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Dec. 28, 2006 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
29:49
576 Evolution
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Good morning, everybody.
Hope you're doing well. It's Steph.
It is the 29th of December, 2006.
Hello back to the YouTube people.
I'm posting again.
I've done quite a series of audio-only podcasts, but I thought that today the topic was interesting and important enough to throw back a few...
Pictures on the web.
So, welcome back to the Big Chatty Four Heads Morning Drive.
I hope that you're doing well.
I hope you had a lovely Christmas.
And the best of a best Happy New Year to everyone out there on the internet who strives for truth, wisdom, and understanding.
So the topic I'd like to chat about this morning is what some people have described, and I think quite accurately as, the single best idea in the history of the planet.
And it is an absolutely wonderful idea.
I would say that it is the second best in some way, maybe the third best.
I would say number one is logic, number two is the free market, but number three...
Not so much for any of the multifarious benefits that it has bestowed upon humanity directly, but as a way of illuminating the world and of providing a powerful answer to the argument from design, and that is the theory of evolution.
1C. Darwin from the Beagle has given us an incredible intellectual treasure in the theory of evolution.
And it is something that I lean quite a bit upon Richard Dawkins, a near-perfect atheist who's written some wonderful books on this topic, The Selfish Gene, The Blind Watchmaker, and currently you might want to have a listen to or a read of a fine book called The God Delusion, which he takes a...
A very good run at religion.
I don't think that he's quite successful.
That could be my error, and certainly willing to be wrong in the face of somebody like Richard Dawkins, but we'll talk about that another time.
But what he does do is explain the theory of evolution with some wonderful metaphors, and I'll throw in some of my own, and we'll talk a little bit about this absolutely astounding and wonderful intellectual construct.
The great challenge, of course, for those who wish to explain the complexities and the delicate ecosystem of the natural world, the challenge has always been, well, how can we have a watch without a watchmaker?
That's why Richard Dawkins entitled one of his books, The Blind Watchmaker.
One sec, I have to clean my glasses.
Hold on a sec.
See, there's a reason I'm in a car and not a studio.
But the idea that something is complex, and there's things that are always put forward in these kinds of contexts, such as the human eye and its incredible ability to adjust to light, to focus on different objects, to resist such as the human eye and its incredible ability to adjust to light, to The human eye is given as an example of the fact that there must have been a designer.
You can't have something as complex as the human eye, let alone the human brain, without there being a designer.
Some physicist, who's not a biologist, put it thusly.
He said that the chances of random selection of what he termed evolution, which is an incorrect characterization, which we'll get to in a second,
What he termed random selection, the chances of that assembling a living organism that can reproduce and feed and excrete and so on, is about the same as of a wind blowing through a scrapyard assembling a giant 747.
Because many people look upon evolution as chance.
And evolution is not random, and evolution is not chance.
Evolution is entirely purposeful.
And while no biologist, I think I can at least get some of the basics straight.
The basics of life, of course, is replicating DNA. DNA is that, you know, four-strand double helix that Watson and Crick discovered in the 50s and which we all had to learn in high school for reasons that we could not understand.
And this replicating DNA is really the entire purpose of life.
And many people get this confused and they say, well, the human race has a desire to reproduce itself.
And I mean, that's true at a sort of emotional level, but that's not what's actually occurring.
Your little toe wants to reproduce itself, or more specifically, the genes which go into producing your little toe want to reproduce themselves.
And your little toe is using you to reproduce more little toes.
So it's each one of our genes that wishes to reproduce itself, and we are merely the most efficient mechanism for doing so.
And that's a very, very important thing to understand.
It's the gene in your little toe that wants to make more little toes.
It doesn't care about anything else.
The gene in your little toe doesn't care about the liver.
And it will serve the liver if it can, simply because that will help it reproduce itself all the better.
So it is at really micro-atomic level that the theory of natural selection works.
It doesn't work in terms of species.
It doesn't work in terms of eyeballs.
It works in terms of DNA. So this desire of DNA to reproduce itself over and over and over again, and for the most successful methodologies for reproducing itself to win out over a multi-billion year time frame, It's really the basis.
