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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 08 April 2017
Here is one way that philosophers and biologists sometimes speak of Darwin's explanatory innovation: ‘Eyes, organs of echolocation, camouflage and the like are all wonderful instances of contrivance, of complex adaptation, of good design. Paley and the other natural theologians sought to explain this good design by appeal to an intelligent designer. Darwin, on the other hand, offers us a superior explanation for the appearance of this same property: Darwin shows us that we can explain good design through the action of selection. Indeed, selection is the only process that can explain good design in nature. And that is why evolutionary biologists can continue to use a version of the argument from design called the argument from biological design: when we see an instance of good design in nature, we should infer not the guiding hand of God, but the hand of selection at work.’
1 Maynard Smith, J., ‘The Status of Neo-Darwinism’, Theoretical Biology, Waddington, C. H. (ed.) (Edinburgh: University Press, 1969).Google Scholar
2 Dawkins, R., The Blind Watchmaker (London: Penguin, 1986).Google Scholar
3 Dawkins, R., ‘Universal Darwinism’, The Philosophy of Biology, Hull, D. and Ruse, M. (eds.) (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), p. 16.Google Scholar
4 Ibid., 15–16.
5 Self-organization is much discussed in Kauffman, S., At Home in the Universe (London: Penguin, 1996).Google Scholar
6 Sober, E., ‘Six Sayings About Adaptationism’, The Philosophy of Biology, Hull, D. and Ruse, M. (eds.) (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), p. 74.Google Scholar
7 Pinker, S. and Bloom, Paul, ‘Natural Language and Natural Selection’, Behavioral and Brain Sciences 13 (1990), 707.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
8 A very useful paper that discusses this inference in far more detail, and gives many more examples of its use and defence, is Lauder, G., ‘The Argument from Design’, Adaptation, Rose, M. and Lauder, G. (eds.) (San Diego: Academic Press, 1996).Google Scholar
9 Behe, M., Darwin's Black Box: The Biochemical Challenge to Evolution (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1996), 194.Google Scholar
10 Ibid., 198.
11 I owe this point to Sober, E., ‘The Design Argument’, The Blackwell Guide to the Philosophy of Religion, Mann, W. (ed.) (Oxford: Blackwell, forthcoming).Google Scholar
12 Some useful papers on cosmic design arguments are collected in God and Design: The Teleological Argument and Modern Science, Manson, N. A. (ed.) (London: Routledge, 2003).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
13 This is not the place for comprehensive references to the Selected Effects account. Many of the most important papers are collected in Nature's Purposes: Analyses of Function and Design in Biology, Allen, C., Bekoff, M. and Lauder, G. (eds.) (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1998).Google Scholar
14 For an evaluation of the Selected Effects account see chapter five of Lewens, T., Organisms and Artifacts: Design in Nature and Elsezchere (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2004)Google Scholar.
15 I discuss this notion of ‘shaping’ in more in op. cit., note 14, chapter 2.
16 p. cit., note 2, 21.
17 Dennett, D. C., Darwin's Dangerous Idea (New York: Norton, 1995), 2Google Scholar
18 Here I am expanding on what I take to be Sober's view, op. cit., note 6, 75.
19 Dennett has long been a defender of such evolutionary models of creativity. See op. cit., note 17, and also Griffiths, P., ‘Functional analysis and proper function’, British Journal for Philosophy of Science 44 (1993), 409–22CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
20 For more thoughts on this see op. cit., note 14, chapter seven.
21 I am grateful to the audience at the Royal Institute of Philosophy where this talk was first given in February 2004, and to the audience at Shanxi University, China, where a revised version was given in April 2004. I also owe thanks for comments to Andre Ariew, Emma Gilby, Griff Gilby, Peter Lipton, Matteo Mameli, Hugh Mellor, Anthony O'Hear, Samir Okasha and David Papineau.
