Thank you for your question. I'm smitten by things like apples and trees also. However, implicit in your remark may be a thought about which I'm doubtful: It's the thought that if things like apples can't come into being by pure coincidence, there must be some divine cause to these things. I can't be sure whether this is what you have in mind, based on your question, but if it is what you're aiming at, I'd suggest the following: The theory of Evolution by Natural Selection does not try to explain biological phenomena in nature by appeal to nothing more than sheer coincidence. Rather, apparent design and complexity in nature are in general due to differential rates at which different organisms are able to pass along their genes, and that's not a chance process. (This point is eloquently spelled out in Dawkin's book, _Climbing Mount Improbable_.)

Also, I should point out that there lots of biological entities that are not convenient for human beings at all: weeds, poison ivy, noxious fruit that can cause paralysis, and the like are
not convenient for us at all. We tend to ignore these things when in search of things that are useful to us, but when we forget about all the things that aren't, can can end up with an imbalanced view of our relation to the rest of the biological world.

One little historical point to begin with: Descartes didn't actually appeal to the Argument from Design at all. But you're certainly right that it has a long and venerable history behind it. It's the fifth of St Thomas Aquinas's 'Five Ways' of proving the existence of God; and, in some form or other, it goes a long way still further back than that.

Regarding the recent controversies (and perhaps explaining the 'oddness' of the trial), there are two issues that need to be distinguished. (i) Is it a good argument? (ii) Is it a scientific argument? The two questions are independent: both scientific debates and debates of other kinds (philosophical, theological, etc.) do get their fair share of both good arguments and bad arguments. We hope that, whatever the debate, the good arguments will win the day: but the bad ones deserve to be given a fair hearing too, so that what is bad about them might be exposed. Now, the recent controversies have centred around the question of whether or not ID is a scientific theory. If it is a scientific theory, then it would seem to merit some discussion within Science classes in public schools: counterposed against alternative theories, perhaps, to facilitate a free and fair debate wherein the superior theory (whichever that might be) might vanquish the inferior. If it's not a scientific theory, then, whatever merits it may or may not have, Science classes are simply not the place for it to be discussed.

I didn't follow the Dover trial in any great detail, but it did have strong echoes of an Arkansas trial in 1981, on an almost identical issue: whether 'Creation Science' (as it was then being called) should be taught in Science classes in public schools. Philosophers of science were invited to testify at the trial, but not directly on the question of whether Creation Science (or ID) was good or bad science. Rather, they were asked whether they felt it qualified as science at all. The witnesses maintained that it failed to live up to the criteria that define genuine scientific research -- it wasn't seeking universal laws of nature, it wasn't yielding explanations of known phenomena or predictions of unknown ones, it wasn't empirically testable, and its practitioners were overly dogmatic -- and the court agreed. As I understand it, this was also the question that the Dover court was asked to decide: not whether ID was a good theory, but whether it was a scientific theory. But the interesting thing about that 1981 trial (and, for all I know, maybe the Dover trial too) was that it launched a debate within the philosophy of science community. The trouble with philosophers of science is that they are decidedly prone to disagreements about what science is, let alone how its practitioners ought to operate. Some philosophers pointed out that many of the most central, paradigmatic cases that everyone would unhesitatingly regard as genuinely scientific theories would nevertheless fall short of the excessively rigid criteria for scientific status just listed above. There is no clear philosophical consensus about what makes a theory qualify as 'scientific'. Consequently, there is no clear philosophical consensus about whether or not the Argument from Design is a scientific argument.

Where philosophers are, I think, closer to consensus (although I'm sure there will still be dissenters here too) is on the question of whether or not the Argument from Design is a good argument. David Hume, in his Dialogues concerning Natural Religion (written in the 1750s, published 1779), argued that it was not; and his objections to it (which I'd invite you to follow up in detail, if you're interested in this sort of thing) are really rather powerful, and regarded as decisive by many philosophers nowadays. Hume showed (or purported to show) that little or nothing of religious doctrine can be rationally justified, through any arguments based on empirical evidence (or by a priori arguments either for that matter). Indeed, he argued that, if anything, the evidence would seem to tell directly against such doctrines. Admittedly, even outside this domain, Hume didn't think that very much else could be rationally justified either, and the running theme of his philosophical works was the thesis that our belief-system, right across the board, is not grounded in any philosophical arguments at all, but rather in our passionate impulses and habits. So he still left plenty of room for religious faith, as such, but merely wished to show that the Argument from Design could do nothing to underpin such faith. Most philosophers nowadays would, I think, agree with him on this.

We do have a lot in common psychologically, and all of that matters when we're trying to decide what's right and wrong. And the more we know about the psychological effects of how we treat people, the more information we'll have to feed into our ethical decisions. Psychologists have relevant things to say, as do doctors and, for that matter, economists, massage therapists, and various other specialists.

Whether or not knowing everything about what makes people happy would settle all ethical questions, however, is another matter. (Not sure if you were suggesting it would.) For example: suppose that there are things that would make me happy at your expense. Most of us don't think it's just a matter of comparing the sum of my potential pleasure to the sum of your potential pain. Questions about fairness, for example, will also matter, and psychologists have no special expertise in sorting out what's fair. (Neither do most philosophers, for that matter.)

There's also room to argue about whether the good really is just what makes us happy, and about whether happiness is a just a matter of satisfying various desires. And in fact, we've only scratched the surface. So while the sorts of things you point to are bound to matter for ethical matters, there will be plenty left over that knowing how people's psyches work won't tell us.

