The case of the Bogus Biomorphs
Nothing that has entered the evolution debate since Darwin's time has promised
to illuminate the subject so much as the modern computer with its apparently
limitless ability to represent, on the monitor-screen, compelling visual
representations of living things. Anyone who marvelled at the
dinosaurs in Jurassic Park has felt the computer's power apparently to simulate
life processes.
So called genetic software systems, said to
emulate the processes of genetic mutation and natural selection at speeds high
enough to make the process visible, have become a feature of most up-to-date
biology laboratories.
But, compelling though the visual images are, how
much confidence can we put in the computer as a guide to the evolution of life?
In his book The Blind Watchmaker, Richard
Dawkins describes a computer program he wrote which randomly generates
symmetrical figures from dots and lines. These figures, to a human eye, have a
resemblance to a variety of objects. Dawkins gives some of them insect and
animal names, such as bat, spider, fox or caddis fly. Others he gives names like
lunar lander, precision balance, spitfire, lamp and crossed sabres.
Dawkins calls these creations 'biomorphs',
meaning life shapes or living shapes, a term he borrows from fellow zoologist
Desmond Morris. He also feels very strongly that in using a computer program to
create them, he is in some way simulating evolution itself. His approach can be
understood from this extract;
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'Nothing in my biologist's intuition, nothing in my 20 years experience
of programming computers, and
nothing in my wildest dreams, prepared me for what actually emerged on the
screen. I can't remember exactly when in the sequence it first began to dawn
on me that an evolved resemblance to something like an insect was possible.
With a wild surmise, I began to breed generation after
generation, from whichever child looked most like an insect. My
incredulity grew in parallel with the evolving resemblance. . . Admittedly they
have eight legs like a spider, instead of six like an insect, but even so!
I still cannot conceal from you my feeling of exhultation as I first watched
these exquisite creatures emerging before my eyes.'
Dawkins not only calls his computer drawings 'biomorphs',
he gives some of them the names of living creatures. He also refers to them as
'quasi-biological' forms and in a moment of excitement calls them 'exquisite
creatures'. He plainly believes that in some way they correspond to the real
world of living animals and insects.
Why is this an example of pseudoscience?
In reality, the biomorphs do not correspond in
any way at all with living things, except in the purely trivial way that
Dawkins sees some resemblance in their shapes. The only thing about the 'biomorphs'
that is biological is Richard Dawkins, their creator.
As far as the 'spitfire' and the 'lunar lander'
are concerned there is not even a fancied biological resemblance.
The program he wrote and the computer he used
have no analog at all in the real biological world. Indeed, if he set out to
create an experiment that simulates evolution, he has only succeeded in making
one that simulates special creation, with himself in the omnipotent role.
His program is not a true representation of
random mutation coupled with natural selection. On the contrary it is dependent
on artificial selection in which he controls the rate of occurrence of
mutations. Despite Dawkins's own imaginative
interpretations, and even with the deck stacked in his favour, his biomorphs
show no real novelty arising -- no cases of bears turning into whales.
Most important of all, it is Dawkins, not blind fate, who chooses which are the lucky
individuals to receive the next mutation and of
course he chooses the most promising ones ('I began to breed ... from whichever
child looked most like an insect.') That is why they have ended up looking like
recognizable images from his memory. If his mutations really occurred randomly,
as in the real world, Dawkins would still be sitting in front of his screen
watching a small dot and waiting for it do something.
Above all, his computer experiment falsifies the most important central claim of
mechanistic Darwinian thinking; that, through natural processes, living things
could come into being without any precursor.
