Richard Dawkins: The Blind Watchmaker, translated by Wang Delun, Chongqing Publishing House, Hainan Publishing House, May 2005
Preface, p. 1
This book is founded on the belief that our own existence was once one of the most baffling mysteries. But now this mystery no longer exists, because Darwin and Wallace have solved it—though we still have to keep adding footnotes to their answer. The reason I wrote this book is that I am astonished that so many people seem not only unaware of the elegance and beauty of that answer; what is even harder for me to believe is that many people are not even aware that such a question exists.
////——How strong that confidence is! The confidence of contemporary scientistic thinkers comes precisely from this mood: “Those eternal riddles that tormented countless sages and philosophers have all been perfectly explained by science!” But is this perhaps too arrogant? Even from a scientific standpoint, such hubris does not hold water. Consider that at the beginning of the twentieth century there were also people claiming that physics had already completed its explanation of the world, and that the only work left was to add a few footnotes; what became of that later? Given the experience of the development of physics, why can Dawkins and the others still be so confident about biology? The history of the establishment of elementary physics is far longer than that of evolution, and its success in explaining the world has been far more glorious than that of evolution; for a time its theoretical system also seemed far more rigorous and complete than evolution’s. But the lesson of history has already told us that such self-satisfied arrogance is too naïve. Why, then, are evolutionists still so confident in a theoretical system from more than a hundred years ago? Or rather, why do they lack such confidence in the future of evolutionary biology? Is it not something we can expect that evolutionary science will undergo new revolutions like physics did, and surpass Darwin just as it surpassed Newton?
Preface, p. 2
I must admit that this book is by no means devoid of emotion; in some parts it is positively passionate, and if this were to appear in a professional scientific journal, it would surely draw criticism. The purpose of this book is not only to disseminate knowledge, but also to persuade, and even to enlighten. I hope to enlighten readers: on the surface, our own existence appears to be a terrifying mystery, while also conveying an exhilarating fact: that this mystery has an elegant solution, one completely within our grasp; and, I hope to persuade readers to believe that the truth of the evolutionary worldview is by no means accidental. It is the only known theory that can solve the mystery of our existence. This makes it an especially satisfying theory: evolution is not only correct on Earth, but also applies wherever life exists in the universe.
////——Notice the word “enlighten” here. In fact, this book, along with The River out of Eden, Unweaving the Rainbow, and George Williams’s Who Is the Creator?, even from their titles alone, directly carry religious metaphors; in the lines between the words of the book, what one feels is astonishingly something akin to religious preaching—passion, confidence, guidance, contagion, persuasion, revelation. It seems that what they are popularizing is precisely a kind of religious faith, a spreading of the Darwinian gospel. Popular science books that read like gospels—Dawkins and Williams do not shy away from this analogy, and at times they themselves even express this kind of religious sentiment—“Science is a unique great religion more worthy of devout belief than all existing religions!” By saying this I absolutely do not mean to belittle them. People who spread science with religious devoutness are lovable. For me, both science and religion are good things; religious science can of course be a better-thing-on-top-of-a-good-thing. The problem is only that if that religion is dogmatic, violent, and authoritarian, then of course it is a bad thing; establishing that sort of emotional scientism is undoubtedly harmful.
////——Dawkins says, “It is the only known theory that can solve the mystery of our existence.” Note the word “known” here; it is used very well. In reality, non-Darwinian evolutionary explanations of the relevant issues are indeed not sufficiently complete. Darwinism is indeed, relatively speaking, “satisfying.” However, does the best theory necessarily have to be complete? And further, could it even be universally valid across the entire universe? Where does such confidence come from? Intelligent design is impossible throughout the universe? Then let us imagine a possible world only within the limits currently allowed by technology: hundreds of millions of years from now, Earthlings’ technology is unimaginably advanced; they are able to use genetic engineering to control biological variation, accelerate evolutionary processes, and alter the direction of evolution. At the same time, humans take a planet in some stellar system—say, Alpha Star—as an experimental base, introduce initial life forms and let them multiply, and then every few tens of millions of years go over to check on them, and incidentally, through genetic modification, design the direction of those life forms’ evolution according to their own preferences, with the aim of steering evolution toward some intelligent “new human beings.” In the end, those new human beings are born as the Earthlings expected. Because the Earthlings are sufficiently cunning, and only go over every so many years to make modifications at key moments, those new human beings find it difficult to discover conclusive evidence that Earthlings once intervened, let alone catch an Earthling and interrogate them. But in the course of the evolution of the new human beings, factors of “intelligent design” were indeed introduced; the direction of their evolution was interfered with by some rational force. Then is Darwin’s theory of natural selection, which excludes all factors of intelligent design, still applicable on Alpha Star? The claim of Francis Crick, the discoverer of DNA, that “the original DNA on Earth came from outer space” is not wholly unreasonable. Although I do not believe any pseudoscientific book that declares “Earth is an alien testing ground,” evolutionary science absolutely could never be confident enough to exclude this possibility across the entire universe.
p. 6 The only “watchmaker” in nature is the blind forces of physics.
