The Blind Watchmaker

 The Blind Watchmaker – Richard Dawkins

 

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, it had lain there for ever. But suppose I had found a watch on the ground, and it should be inquired how the watch happened to be in that place, I should hardly think of the answer. Some human brain must’ve designed it, got it made and dropped there. There are many many complicated designs found in the world, not designed by human. Who must’ve designed those?

Living things are too improbable and too beautifully designed to have come into existence by chance. How, then, did they come into existence? Dawkin says it is by gradual step by step transformation from simple beginnings, from primordial entities sufficiently simple to have come into existence by chance. Each successive change in the gradual evolutionary process was simple enough, relative to its predecessor, to have arisen by chance. But if you see the cumulative change it it looks extremely complex. This cumulative process is directed by non-random survival.

 

If you walk up and down a pebbly beach, your will notice that the pebbles are not arranged at random. They look segregated as if some one has arranged. Actually it’s all because of the waves hitting over and again.The waves and pebbles together constitute a simple example of a system that automatically generates non-randomness.The world is full of such systems.

Compare human eye with a designed instrument Telescope. Eye was made for vision where as the Telescope to amplify the vision. We know the designer of Telescope. Question is who designed Eye?

Does the Eye have a designer too? Is it God? Some sort of energy? 

 

Existence of life has no meticulously planned design. Moreover evolution does not have long term goals. This extremely complex design of life is a matter of loooooooong term evolution. Eyes don’t fossilise, so we don’t know how long our type of eye took to evolve its present complexity and perfection from nothing, but the time it has taken is several hundred million years. In a few hundreds of years or at the most thousands of years we’ve seen Wolf getting evolved to some dog species. Well! They are still dogs aren’t they? They haven’t turned into different kind of animals. Just think about the change from wolf to dog step by step. Approximately how many steps it must have taken? If we consider a evolution step as a normal human walking step, then on the compared scale the steps would be as many as the steps needed to travel 2 miles for a normal human. And how far would a human walk back to gauge the evolution of earth? Around 5000km, say the time taken to walk from Baghdad to London or the time taken to walk from Nasik to Chennai, come back, walk back to Chennai and come back to Nasik again. In the above analogy one walking step is equivalent to one conspicuous change in evolution that took around hundreds of years.

How about the complex design like a human eye?

Like any nerve, the optic nerve is a trunk cable, a bundle of three million insulated wires, each leading from one cell in the retina to the brain. How has this very complex system come into existence?

1.Could the extremely complicated human eye have arisen from no eye at all, millions of years ago?

2. Could the human eye have arisen directly from something slightly different from itself, something that we may call x?

The answer to Q.1 is clearly a decisive No!. The odds against a ‘Yes’ to Q.1 are many billions of times greater than the number of atoms in the universe. The answer to Q.2 is yes considering x close to present human eye. Having found x we apply the same consideration to x to date back to x’ and then x’ to x” and so on. By interposing a large enough series of x we can derive human eye from something very different from itself. All other complex designs not made by humans got formed this way. Cumulative selections can manufacture complexity while single step selection can’t.

 

Origins and Miracles:

Coincidence multiplied many times results in miracles. Can a monkey type, “Vinay” on a type writer? It will be called a miracle!

Let’s evaluate the possibility. In order for a monkey to type this by chance it needs very large amount of luck, but it is still measurable.  There are 5 characters in the word Vinay. Including the space bar, there are 27 buttons (26 letters + space bar) as total sample in a type writer. If a monkey randomly puts its finger on any letter, the probability of the above sentence getting typed is (1/27) ^5. This is around  0.00000007. say 1/14,000,000. That’s one in 1.4 crores, roughly the population of Mumbai. In a way if we think 14 million monkeys are given a typewriter each, one of them would solemnly type “Vinay”. 1.4 crore is a very big number, so the possibility of a monkey typing my name looks miracle. But in our world, this is not impossible. So there are some levels of sheer luck, not only too great for puny imaginations, but too great to be allowed in our hard headed calculations about the origin of our life. 

There are at least 10^20 billion(100 billion billion) planets in the universe. We know that life has arisen here. So it is almost inescapable that at least some among all those billions of  billions  of the other planets have life. Given infinite time, or infinite opportunities, anything is possible. Miracles are a part of it.

