across a strange creature, the like of which we have never seen before. (The joys of Google image search.)

Now, this definitely fits the bill of "strange creature", but imagining that we happened across it upon the heath, would we immediately assume that some deity, alien or mad scientist had created it? Or would we assume that there must be a small population of such creatures thereabouts (perhaps shy and retiring creatures seldom seen) and that this strange creature was in fact descended from a strange creature mother and a strange creature father? Myself, I would generally assume the latter -- unless some peculiar thing about it began to lead me to believe that it was unlike other animals and was not in fact descended from others of its own kind.

What am I getting at, you may wonder, and will I ever get to the point? The point is this: animals fall into a different category from any other physical thing in that they are the only things capable of creating new beings like themselves. When you see an animal, you assume that it is the offspring of another animal. When you see a car, you do not assume that it is the offspring of another car. This is because you understand that animals reproduce and manufactured objects do not. Further, reproduction produces slight variances in result. Sexually reproducing animals do not produce exact copies of themselves, but rather variations based upon the inherited characteristics from both parents.

Now, the fact that animals can reproduce and that their offspring have variations certainly does not prove that an ancestral animal was not created or modified by some intelligent being. But it does mean that one needs to give the question more thought before announcing a sweeping conclusion such as: "Anything with specified complexity or irreducible complexity must be designed, and therefore animals were obviously designed."

Clearly, if animals were not capable of reproducing, then finding one would suggest manufacture or indeed (given the complexity of most animals as compared to any machine) an outright miracle. However, as things stand what we can say with surety is: "Any non reproducing thing which is found to possess specified complexity or irreducible complexity must be the product of intelligent design. Any reproducing thing which possesses specified complexity or irreducible complexity may be the product of either design or the offspring of other organisms -- most likely the latter since we have no idea how to manufacture a living organism."

This takes us back to the question of: From what, then, do these animals descend? And that, of course, is the question. (What, you expected answers?) More later...

UPDATE: Welcome Mark Shea readers. If you're interested in more, do check out today's follow-up post on evolution.