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97 C H A P T E R F I V E Nature’s ‘‘Very Special Way’’ The title of this part of the book layers multiple allusions. Let me begin by trying to unpack some of those allusions. The blind watchmaker appears as the title character of a 1986 book by Richard Dawkins.∞ Significantly, the subtitle of Dawkins’s book is ‘‘Why the Evidence of Evolution Reveals a Universe without Design.’’ Also, significantly, Dawkins’s main title—The Blind Watchmaker—is itself an allusion to a famous argument against evolution advanced by William Paley, the great eighteenth-century theologian. Paley’s argument proceeds by way of an analogy. He begins by noting that if I am walking along a path and stub my toe on a stone, I have no great occasion to wonder how the stone came to be there. If someone presses me for an answer, I might say that for all I know or care the stone has been there for as long as the earth itself existed. But now suppose I am walking along the same path and look down to see a watch on the ground. I immediately ask myself how it came to be there and I find that the answer I gave for the stone simply will not su≈ce. There is no way I can believe that a watch, with its intricate design so obviously intended for some purpose, is itself the product of the same random physical forces that I can believe ‘‘constructed’’ the stone. Because the watch has a complex design and an evident purpose, there must be a watchmaker who designed it for that purpose. Paley then completes the analogy by insisting on the self-evident truth that works of nature—from plants and animals to humans—are more like watches than stones. This is how he puts it in his 1802 book Natural Theology: ‘‘Every indication of contrivance, every manifestation of design, which existed in the watch, exists in the works of nature; with the di√erence, on the side of nature, of being greater or more, and that in a degree which exceeds all computation.’’≤ Paley’s point was simply that where there is a design there must be a 98 Blind Watchmaker Meets Scatterbrained Computer Programmer designer and where there is a very good design there must be a very good designer. But more than that, the designer must be separate from the thing designed. Even the most sophisticated watch certainly cannot design itself. Of course, today we do have computers that design other computers and programs that write other programs. But Paley would not be concerned. There still needs to be a first designer or a first programmer that is not itself a computer or a program. Interestingly, in his Critique of Judgment the philosopher Immanuel Kant— another eighteenth-century figure of note—uses the same example of a watch to help make Paley’s point. Kant notes, as I just did, that inanimate matter cannot design, much less animate, itself. ‘‘That is,’’ Kant says, ‘‘the reason why the cause that produced the watch and its form does not lie in nature (the nature of this material), but lies outside nature and in a being who can act according to the ideas of a whole that he can produce through his causality.’’≥ Again, for Kant, as for Paley, design is the key. Watches may, in some sense, be produced from the metals of the earth, but the form of the watch—its design— is produced by a watchmaker. Hence, when we see design we know that there must be an intelligence at work. Indeed, we must assume this, but only when we see design. Thus Kant notes, quite correctly, that unlike the physical sciences , which can simply study the e√ects of various forces on various bodies without troubling themselves any further, the biological sciences must assume that the things they study are more than simply a random collection of particles. They must assume that these things have an intrinsic design and that each part of the thing is somehow related to this design. Additionally, they must assume that these things are all somehow part of some plan extrinsic to the thing itself, a plan that Kant will only go so far as to call an ‘‘analogue of life.’’∂ To drive home his argument Kant draws our attention to the ‘‘familiar fact that those who dissect plants and animals in order to...

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