////——This sentence succinctly sums up the meaning of the title; I quote it here for ease of future reference. div>
p. 7
But I cannot diminish the miracle of living “watches” that once gave Paley such immense inspiration: on the contrary, I will try to explain my feelings, which Paley might have exploited for his own purposes. As for awe before living “watches,” I am second to none. My shared sentiments with the esteemed William Paley may even outnumber those I share with a famous modern philosopher, with whom I once discussed this issue at a banquet. At the time I said that I could not believe anyone could have been an atheist before Darwin’s On the Origin of Species was published in 1859. “What about Hume, then?” the philosopher asked. “How did Hume explain the organized complexity of the biological world?” I asked. “He did not explain it,” the philosopher said. “Why is a special explanation needed?”
Paley knew it needed a special explanation, and Darwin knew it too. And I suspect that my philosopher friend also understands this deep down. In any case, I have a responsibility to explain this here. As for David Hume, it is said that this great Scottish philosopher refuted the doctrine that God created man a century before Darwin. But all Hume did was criticize the logic that takes the apparent design in nature as conclusive evidence for God’s existence. He did not propose any other explanation for that apparent design, nor did he answer this question. A Humean atheist before Darwin might have said: “I cannot explain the complex design of living things. What I do know is that God is not a very good explanation, so we can only wait for someone to come up with a better answer.” I cannot help feeling that such a stance, though logically coherent, is still unsatisfactory; and although atheism before Darwin was logically sustainable, only Darwin made it possible to be an intellectually satisfied atheist.
////——This passage is very interesting, so I have quoted a great deal of it. First, note the word “awe”; the living “watches” refer precisely to life, or to the blind forces of nature. In any case, can we interpret the meaning here as “awe before life” or “awe before nature”? In the great Chinese debate about “awe before nature,” the situation seems to have become a contest between scientism and anti-scientism, which is actually quite baffling! Why is it that the camp opposing awe seems, as a matter of course, to be the scientistic camp? Why can scientistic thinkers not revere nature? I feel that for scientists, awe before nature is precisely the most natural thing in the world. “Nature” is exactly what they devote their whole lives to pursuing relentlessly. For scientists, should not nature’s status be unimaginably lofty and sacred? Is it not natural that admiration and longing should give rise to awe? In the writings of famous Western scientists, one can often read either subtle or explicit expressions of “awe before nature.” Even in someone like Dawkins, one of the strongest scientistic scientists, we see it! Then why in China do we see scientists proclaiming that “there is no need to revere nature”? I feel that without a religious kind of awe before nature, it is very difficult to pour intense passion into scientific exploration. As Einstein said, I too do not believe that someone lacking this kind of religious feeling can achieve truly brilliant accomplishments in scientific exploration. Chinese science lags behind the West; perhaps this is something worth reflecting on?
