The Blind Watchmaker: Why the Evidence of Evolution Reveals a Universe Without Design by Richard Dawkins

Author:Richard Dawkins
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Life Sciences, Science, Evolution (Biology), Evolution, General, Natural Selection
ISBN: 9780393315707
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Published: 1986-01-15T10:00:00+00:00

used as if it constituted evidence against the theories that those chemists are trying to test. But actually one can argue that we should be worried if it turned out to be very easy for chemists to obtain life spontaneously in the test-tube. This is because chemists' experiments last for years not thousands of millions of years, and because only a handful of chemists, not thousands of millions of chemists, are en-gaged in doing these experiments. If the spontaneous origin of life turned out to be a probable enough event to have occurred during the few man-decades in which chemists have done their experiments, then life should have arisen many times on Earth, and many times on planets within radio range of Earth. Of course all this begs important questions about whether chemists have succeeded in duplicating the conditions of the early Earth but, even so, given that we can't answer these questions, the argument is worth pursuing.

If the origin of life were a probable event by ordinary human standards, then a substantial number of planets within radio range should have developed a radio technology long enough ago (bearing in mind that radio waves travel at 186,000 miles per second) for us to have picked up at least one transmission during the decades that we have been equipped to do so. There are probably about 50 stars within radio range if we assume that they have had radio technology for only as long as we have. But 50 years is just a fleeting instant, and it would be a major coincidence if another civilization were so closely in step with us. If we embrace in our calculation those civilizations that had radio technology 1,000 years ago, there will be something like a million stars within radio range (together with however many planets circle round each one of them). If we include those whose radio technology goes back 100,000 years, the whole trillion-star galaxy would be within radio range. Of course, broadcast signals would become pretty attenuated over such huge distances.

So we have arrived at the following paradox. If a theory of the origin of life is sufficiently 'plausible' to satisfy our subjective judgement of plausibility, it is then too 'plausible' to account for the paucity of life in the universe as we observe it. According to this argument, the theory we are looking for has got to be the kind of theory that seems implausible to our limited, Earth-bound, decade-bound imaginations.

Seen in this light, both Cairns-Smith's theory and the primeval-soup theory seem if anything in danger of erring on the side of being too plausible! Having said all this I must confess that, because there is so much uncertainty in the calculations, if a chemist did succeed in creating spontaneous life I would not actually be disconcerted!

We still don't know exactly how natural selection began on Earth.

166 The Blind Watchmaker

This chapter has had the modest aim of explaining only the kind of way in which it must have happened. The

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.