I mean, it's not the basis that Darwin put forward because he didn't know about DNA, of course, but it is the real basis of the theory of evolution, is this reproducibility, the desire for DNA to reproduce itself, and desire in the most loosely used way of using it.
Now, The reason that this is not random is there are three major factors that inhibit the biological organisms from failing to reproduce.
Inhibit from failing? There's a double negative.
Sorry about that. Let me weed that one out as far as a metaphor goes in the ecosystem of my metaphor creation.
There's not intelligent design sometimes there, I'll tell you that much.
There are three things which are going to largely inhibit.
There is the internal illness or ailments.
So those organisms which do not create an immune system or some way of repelling invasions from viruses and bacteria and so on are going to fail.
The bacteria are going to do nicely in the same way that an antelope fails when a lion succeeds.
So there's internal threats.
There is the environment itself.
So just think of the woolly mammoth in a global warming situation.
It either loses its massive fur or it's going to overheat and die.
So when there is a change in the environment, mammals of course do slightly better because they can regulate their own body temperatures in a way that reptiles and fish cannot.
If you've ever had those really sensitive tropical fish who have like two degrees of variance allowable in their water, you know what I'm talking about.
And then, of course, there's predators, right?
Those sharks and antelopes and viruses which are going to attack and attempt to eat the organism, flesh-eating viruses and this sort of stuff.
I guess there's a fourth, interacting with the environment.
All of these things can both negatively and positively select the carrier for an individual DNA for reproductive success.
It's not the human being that is selected for reproductive success.
It is the DNA that constitutes the human being that is selected for reproductive success.
So it occurs at a much more, you know, there's macroeconomics and then there's microeconomics.
Macroeconomics is just another way of describing microeconomics except to the degree that it's government intervention, in which case it's women-based totalitarianism, but we'll get into that another time.
And so evolution is really occurring at the micro level, at the DNA level.
So the reason that people use these metaphors like a junkyard blowing together as scraps of junk In order to, and have it create a 747, and the absurdity of all of that is thinking that the eyeball is just assembled randomly by nature.
And that's not the case at all, of course, right?
I mean, everybody who's read up on evolution knows that, but it's worth going over again briefly.
Richard Dawkins uses a metaphor that I think is quite good.
Look at me blowing every metaphor in the podcast and then putting forward cautious praise for a very good one by Richard Dawkins, so apologies to old Dickie D. Mmm, Dicky D's!
I've only had one coffee this morning, so my focus is a little off, but I shall survive!
So he says that the reason that people get confused is they think that there's this plateau, like a very high mountain, called the Eyeball.
And in this very high mountain, to achieve the summit of this very high mountain, You have one of two ways of getting up there, just you as a human being.
So on one side is a sheer cliff face that goes up for 5,000 feet, and it's icy, and there are eagles pecking at you, and it's hellishly windy, and it hails, and so on.
And you're standing at the bottom of that, looking up at this 5,000-foot crag face with attacking eagles and hailstones, saying, well, you can't just jump up to the top of that.
It's absolutely impossible.
So anything that's up there must have been put there by God.
Whereas on the other side, if you walk around the mountain, on the other side is a very gentle slope that goes on for miles and miles, which allows you to walk very easily up to the top.
Fairly easily. The only problem I have with the metaphor is that it should actually be downhill somehow, because uphill is still an effort, whereas natural selection is like a ball rolling downhill.
So people look at natural selection as if it randomly blows together junk to create a 747, or it randomly blows together chemicals and cells to create the eye, the optic nerve, the optic center, and so on.
And they say, well, that's just not possible.
You look at the final product.
Well, not the final product.
Of course, we're still evolving. You look at the current product of a multi-billion-year evolutionary process.
I think it's five billion years or so on that's been going on.
And you say, this incredible complexity cannot have arisen out of blind chance.
Well, of course, it doesn't. In evolution...
Everything which succeeds slightly more than that which came before is selected for a slight increase in reproductive success.
So if you are...
Gee, here I'm going to really...
Here I'm really going to show my ignorance, right?
