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Religion & Law

: Thoughts in a Haystack

A Tale to Pinto a Donkey

By John Pieret

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I suppose I should preface this with the statement that I really admired Stephen Jay Gould's take on science and his writing. Also, The Panda's Thumb is one of my favorite blogs. But the fact is that Gould's use of the panda's thumb as an argument in favor of science and against creationism was deeply flawed. This is not anything previously left unsaid, but Elliot Sober, in his new book, Evidence and Evolution (in case you haven't noticed, I really like it) has a good discussion of the difficulties with what he calls the no-designer-worth-his-salt argument.

Panda's have what might be called a "thumb" but, in fact, it is not a digit:

Rather, they have a spur of bone that sticks out from their wrists. The thumb and the paw together form a V through which the panda repeatedly runs branches of bamboo, laboriously stripping the stalks to get them ready to eat. Pandas spend a large portion of their waking lives at this task. The thumb is extremely inefficient. Gould's point is that no designer worth his salt (the phrase is due to Raddick 2005) would have given the panda this device for preparing its food. A truly intelligent designer would have done better. On the other hand, Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection says that inefficient devices of this kind are not at all surprising. Darwin thought of natural selection as a gradual process that improves adaptedness; natural selection does not necessarily lead to perfect adaptation, whatever that might mean. Selection modifies the traits found in ancestors by small changes; the result is not that the best of all conceivable adaptations evolves; rather, natural selection causes traits to evolve that do a better job than the alternatives that are actually present in the evolving lineage.
... [Gould] claims that the hypothesis of intelligent design makes the panda's thumb very improbable, whereas the hypothesis of evolution by natural selection makes the result much more probable. Creationists have a serious objection to Gould's argument. It can be expressed by a rhetorical question: How does Gould know what God (or some unspecified designer) would have wanted to achieve in building the panda? Gould is assuming that an intelligent designer would have wanted to supply pandas with a superefficient device (like a stainless-steel can opener) for preparing bamboo and would have had the ability to achieve this objective. But why is it so clear that God would have wanted to do this? Perhaps God realized that if pandas had better tools, they would eat all the bamboo, which would cause the extinction of the bamboo forest and of pandas as well. And maybe these two extinctions would have triggered a cascade of others. Perhaps God realized that these bad consequences would follow if pandas had better tools, and so he decided to slow them down. Creationists don't need to assert that they know what God would have had in mind if he had built the panda. All they need to say is that Gould does not know this. Gould adopts assumptions about the designer's goals and abilities that help him reach the conclusion he wants - that intelligent design is implausible and Darwinian evolution is plausible as an explanation of the panda's thumb. But it is no good simply inventing assumptions that help one defend one's pet theory. Rather, what is needed is independent evidence concerning what God (or some other intelligent designer) would have wanted to achieve if he had built the panda. And this is something that Gould does not have.

Not that creationists should be smug. Sober goes on to show how this very objection also applies to Intelligent Design and, in fact, renders it untestable and, therefore, not science.

But does that mean the no-designer-worth-his-salt argument is useless? Not necessarily. Consider what Francisco Ayala makes of it:

The implications of the theory of intelligent design are not even compatible with the idea of a personal God, a creator, "which is all powerful and all knowing and benevolent, that is omnipotent, omniscient," said the Spanish-American Ayala.
"It would have to be imperfect design or incompetent design or inept design, but not intelligent design," he said, noting for example that human beings have more teeth than can fit in the jaw, so dentists have to remove the wisdom teeth.

True, the inefficient "thumb" of the panda might save the bamboo forests (or have some other rationale) but what does it say about a supposedly omnipotent and omniscient being that he/she/it has to resort to such Byzantine jerrybuilt solutions? If God can't do more elegant design, doesn't it imply some serious constraints on his foresight and/or abilities? At the very least, it guts the power of what has been at the heart of the argument from design for centuries -- the claim that nature displays good design.

In the end, the panda's thumb is a theological argument against a particular version of God. And the attempt to avoid the argument leaves that God, not as the infinitely competent creator of a magnificent universe and all that is in it but, instead, as a bumbler on a par with, as famously argued by the Discovery Institute's Casey Luskin, the designers of the Ford Pinto.

If that is the sort of God you want to worship, you might want to make sure your insurance is paid up.
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Full post as published by Thoughts in a Haystack on November 12, 2008 (boomark / email).