The Blind Watchmaker Read online

  Every one of us knows from personal experience, for example on dark nights, that there is an insensibly graded continuous series running all the way from total blindness up to perfect vision, and that every step along this series confers significant benefits. By looking at the world through progressively defocused and focused binoculars, we can quickly convince ourselves that there is a graded series of focusing quality, each step in the series being an improvement over the previous one. By progressively turning the colour-balance knob of a colour television set, we can convince ourselves that there is a graded series of progressive improvement from black and white to full colour vision. The iris diaphragm that opens and shuts the pupil prevents us from being dazzled in bright light, while allowing us to see in dim light. We all experience what it is like not to have an iris diaphragm, when we are momentarily dazzled by oncoming car headlights. Unpleasant, and even dangerous, as this dazzling can be, it still doesn’t mean that the whole eye ceases to work! The claim that ‘The eye either functions as a whole, or not at all’ turns out to be, not merely false but self-evidently false to anybody who thinks for 2 seconds about his own familiar experience.

  Let us return to our Question 5. Considering each member of the series of Xs connecting the human eye to no eye at all, is it plausible that every one of them worked sufficiently well that it assisted the survival and reproduction of the animals concerned? We have now seen the silliness of the anti-evolutionist’s assumption that the answer is an obvious no. But is the answer yes? It is less obvious, but I think that it is. Not only is it clear that part of an eye is better than no eye at all. We also can find a plausible series of intermediates among modern animals. This doesn’t mean, of course, that these modern intermediates really represent ancestral types. But it does show that intermediate designs are capable of working.

  Some single-celled animals have a light-sensitive spot with a little pigment screen behind it. The screen shields it from light coming from one direction, which gives it some ‘idea’ of where the light is coming from. Among many-celled animals, various types of worm and some shellfish have a similar arrangement, but the pigment-backed light-sensitive cells are set in a little cup. This gives slightly better direction-finding capability, since each cell is selectively shielded from light rays coming into the cup from its own side. In a continuous series from flat sheet of light-sensitive cells, through shallow cup to deep cup, each step in the series, however small (or large) the step, would be an optical improvement. Now, if you make a cup very deep and turn the sides over, you eventually make a lens-less pinhole camera. There is a continuously graded series from shallow cup to pinhole camera (see, for illustration, the first seven generations of the evolutionary series in Figure 4).

  A pinhole camera forms a definite image, the smaller the pinhole the sharper (but dimmer) the image, the larger the pinhole the brighter (but fuzzier) the image. The swimming mollusc Nautilus, a rather strange squid-like creature that lives in a shell like the extinct ammonites (see the ‘shelled cephalopod’ of Figure 5), has a pair of pinhole cameras for eyes. The eye is basically the same shape as ours, but there is no lens and the pupil is just a hole that lets the seawater into the hollow interior of the eye. Actually, Nautilus is a bit of a puzzle in its own right. Why, in all the hundreds of millions of years since its ancestors first evolved a pinhole eye, did it never discover the principle of the lens? The advantage of a lens is that it allows the image to be both sharp and bright. What is worrying about Nautilus is that the quality of its retina suggests that it would really benefit, greatly and immediately, from a lens. It is like a hi-fi system with an excellent amplifier fed by a gramophone with a blunt needle. The system is crying out for a particular simple change. In genetic hyperspace, Nautilus appears to be sitting right next door to an obvious and immediate improvement, yet it doesn’t take the small step necessary. Why not? Michael Land of Sussex University, our foremost authority on invertebrate eyes, is worried, and so am I. Is it that the necessary mutations cannot arise, given the way Nautilus embryos develop? I don’t want to believe it, but I don’t have a better explanation. At least Nautilus dramatizes the point that a lensless eye is better than no eye at all.

  When you have a cup for an eye, almost any vaguely convex, vaguely transparent or even translucent material over its opening will constitute an improvement, because of its slight lens-like properties. It collects light over its area and concentrates it on a smaller area of retina. Once such a crude proto-lens is there, there is a continuously graded series of improvements, thickening it and making it more transparent and less distorting, the trend culminating in what we would all recognize as a true lens. Nautilus’s relatives, the squids and octopuses, have a true lens, very like ours although their ancestors certainly evolved the whole camera-eye principle completely independently of ours. Incidentally, Michael Land reckons that there are nine basic principles for image-forming that eyes use, and that most of them have evolved many times independently. For instance, the curved dish-reflector principle is radically different from our own camera-eye (we use it in radiotelescopes, and also in our largest optical telescopes because it is easier to make a large mirror than a large lens), and it has been independently ‘invented’ by various molluscs and crustaceans. Other crustaceans have a compound eye like insects (really a bank of lots of tiny eyes), while other molluscs, as we have seen, have a lensed camera-eye like ours, or a pinhole camera-eye. For each of these types of eye, stages corresponding to evolutionary intermediates exist as working eyes among other modern animals.