But... Let's just say that you are a fish.
You're somewhere between a fish and a shark.
I know sharks are kind of fish. And you have no dorsal fin.
And that means that you kind of roll around in the ocean.
It's tougher for you to zero in on your prey and it's harder for you to avoid any other predators, particularly when you are young.
So if there's some mutation that produces a slightly stubby dorsal fin that gives you a 2% chance better survival rate, then there's going to be 2% more of those genes that get reproduced.
And again, if you look at this over a couple of generations, it means nothing.
But if you look at it over billions and billions of years, then it starts to mean something quite important.
And so there's an optimum size for the dorsal fin and maybe it's been reached and maybe it hasn't.
But if the shark...
So every shark gets a larger dorsal fin, gets greater accuracy and so on, but then at some point the dorsal fin just gets too large or there are two dorsal fins or something like that.
In which case then you become negatively selected for survival, in which case the dorsal fin size sort of stabilizes.
If you think about this, of course, in terms of giraffes as well.
Giraffes have long necks because you're doing a lot better if you can eat the higher hanging fruit.
Or leaves. I think they eat leaves.
But there's some optimal size for a giraffe's neck.
So, for instance, if you've seen those pictures of giraffes eating...
Sorry, drinking. They spread their front legs and they dip their heads down and there's quite a complicated valve mechanism that goes on between the heart and the head of the giraffe wherein the giraffe is Because normally it has to pump an enormous amount of blood up to the top of the head.
That's quite a gravity well to go up the giraffe's neck.
So when it puts its head down, why doesn't it pump way too much blood and the giraffe's heads explode?
Well, because when the head goes down, a complicated set of valves reduces the blood flow to the head so that gravity does the work of getting the blood to the head and you don't need to use gravity plus all of the stuff to make the head blow up, right?
And all of this sort of stuff is selected.
And there is a cost and a benefit to each of these particular selections.
So a giraffe that has a slightly longer head is going to do well because it's going to be able to get to higher leaves on a tree.
However, a giraffe with a 90-foot-long neck is not going to have the muscular strength or it's going to consume more energy in keeping the head erect than it's going to gain from the additional leaves.
Because, I'm guessing, when the neck gets longer, the energy consumption goes up not in a linear but more in an asymptotic fashion.
So, there is a kind of stability that is arrived at in just about any ecosystem.
Just as in the absence of government intervention, there is a stability that is arrived at, with individual exceptions, overall in the economics system, in a free market system.
Now, the other metaphor that...
there's two other metaphors that Dawkins uses that I would really sort of pass along to you, with all respect to Dickie D, and also with the suggestion to read his books, which are just fascinating...
And his presentation skills are very good as well.
He's a very warm and pleasant presenter and a very good writer.
But he says that if there's some incredibly complicated bank vault that has some incredibly complicated Dial mechanism for getting into it.
Combination lock. Then expecting, and you have to go through 50 sequences correctly to get it right, expecting that people are just going to randomly spin the dial and get into the vault, of course, is absurd, right?
Because each of the 50, I think it's squared.
It's been a while since I've taken any stats, but I think they're squared, so the chance is 50 times 50 times 50.
It becomes ridiculously bad that you are going to be able to do it.
So bad so that when I go to the gym, I have a lock that has 60 and 3.
60 times 1,800 times.
So that's all you need for reasonable levels of security at a gym and a bank vault with 50.
And of course, an I has like 5,000 or 5 million or whatever.
Expecting people to spin these in sequence all at once with no feedback is to leap from single-celled to human brain, right?
To leap up that cliff face, to go from single-celled to human brain.
And clearly, that doesn't make any sense.
I mean, the odds of that occurring are slim to none.
But that's not what happens with evolution.
What happens with evolution? Is that every time somebody spins that dial, they hear a click if it's the right number.
It works incrementally.
And yes, the odds of spinning that dial and landing on the 50 each time is only 1 in 50.
But we're talking billions of years.
Small but possible chances accumulated over billions of years can result in enormous complexity.
And a seeming watchmaker.
The complexity of the eye is a seeming watchmaker.