Why are trees in forests so tall? It’s because of competition amongst them. A taller tree disallows the adjacent tree to get enough sunlight. So the shorter tree tries to get taller. Now the previously taller tree gets deprived of the sunlight and hence it inculcates changes to get taller. This sets the Arms race. Arms race sets the need in many species to get periodically evolved. So the example of tall trees in forest in symmetric arms race, whereas the asymmetric arms race is that between Cheetah and Gazelles. Gazelles evolve to be more protective whereas the Cheetahs evolve to be better in hunting. It’s not competition in all the cases. Evolution also is a result of adaptation. For eg. The legs of camels grew longer to keep the stomach away from the hot sand in the desserts. Evolution also was a result of the changes to impress the opposite sex. The tail of peacock became beautiful, generation after generation simply to impress its partner.

The arms race does not go on forever, but stabilise, when for instance, further improvements become too economically costly. The changes in brain size has some role to play in the evolution. Substantial fraction of any brain is needed to perform routine operations around the body and a big body automatically needs a big brain for this. Encephalisation quotient helps to find the changes. An EQ is calculated by the ratio of the actual brain volume to the volume expected for its body size (i.e.Va/Ve). Humans have EQ of 7 whereas have it as 0.3. Although it does not mean that the Humans are 23 times as clever as hippos, but it tells about the computing power the animal has in its head. The fastest known evolutionary changes, includes swelling of human skull from Australopithecus like ancestor, with a brain volume of 500 CC to modern Homo sapiens’s average brain size of 1400 CC. This nearly tripling of the brain size has happened in around three million years. By evolutionary standards this is rapid rate of change. If we count the number of generation in 3mn years( say 4 generations per century) the average growth is less than one hundredth of a cubic centimetre per generation. 

The power and the Archives

The main storage medium inside living cells is chemical. It exploits the fact that certain kinds of molecule are capable of polymerising, that is joining up in long chains of indefinite length. There are lots of polymers. For eg. Polythene is made up of long chains of small molecule called ethylene- Polymerised ethylene is therefore called polythene. Some polymers instead of being uniform chains of one small molecule like ethylene are chains of two or more different kinds of small molecules. As soon as such heterogeneity enters into a polymer chain, information technology becomes a theoretical possibility.If there are two kinds of small molecule in the chain, the two can be thought of as 1 and 0 and immediately any amount of information, of any kind can be stored provided that the chain is long enough. The particular polymers used by living cells are called polynucleotides. The. Two main families of polynucleotides are DNA and RNA. Instead of just two states 1 and 0, the information technology of living cells uses four states, A, T, C and G. There is very little difference in the principle between a two state binary information technology and four state information technology like that of a living cell. The space that human cell can store is equivalent to 30 volumes of Encyclopaedia Britannica, 3 or 4 times.Amazingly only 1% of the genetic information in, for eg. In human cells gets actually used. Nobody knows why the other 99% is there. An assumption is that it could be parasitic, free loading on the efforts of 1 %, a theory that recently being called as ‘Selfish DNA’.

Electronic Computer memory is classified into ROM and RAM. ROM is read only memory, which means it is written once and read many a times. The pattern of 0 and 1 is inscribed in it during manufacturing and it remains unchanged throughout the life of the memory.  On the other hand RAM is read as well written. So RAM is ROM + more.In RAM you can put any pattern of 0 and 1. So most computers memory is RAM. ROM is used for fixed repertoire of standard programs, which are needed again and again, which you can’t change even if you want to.

DNA is ROM, it can be read millions of times but is written only once, when it is first assembled at the time of the birth. The pattern of A,T,C and G is copied into trillions of body cells. All of us, human beings have same set of human address, but not necessarily the same contents of those address. That’s why we all are different from one another. Chimpanzees have 48 chromosomes as compared to 46 of ours. Once in a blue moon the addressing system itself changes. That’s how the 24 pairs of Chimps got evolved to 23 pairs of humans. One pair got merged and led to evolution.

 

The big message from the book is that the sum total of small changes makes the overall change a big one. How can this be used in our lives, jobs, business, relations to make profound changes? 

 

Disclaimer 

The summary of this book is just an attempt to assemble the note worthy points made by Richard Dawkins. In the process,  changes in the contents are made to suit the usefulness.

 

Vinay Wagh

Bulls Eye 

Nasik