Climbing Mount Improbable

The mountain of remote possibility... By design? Proponents of intelligent design alone aren’t looking for the specific complexity as the key to determining the existence of design in biological systems. Let’s take University of Oxford biographer Richard Dawkins, who is authorized to object to intelligent design more than anyone else. In his book The Blind Watchmaker, Dawkins tries to explain why biological systems are not designed in advance, even though they show specific complexity: "Complex things have certain predetermined advantages and are very unlikely to exist by random chance only. In the case of living organisms, the predetermined advantage is the ability to pass on genes to reproduce.” Dawkins attributes the specific complexity of living organisms, but does not conclude that they are designed to be, in his estimation, insignificant enough. In our theory of the origin of life, we allow ourselves to admit that there is some luck. This luck is due to the maximum number of planets that qualify for life in the universe. So we have at our disposal, if we want to use it, an advantage of 1 in 10/20, which is the number of planets we expect in the universe, if our theory of the origin of life needs it. Assume, for example, that we need to propose the accidental start of life that created DNA and its protein-dependent mechanism of multiplication spontaneously into existence. We will give ourselves the luxury of accepting this extreme theory – anomalous – provided that the probability of it happening on one of the planets is greater than 10-20. Dawkins was right here that assuming too much luck would not be an acceptable scientific explanation and that the amount of luck that is scientifically accepted depends on the number of chances available. These chances, which he called the “luck ratio,” are what we call “probability data.” Probability data determine whether an event that seems improbable is really improbable after taking into account all the chances of life actually occurring. This is why he wrote Climbing Mount Improbable. In this book, Dawkins compares the appearance of complexity to the rise of a mountain. The book is so named because if you want to climb a mountain one step at a time – that is, to have massive complexity all at once – it is improbable. According to Dawkins, the mountain usually contains crooked roads that lead to the top and can be traversed by very small steps; but this claim must be scrutinized. This biological natural mountain is certainly steep in all its sides and reaching the top by small steps is practically impossible given the large inherent gaps between the living creatures. These gaps must exist in nature, not just in our perception of nature. Although biological systems seem very unlikely, Dawkins argues that biological complexity has never occurred in a single step, but rather according to Darwinian mechanisms of natural selection and random diversity. For Dawkins, these mechanisms take seemingly improbable ways, and then become improbable, and can therefore be explained without design. According to Dawkins' description of Darwinian mechanism, each generation of an organism's evolutionary history consists of a cycle of random variations and natural selection to be a very small step in the evolutionary path of the organism. Darwinian mechanism continues the process of trial and error. Natural selection does the experiment and random variations do the error. As with all mechanisms based on trial and error, Darwinian mechanism relies on small incremental improvements. The Darwinian mechanism explains the specific complexity by dividing the impossible possibility - the development of the biological system - into a sequence of possible possibilities, and therefore the impossibility can be overcome by very small steps over time. In the rest of this chapter, we will explain why many of the impossibilities in the evolutionary path cannot be overcome by this mechanism, and how the specific complexity indicates not only the appearance of the design of biological systems, but also the fact of their design. More: https://braheen.com/publications/التصميم-الذكي-ومفهوم-التعقيد-المحدد — Source: Published on Facebook's "Braheen Center" page