  Anti-evolution propaganda is full of alleged examples of complex systems that ‘could not possibly’ have passed through a gradual series of intermediates. This is often just another case of the rather pathetic ‘Argument from Personal Incredulity’ that we met in Chapter 2. Immediately after the section on the eye, for example, The Neck of the Giraffe goes on to discuss the bombardier beetle, which

  squirts a lethal mixture of hydroquinone and hydrogen peroxide into the face of its enemy. These two chemicals, when mixed together, literally explode. So in order to store them inside its body, the Bombardier Beetle has evolved a chemical inhibitor to make them harmless. At the moment the beetle squirts the liquid out of its tail, an antiinhibitor is added to make the mixture explosive once again. The chain of events that could have led to the evolution of such a complex, coordinated and subtle process is beyond biological explanation on a simple step-by-step basis. The slightest alteration in the chemical balance would result immediately in a race of exploded beetles.

  A biochemist colleague has kindly provided me with a bottle of hydrogen peroxide, and enough hydroquinone for 50 bombardier beetles. I am now about to mix the two together. According to the above, they will explode in my face. Here goes …

  Well, I’m still here. I poured the hydrogen peroxide into the hydroquinone, and absolutely nothing happened. It didn’t even get warm. Of course I knew it wouldn’t: I’m not that foolhardy! The statement that ‘these two chemicals, when mixed together, literally explode’, is, quite simply, false, although it is regularly repeated throughout creationist literature. If you are curious about the bombardier beetle, by the way, what actually happens is as follows. It is true that it squirts a scaldingly hot mixture of hydrogen peroxide and hydroquinone at enemies. But hydrogen peroxide and hydroquinone don’t react violently together unless a catalyst is added. This is what the bombardier beetle does. As for the evolutionary precursors of the system, both hydrogen peroxide and various kinds of quinones are used for other purposes in body chemistry. The bombardier beetle’s ancestors simply pressed into different service chemicals that already happened to be around. That’s often how evolution works.

  On the same page of the book as the bombardier beetle passage is the question: ‘What use would be … half a lung? Natural selection would surely eliminate creatures with such oddities, not preserve them.’ In a healthy adult human, each of the two lungs is divided into about 300 million tiny chambers, at th
e tips of a branching system of tubes. The architecture of these tubes resembles the biomorph tree at the bottom of Figure 2 in the previous chapter. In that tree, the number of successive branchings, determined by ‘Gene 9’, is eight, and the number of twig tips is 2 to the power 8, or 256. As you go down the page in Figure 2, the number of twig tips successively doubles. In order to provide 300 million twig tips, only 29 successive doublings would be required. Note that there is a continuous gradation from a single chamber to 300 million tiny chambers, each step in the gradation being provided by another two-way branching. This transition can be accomplished in 29 branchings, which we may naively think of as a stately walk of 29 steps across genetic space.

  In the lungs, the result of all this branching is that the surface area inside each lung is rather more than 70 square yards. Area is the important variable for a lung, for it is area that determines the rate at which oxygen can be taken in, and waste carbon dioxide pushed out. Now, the thing about area is that it is a continuous variable. Area is not one of those things that you either have or you don’t. It is a thing that you can have a little bit more of, or a little bit less of. More than most things, lung area lends itself to gradual, step-by-step change, all the way from 0 square yards up to 70 square yards.

  There are plenty of surgical patients walking around with only one lung, and some of them are down to a third of normal lung area. They may be walking, but they aren’t walking very far, nor very fast. That is the point. The effect of gradually reducing lung area is not an absolute, all-or-none effect on survival. It is a gradual, continuously varying effect on how far you can walk, and how fast. A gradual, continuously varying effect, indeed, on how long you can expect to live. Death doesn’t suddenly arrive below a particular threshold lung area! It becomes gradually more probable as lung area decreases below an optimum (and as it increases above the same optimum, for different reasons connected with economic waste).

  The first of our ancestors to develop lungs almost certainly lived in water. We can get an idea of how they might have breathed by looking at modern fish. Most modern fish breathe in water with gills, but many species living in foul, swampy water supplement this by gulping air at the surface. They use the internal chamber of the mouth as a kind of crude proto-lung, and this cavity is sometimes enlarged into a breathing pocket rich in blood vessels. As we’ve seen, there is no problem in imagining a continuous series of Xs connecting a single pocket to a branching set of 300 million pockets as in a modern human lung.

  Interestingly, many modern fish have kept their pocket single, and use it for a completely different purpose. Although it probably began as a lung, over the course of evolution it has become the swimbladder, an ingenious device with which the fish maintains itself as a hydrostat in permanent equilibrium. An animal without an air bladder inside it is normally slightly heavier than water, so sinks to the bottom. This is why sharks have to swim continuously to stop themselves sinking. An animal with large air pockets inside it, like us with our great lungs, tends to rise to the surface. Somewhere in the middle of this continuum, an animal with an air bladder of exactly the right size neither sinks nor rises, but floats steadily in effortless equilibrium. This is the trick that modern fish, other than sharks, have perfected. Unlike sharks, they don’t waste energy preventing themselves from sinking. Their fins and tail are freed for guidance and rapid propulsion. They no longer rely on outside air to fill the bladder, but have special glands for manufacturing gas. Using these glands and other means, they accurately regulate the volume of gas in the bladder, and hence keep themselves in precise hydrostatic equilibrium.