Your last sentence is right: It's not true that in the case you have in mind the parents confer a benefit on child that would otherwise lack it. You're right also that it is a bit strange to suppose that children benefit from this. On the other hand, one might argue that this practice benefits society at large by increasing the overall representation of intelligence. (Whether increasing the overall level of intelligence in the population will benefit it, is an empirical question to which I doubt we have an answer.) Or one might hold that it benefits the parent or parents by increasing their chances of having high-achieving children. (Whether having smarter children in general makes parents happier is also an empirical question, and I also doubt that we know how to answer it at this point.)

You might enjoy pursuing these issues a bit further with Jonathan Glover's new book, _Choosing Children: Genes, Disability and Design_, forthcoming in early 2008 with Oxford University Press. Glover is an excellent writer and a very fine philosopher.

You are quite right. There seems no good reason why genetic causes should absolve us from moral responsibility any more that other causes of our behaviour. This is a point that has often been made by Richard Dawkins. If there is a threat to free will and moral responsibility, it is determinism per se, not genetic determinism in particular.

Of course, there remains the question of whether determinism does undermine free will and moral responsibility. Compatibilists say no--they say you are free as long as your actions issue from your own conscious choices, even if those choices themselves are determined by your genes and environment. Incompatibilists say yes--if your actions are ultimately determined by causes beyond your control, then you aren't free, even if the determination proceeds via your conscious choices.

But, either way, genetic causes have no special status. Compatibilists will say that genetic causes, like other causes, don't undermine your freedom when they influence your behaviour by influencing your choices. And incompatibilists will say that non-genetic causes beyond your control, like your early upbringing, do undermine your freedom just as much as genetic causes.

Your question relates directly to a central issue in the philosophy of biology, which is how to understand what it means to say that a biological trait has a particular function. The appeal to evolution by natural selection is attractive here because we often seem to explain why a trait is present by appeal to its function, and this practice would otherwise be strange, since functions are effects and we don’t normally take effects to explain their causes. Thus suppose we say ‘We have arteries because they carry blood away from the heart’. Carrying blood away from the heart is an effect of having arteries, so how can it explain why we have them? But in the context of natural selection, we can say that it is because arteries in our ancestors carried blood in the past that we are here now, arteries and all. So the functional explanation ‘We have arteries because they carry blood away from the heart’ is actually not an ‘effectal’ explanation, but a causal explanation. What explains and causes arteries today is blood getting carried in the past and the selection of creatures who could do that sort of thing.

Nevertheless, I take your point that when we simply characterise something in functional terms we do not seem to be committing ourselves to an evolutionary theory. People talked about functions and defined things in functional terms before Darwin. So maybe we can define arteries in terms of their function – carrying away blood – and understand function not in terms of natural selection but rather in terms of the characteristic contribution that arteries make the operation of the organism as a whole. It’s true a dead person still has arteries even though they are no longer carrying blood, but that’s because those tubes are similar to the ones that are doing their job in normal living individuals.

If you want to follow up the philosophy of biological function, a good anthology is Nature’s Purposes, edited by Colin Allen, Marc Bekoff, and George Lauder.

You seem to be raising a couple of puzzles here. One is how it has come about that human beings are sometimes motivated to help strangers, given that we might have expected evolution to produce beings concerned to promote the survival only of themselves and their kin. One immediate answer to this question is that, despite what some fanatical sociobiologists say, you can't explain everything about human behaviour as it is now merely by reference to our evolutionary history -- even if you allow in cultural as well as biological evolution. Evolution made it possible for impartial benevolence to develop, but it didn't necessitate it. Its emergence -- where it has emerged -- is to be understood primarily in terms of history rather than biology.

The second puzzle is why we *should* help others even when doing so doesn't benefit us. Many people have believed egoism -- the view that the only reason we have to do anything is grounded in the promotion of our own well-being. Philosophy has so far failed to provide a knock-down argument against egoism. But what it has clarified is some of its implications -- for example, that the fact that I can save you from years of agony by pushing some button gives me no reason to push that button.

The theory of evolution by natural selection is sometimes claimed to be an unfalsifiable theory, since it appears that no matter what fossil evidence we uncover, a 'just so' evolutionary story could be told to fit it. However, this simple-minded position seems to wrong. There does appear to be plenty of that evidence could tell against the theory if that evidence were discovered. For example, if the age of the earth were discovered to be much shorter than is required for evolution by natural selection to operate (say, a few thousand years), then that would be good reason to reject the theory. Fortunately, we have every reason to think that the earth is old enough for evolution by natural selection to have operated, and so no reason to reject the theory.

Hi Martin. I'm not sure about your justification for not studying philosophy (the intention of which is to encourage thinking things through for yourself!), but you'll be glad to know that there are plenty of philosophers who think along similar lines to those that you mention. There are too many to list, but two prominent philosophers concerned about the kind of big picture that you mention are Daniel Dennett (Consciousness Explained, Darwin's Dangerous Idea) and Fred Dretske (Naturalising the Mind).

The answer to your first question about preconceptions is that scientists are human beings and so scientific practice is affected in many ways by human subjectivity. These effects include, but are not limited to, a human tendency towards dogmatisim. Scientific methods and training can limit the damaging effects of human dogmatism, but cannot eliminate them entirely.

The answer is your second quetsion about intelligent design is that there are substantive scientific reasons for rejecting this argument for God's existence. Ironically, your assumption that scientists' failure to accept this arguments can only be due to unscientific dogmatism may be based on your own wishful or dogmatic thinking -- it is a mistake to think that the best or even the typical scientific response to the argument from design is dismissing it as a childish myth.

Finally, my sense is that scientists and philosopers have explored and assessed this argument from mutliple perspectives, so I think the rational investigation you advocate at the end of your quesiton is underway.