And so if our imaginary evolutionary bank vault thief guy is listening and spinning that dial, and he spins randomly, he doesn't get to turn it and check, he spins randomly, But when it's the correct number, he hears a click, he writes it down, and that number is not lost again.
He's passed that hurdle.
So he's done number one.
So then he spins randomly again, and after roughly 50 tries, he hears another click, and he gets to move on.
How long is it going to take him to get into the vault?
Well, not very long. An hour, maybe an hour and a half.
Something that was initially impossible Which is, without any feedback, getting all the numbers in sequence correct to get into the bank vault, has now become inevitable and, frankly, relatively easy.
I think most bank robbers would be very happy if that was the case.
In fact, I think that they get those...
If Hollywood movies are to be believed, and I'm sure that they are, then bank robbers get those stethoscopes and listen for the click of the tumblers that tell them they're on the right path.
That's what makes it easy, and I'm sure that there are massive sound dampeners and felt and whatever they put in there to make them inaudible, the clicks of the lock.
So something against which the odds were enormous, and the chances of success were almost infinitesimal, one in a trillion or something like that, suddenly becomes the tidy work of an hour or so, and eminently possible.
Because with evolution, it's not everything happening in sequence and the odds accumulated all at once.
It's just every single step that moves forward that is selected for success has to be the basis of any other step.
And that's why one of the negative tests for evolution that intelligent design advocates are constantly searching for is an organ or an organism or a biological attribute without precedence.
Without precedence.
So yeah, the human brain, monkey has a brain, duck-billed platypus has a brain, mosquito has a brain, so there's precedence for it, and you can see the step-ups in evolutionary terms of the brain.
And every organ that you can find, every biological attribute that you can find, you can find some level of Precedent for it.
Some simpler form of it, some pre-form of it.
If a computer popped into existence, I mean, let's get really gross and say that some duck-billed platypus gave birth to a working computer, then a biologist would have a bit of a tricky time.
That would be a little bit tough to explain how a fully assembled computer came out of the womb of a duck-billed platypus.
Because there's no precedence for it.
And there are some little wheels and little, you know, pseudo-motors that occur in bacteria and so on.
But each of those component parts has precedence.
And the combination is biologically viable and beneficial.
So this does not dispute the theory of evolution at all.
By the way, it's a little bit more than a theory right now.
It's called the theory, right?
I mean, people get confused and the creationists will say, ah, but it's only a theory.
And it's like, well, that's true. And there are theories of gravity as well, but that doesn't mean that gravity doesn't exist.
There are theories of evolution. There is a theory of evolution, but that doesn't mean that it's not proven.
The theory of evolution is about as proven as things get in science.
There has been no instance found, despite, what, 150 plus years of searching, there has been no instance found of something which has accrued in an evolutionary sense which did not have a prior precedent.
And the proofs, you could go on and on, right?
And I've mentioned some of these before in the show, but there is the fact that whales have hindquarters, hind legs, even though they haven't walked on land in hundreds of millions of years.
Human beings, of course, have appendices, despite the fact that we haven't used them for our diet in Lord knows how long.
Lord does probably know how long.
Let's go back to that.
That evolution in terms of moths has been observed, such as in England when the coal factories in the 19th century began belching forth their satanic soot.
There was a natural selection towards moths on a darker tree, sorry, darker moths on trees because the trees themselves were getting darker because of the coating of soot.
And so it was very easy to see that as the environment changed, the moths that were naturally darker and thus more invisible to predators were the ones naturally selected for survival and you could watch relatively quickly the moths becoming darker.
Which doesn't mean that the gene for lightness disappears completely.
It just means that it becomes recessive or I guess at some point maybe it does.
I don't know enough about biology to be able to answer that.
But you can see this kind of stuff occurring all the time.
You can even see it in the development of the human fetus.
We all go through this fish stage.
We actually have gills for a time before we settle on being human and then finally on our gender.
We all start as women and then a massive dose of hormones turns us into men if such is to be our destiny to have the dangly bits.
But that is really the most powerful explanation of the complexity of the world that we know of.