  Several species of modern fish can leave the water. An extreme is the Indian climbing perch, which hardly ever goes into the water. It has independently evolved a quite different kind of lung from that of our ancestors — an air chamber surrounding the gills. Other fish live basically in water but make brief forays out of it. This is probably what our ancestors did. The thing about forays is that their duration can vary continuously, all the way down to zero. If you are a fish who basically lives and breathes in water, but who occasionally ventures on land, perhaps to cross from one mud puddle to another thereby surviving a drought, you might benefit not just from half a lung but from one-hundredth of a lung. It doesn’t matter how small your primordial lung is, there must be some time out of water that you can just endure with the lung, which is a little bit longer than you could have endured without the lung. Time is a continuous variable. There is no hard-and-fast divide between water-breathing and air-breathing animals. Different animals may spend 99 per cent of their time in water, 98 per cent, 97 per cent, and so on all the way to 0 per cent. At every step of the way, some fractional increase in lung area will be an advantage. There is continuity, gradualism, all the way.

  What use is half a wing? How did wings get their start? Many animals leap from bough to bough, and sometimes fall to the ground. Especially in a small animal, the whole body surface catches the air and assists the leap, or breaks the fall, by acting as a crude aerofoil. Any tendency to increase the ratio of surface area to weight would help, for example flaps of skin growing out in the angles of joints. From here, there is a continuous series of gradations to gliding wings, and hence to flapping wings. Obviously there are distances that could not have been jumped by the earliest animals with protowings. Equally obviously, for any degree of smallness or crudeness of ancestral air-catching surfaces, there must be some distance, however short, which can be jumped with the flap and which cannot be jumped without the flap.

  Or, if prototype wingflaps worked to break the animal’s fall, you cannot say ‘Below a certain size the flaps would have been of no use at all’. Once again, it doesn’t matter how small and un-winglike the first wingflaps were. There must be some height, call it h, such that an animal would just break its neck if it fell from that height, but would just survive if it fell from a slightly lower height. In this critical zone, any improvement in the body surface’s ability to catch the air and break the fall, however slight that improvement, can make the difference between life and death. Natural selection will then favour slight, prototype wingflaps. When these small wingflaps have become the norm, the critical height h will become slightly greater. Now a slight further increase in the wingflaps will make the difference between life and death. And so on, until we have proper wings.

  There are animals alive today that beautifully illustrate every stage in the continuum. There are frogs that glide with big webs between their toes, tree-snakes with flattened bodies that catch the air, lizards with flaps along their bodies; and several different kinds of mammals that glide with membranes stretched between their limbs, showing us the kind of way bats must have got their start. Contrary to the creationist literature, not only are animals with ‘half a wing’ common, so are animals with a quarter of a wing, three quarters of a wing, and so on. The idea of a flying continuum becomes even more persuasive when we remember that very small animals tend to float gently in air, whatever their shape. The reason this is persuasive is that there is an infinitesimally graded continuum from small to large.

  The idea of tiny changes cumulated over many steps is an immensely powerful idea, capable of explaining an enormous range of things that would be otherwise inexplicable. How did snake venom get its start? Many animals bite, and any animal’s spit contains proteins which, if they get into a wound, may cause an allergic reaction. Even so-called non-venomous snakes can give bites that cause a painful reaction in some people. There is a continuous, graded series from ordinary spit to deadly venom.

  How did ears get their start? Any piece of skin can detect vibrations if they come in contact with vibrating objects. This is a natural outgrowth of the sense of touch. Natural selection could easily have enhanced this faculty by gradual degrees until it was sensitive enough to pick up very slight contact vibrations. At this point it would automatically have been sensitive enough to pick up airborne vibrations of sufficient loudness and/or sufficient nearness of or
igin. Natural selection would then favour the evolution of special organs — ears — for picking up airborne vibrations originating from steadily increasing distances. It is easy to see that there would have been a continuous trajectory of step-by-step improvement, all the way. How did echolocation get its start? Any animal that can hear at all may hear echoes. Blind humans frequently learn to make use of these echoes. A rudimentary version of such a skill in ancestral mammals would have provided ample raw material for natural selection to build upon, leading up by gradual degrees to the high perfection of bats.

  Five per cent vision is better than no vision at all. Five per cent hearing is better than no hearing at all. Five per cent flight efficiency is better than no flight at all. It is thoroughly believable that every organ or apparatus that we actually see is the product of a smooth trajectory through animal space, a trajectory in which every intermediate stage assisted survival and reproduction. Wherever we have an X in a real live animal, where X is some organ too complex to have arisen by chance in a single step, then according to the theory of evolution by natural selection it must be the case that a fraction of an X is better than no X at all; and two fractions of an X must be better than one; and a whole X must be better than nine-tenths of an X. I have no trouble at all in accepting that these statements are true of eyes, ears including bat ears, wings, camouflaged and mimicking insects, snake jaws, stings, cuckoo habits and all the other examples trotted out in anti-evolution propaganda. No doubt there are plenty of conceivable Xs for which these statements would not be true, plenty of conceivable evolutionary pathways for which the intermediates would not be improvements on their predecessors. But those Xs are not found in the real world.