////——Dawkins’s discussion of Hume is very interesting. In a certain sense, it also reveals how he views existing Darwinism. Just as before Darwin, design-theory explanations were the best explanation of the complexity of life, but if one rejected them simply because they were not perfect and yet lacked some other more reasonable explanation, that would be inappropriate in Dawkins’s view. And now, Darwinism is precisely the best explanation; because it may still be somewhat imperfect in some respects, to reject it before proposing any new theory that might replace it is irrational. Just as Dawkins “could not believe that anyone could have been an atheist before Darwin’s On the Origin of Species was published in 1859,” he also cannot believe that anyone today could be anti-Darwinist. This way of thinking is indeed appropriate when understanding the history of science: scientists have the right to doubt mainstream theories, but without finding a new alternative explanation, they eventually have to adopt the best explanation. Heisenberg (see The Physicist’s Conception of Nature, Newton Press) said it well: although there is no absolutely correct scientific theory, every specific era will have a “final” scientific theory. In the modern age, the evolutionary theory of natural selection can probably be called “final.” Simply rejecting it because it may not be perfect is indeed irrational,
p. 17
For some people who like words like “-ism,” my way of understanding how things work might be called “hierarchical reductionism.” If you read the latest intellectual magazines, you will find that “reductionism,” like a sin, is only mentioned by those who oppose it. In some circles, if you call yourself a reductionist, it is as shocking as confessing that you eat babies. But just as no one really eats babies, there is no reductionism worth opposing. This nonexistent reductionist—opposed by everyone, yet actually existing only in their imaginations—tries to explain complex things directly in terms of the simplest parts, or even in terms of the sum of the parts. Hierarchical reductionism, by contrast, when explaining a complex entity at any given level in the hierarchy of levels, explains it in terms of an entity one level lower; and the entities used for explanation may themselves be quite complex, needing to be reduced to their own constituent parts, and so on. Needless to say, the methods of explanation appropriate to higher levels differ greatly from those appropriate to lower levels—though the legendary baby-eating reductionist would deny this. That is why one uses a carburetor rather than quarks to explain a car. But hierarchical reductionism holds that the carburetor can be explained by entities at a lower level, and those lower-level entities in turn can be explained by entities at yet a lower level… ultimately it can all be explained in terms of the smallest elementary particles; in this sense, reductionism is nothing more than another name for an honest desire to understand things.
////——What is meant here by reductionism should be “reductionism” in the sense of “reductionism.” Dawkins’s irony is not without reason: anti-reductionists in reality are often fighting against a “straw man.” But criticism of a straw man is also meaningful; these perhaps excessive criticisms always serve as a warning and constraint for moderate reductionists. Just as what should be opposed is “scientism,” not science, what is truly worth opposing is only “reductionism-for-its-own-sake,” not reductionism. Science must emphasize reductionism; even if one recognizes that “the whole is greater than the parts,” scientific research still proceeds primarily through reduction. Science always seeks to reduce more complex theories to more universal and more basic theories. But is “reduction” naturally “transitive”? Many anti-reductionists unthinkingly assume that reduction is always transitive, but in fact, the car can be reduced to various components, and those components can in turn be reduced to various parts, which does not mean that the car can be directly reduced to those tiny parts. Moderate reductionists argue that chemistry should be reduced to physics, biology should be reduced to chemistry, but this does not mean that they must necessarily argue that biology should be reduced to physics! My understanding of “reduction” should be a relation that is “reflexive,” “anti-symmetric,” and “non-transitive” — “reflexive”: something can be reduced to itself, expressing that a science must be self-consistent and must be able to make sense of itself; “anti-symmetric”: if A can be reduced to B, then B cannot be reduced to A, expressing that reduction is a one-way relation; if two sciences can reduce one another, this means they can be integrated together; “non-transitive”: if A can be reduced to B, and B can be reduced to C, then A does not necessarily reduce to C, expressing that the power of reduction is limited. Reductionism understood in this way is not hateful. In fact, including many anti-reductionists, many people’s understanding of “scientific explanation” is improper: they understand scientific explanation to mean displaying all the sufficient and necessary conditions of things and providing a “sufficient reason,” so that saying physics can reduce biology becomes the claim that physical laws can be used to provide a complete account of biological phenomena. But this idea is unrealistic. Even when using physics to explain physical phenomena, it is hard to give a “sufficient reason” that guarantees that something could only happen in this way and not in some other way, let alone when explaining biological phenomena. But when we say that a certain science provides an explanation of a certain phenomenon, what we mean is that, with the help of science, we can better “understand” the thing in question. People cannot understand how a big iron box can speed along the road, and when we open that box and see the axles, carburetor, engine, and various other components inside, we more easily understand it. Even though we may still not have 100% mastery of the principles by which these components cooperate with one another, breaking the whole into parts helps us understand the whole—that much is beyond doubt.
p. 171 The basic idea of the “blind watchmaker” is that we do not need to assume the existence of a designer or anyone else in the universe in order to understand the universe.
////——This is also a concise summary. Two words are worth attention here: “do not need to assume,” and “understand.” In this respect, Darwin undeniably did very well. Dawkins sees this fairly clearly: the success of scientific explanation lies in making it possible for people to “understand” the world. What science can establish is that there is no need for additional assumptions; it is not to prove that additional assumptions definitely do not exist.
June 21, 2006
Plato Café
Translated from the Chinese original with AI assistance. The original text is authoritative.
Leave a Reply