The last thing that I'll say relative to this topic just for now, I mean, it's definitely worth looking into it, is absolutely a crowning triumph of human intellectual achievement and possibly one of the most non-intuitive leaps of logic in the history of the planet, other than the free market, right?
Everyone likes to think that there's central organization For the distribution or the dissemination of goods and services and capital, central organization is going to make things work when it's quite the opposite.
Central organization destroys the wealth-creating capacities of capitalism and the free market.
Not only is it morally beneficial, but it also creates the most efficient and positive allocation of resources.
Whether those resources are leisure or capital or goods or whatever doesn't really matter as much.
This theory of evolution, it's well worth simmering on and thinking about and mulling over and going over in your mind.
It is just an absolutely magical...
I shouldn't say that. It is magical.
I mean, insofar as if you don't mind me using the term, not in any sort of mystical or superstitious sense, but just in terms of how amazingly non-intuitive it is.
I mean... It is not intuitive, in a sense, as the world is round and spinning through the galaxy, which is one of a hundred billion galaxies, and the Sun and the Moon are the same size, and all the stuff that comes from the heliocentric model of the solar system, that's pretty non-intuitive, too.
The fact that not controlling how people use their property results, as Adam Smith says, in the invisible hand, which guides capital labor and goods to their best and most productive uses, That doesn't really make any sense, right?
To be selfish with your property in the long run helps the poor more than to give away your property.
Totally non-intuitive. But of course, if the world were easy, we wouldn't need science and we wouldn't need logic.
So it is a very non-intuitive thing to say that there is incredible complexity that arises from a long, long, long series of minor advantageous mutations or chances.
Now, the last thing which I'll mention about this is the answer that's put forward by religious types is this intelligent design, creationism, and so on.
Well, there are two major problems with it.
One is, of course, that it's not an answer.
Nothing that is put forward.
As God is ever an answer.
I mean, to say to any question, some incomprehensible, unknowable being in ways that we could never fathom and will never understand achieved or did or created X for reasons that we will never be able to fathom, that's not an answer.
I mean, that's just a non-answer.
It's like on a math quiz, you say, well, this answer exists, but in a different dimension in numbers that I can't write down here because they would make the page explode.
Well, try getting a good mark in math Based on that.
It's just basically an argument from an intimidation and an appeal to insecurity and ignorance.
Insecurity more so than ignorance.
So there's no answer if you say, well, God did X. I mean, there's just no answer at all.
I mean, you might as well just say, elves dreamed up the world, and that's my answer to the Big Bang.
Well, it's not really an answer at all.
It's just a species of fairy tale.
Without even the psychological insight sometimes found within good fairy tales.
So... It's not an answer to say that God did anything.
But more importantly, God is far more complex than creation.
I mean, without a doubt, God is far more complex than creation.
And the theory of evolution explicitly and clearly argues and proves, I would say, that the only way that complexity can arise in the world is through evolution.
Therefore, God cannot be the first cause of the universe or of life because something that is complex and as complex as God, the most complex thing around, can only arise out of A very long process of evolution.
Let's just say in a billion years, human beings, either through technology or some other methodology, find a way to leave our bodies, roam the universe at will, we can create whatever matter and energy, just making stuff up.
Well, that would be sort of God-like, but that would only be the result of billions of years of evolution.
So God, who is infinitely complex, cannot be the first cause of anything, because complexity As the theory of evolution has proven, can only arise through infinitesimal improvements and the optimization of gene reproducibility over a long, long, long, long period of time.
So complexity is the result of evolution plus time, natural selection.
Complexity is not, cannot be, the cause of these things.
Because for God to exist, God can only exist in terms of complexity as a result of evolution.
So God cannot be the first cause or any kind of mover of evolution.
God can only result from an evolutionary process.
And since God doesn't have any genes, God is not subject to the evolutionary process.
And therefore, of course, God can't exist at all.
So I hope that this has been helpful.
I look forward to your donations. I wish you the very happiest of Happy New Year's, everybody out there in YouTube land and on Free Domain Radio, which you can find at www.freedomainradio.com.
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