Artificial Design in Natural History: Why It’s So Easy to Understand Animal Behavior

Abstract

Descartes proposed that animals are really machines, a view accepted by natural theologians who sought to reveal the wisdom of the Deity in the adaptations they discovered in animals and plants. Hume showed that there can be no logically coherent evidence that anything in the natural world possesses designed properties and that if, indeed, natural objects were designed, there could be no independent criteria by which the underlying principles of design could be revealed. The modern theory of evolution explicitly states that evolution depends on chance events and to this extent evolution is contingently not a designing process; but evolution is necessarily not a designing process, as Hume’s arguments, which are as true in the context of evolutionary design as they are in the theological one, prove. Nevertheless, arguments about design in animals have persisted effectively unchanged from the time preceding the publication of On the Origin of Species and it is widely believed that the theory of evolution implies that design in some objectively evaluable sense will arise as a consequence of natural selection operating on random variation. This chapter examines the relationship between the theory of evolution and the theory of optimal design and concludes that there can be no logical justification for the belief that animal behavior can be predicted by the application of the principles of optimal design, or for the belief that insight can be gained from accepting the premise that evolution acts as if it were an optimizing designer and investigating the behavior of animals to discover its goals and the physical constraints that prevent the animals from achieving them. Such empirical confirmation as has been obtained from studying animals in terms of design arises out of the coincidental similarity between the animals involved, observer and observed, and where the observed animal behaves unexpectedly, through tautological redefinition of goals, constraints, or both to bring them to coincide with what the animal does.