Truth in Science

In yesterday's Times Educational Supplement Magazine, Sir Jonathan Miller reminisced about his education at St Paul’s School, and in particular his biology teacher, Sid Pask. When studying biology, Miller recalls:

I became excited at the idea of evolution and classification of living things – ideas which made it impossible for me to be anything but an atheist.

Jonathan Miller: Something has to explain the novelties themselves.

Richard Dawkins: Well, the novelties themselves, of course, are genetic variations in the gene pool which ultimately come from mutation and more proximately come from sexual re-combination. There’s nothing very inventive or ingenious about those novelties, I mean they are random. And they mostly are deleterious (most mutations are bad). So you really need to focus on natural selection as the positive side and its only natural selection that produces living things, which have the illusion of design. The illusion of design does not come from the novelty.

JM: What was it about that early novelty, before it culminated in something as useful as a feather? Where could natural selection get its purchase upon something which was no more than a pimple?

RD: There cannot have been intermediate stages which were not beneficial. There’s no room in natural selection for the sort of, um, foresight argument – that says well we’ve got to let it persist for the next million years and it’ll start becoming useful. That doesn’t work. There’s got to be a selection pressure all the way.

JM: So there isn’t a process, as it were, going on in the cell saying look be patient…

RD: No…

JM: …it’s going to be a feather - believe me!

RD: Yes, that’s right, yes.

RD: It doesn’t happen like that... there’s got to be a series of advantages all the way in the feather. If you can’t think of one, then that’s your problem not…not, not natural selection’s problem. Natural selection…well I suppose that is a sort of matter of faith on my part since the theory is so coherent and so, and so powerful.

It seems that a certain amount of faith is needed to believe in the evolution of new complex structures. Is this really compelling enough evidence to make it “impossible…to be anything but an atheist”?