The Watchmaker Analogy Argues, at Most, for Polytheism

In fact it supports (cultural) evolution at least as much as intelligent design ⌚️

“The Art of Makeing Clocks & Watches,” engraving from 1748

It has been dawning on me that this blog is, in a sense, about evolution vs. intelligent design.

Usually this opposition shows up under a different guise. For instance, the simplicity of (designed) dystopias and utopias, vs. the complexity of (evolved) real life. Or the benefits of having a diversity of world cultures to find solutions to civilizational problems compared to the dangers of putting all your eggs in the same basket of monoculture. Or (I don’t remember if I have a post about this, but I think about it a lot) how being extremely prolific, and allowing “natural selection” to pick your best work, beats trying to come up with a single perfectly designed piece of writing.

As far as I know, I’ve never written directly about evolution vs. intelligent design, though. Like, in the “Darwinism–Creationism debate” sense. Maybe because all the arguments about this appeared to have been made by the early 2000s, leaving nothing new for us to discuss.

Still, the other day I was thinking of the watchmaker analogy. The watchmaker analogy has been a favorite of creationists since before creationism was even a thing. It is attributed to the clergyman William Paley, who wrote in 1802 that if you happened to find a watch laying around in a field, it would be more reasonable to conclude that it was created by a watchmaker than by natural forces, unlike, say, a stone. This is because the watch is way more complex. Similarly, the highly complex structures of plants and animals must have been created by an intelligent maker rather than the forces of nature. Hence: God.

This analogy precedes Darwinian evolution by 50 years. Weirdly, this whole debate seems to violate temporal causality, since the watchmaker argument was already criticized by David Hume in the 1770s. Or some early form of it, anyway. Hume said, among other things, that it was a poor analogy: the fact that a watch and the universe share some characteristics, like being complex, doesn’t mean that they’re similar enough to conclude anything about a creator God.

This was essentially the main critique of everyone who came after, from Darwin to Dawkins. Sure, they would say, it seems convincing that a watch must have an intelligent designer. But Living Beings Are Not Like That! Evolution by natural selection is perfectly capable of creating complex organisms without intelligent input, because that’s how natural selection works. Richard Dawkins even called evolution — and a book of his — The Blind Watchmaker.

They’re basically right. But I want to point out that attacking analogies by saying they’re imperfect is kinda lame. Analogies never cover every possible characteristic of the two compared things (otherwise they’re not analogies, they’re just… comparing a thing with itself). So saying that a specific analogy breaks down in some places is really just stating the obvious. It’s totally reasonable to analogize watches and living beings or the universe, if they have shared characteristics, which they do.

And in fact I think the analogy holds more than any of Hume, Darwin, or Dawkins would care to admit. The complexity of watches and living beings isn’t inherently different, and it would be surprising if it arose in completely distinct ways. Paley’s argument, as Dawkins recognized, is in fact quite elegant. But Paley’s problem is that he drew the wrong conclusion — that living beings, like watches, must be designed. Instead the reverse is true: watches, like living beings, are evolved.

How? Through the accumulation of innovations over the course of human history.

Take the verge escapement. It was the first escapement mechanism ever designed, allowing clocks to advance at a regular intervals — ticks — and thereby keep the time more accurately than previous devices.

source

Verge escapements were important in the history of timekeeping, because they led to the development of virtually all mechanical clocks and watches, and indeed all timekeeping devices that use discrete motion rather than the continuous flow of something (as in water clocks and hourglasses). They were routinely used until the mid-19th century, so we can realistically assume that the watch found by William Paley in 1802 contains one.

It seems reasonable for Mr. Paley to conclude that the watch, as a whole, must have been designed. Is it reasonable to conclude that the verge escapement mechanism inside must also be designed? Also yes. But is it reasonable to conclude that they must have been designed by the same person? Absolutely not. The watch, we assume, has been made recently, around 1800, while the verge escapement was invented in the late 13th century.

Earliest known depiction of a verge escapement, from 1364 in Italy

Perhaps the specific shape of the verge escapement in the watch was created by the watchmaker himself. But it’s unlikely — he probably used some existing design. And even if it were his creation, it must have been inspired by some existing design. The same goes for every component of the watch, and indeed the watch-as-a-whole itself. Every single feature of Mr. Paley’s lost-and-found watch has a long history of innovation behind it, involving hundreds if not thousands of watchmakers and other people who invented everything needed, like materials and mathematical tools and so on, to make the watch possible.

It would be unreasonable for Mr. Paley to conclude that a single designer¹ is responsible for the entire watch — for going, in a single step, from the state of nature to the existence of an intricate mechanical device that accurately tells the time. But that’s exactly what he does with God and living beings!

Instead, if we wanted to stay within the realm of theology, we would have to conclude that plants and animals were made by the action of many small gods: a vast polytheistic pantheon with a God of the Eye, and a God of the Heart, and a God of Photosynthesis, and … no, it would have to be a God of the Human Eye, and a God of the Tiger Eye, and a God of the Octopus Eye; or diving down further, a God of the Human Retina, and a God of the Human Cornea, and a God of the Human Visual Cortex, and so on for all parts of the visual system and all forms of eyes that exist in nature. But even that is too superficial — you would need a god for every minute feature that has ever arisen in any organism. Billions of tiny gods who each designed a tiny part of a living being. At this point your gods start looking less like deities and more like mutations in DNA.

David Hume, as it turns out, already made that point in the 18th century, writing in Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion:

If we survey a ship, what an exalted idea must we form of the ingenuity of the carpenter who framed so complicated, useful, and beautiful a machine? And what surprise must we feel, when we find him a stupid mechanic, who imitated others, and copied an art, which, through a long succession of ages, after multiplied trials, mistakes, corrections, deliberations, and controversies, had been gradually improving?

And then:

A great number of men join in building a house or ship, in rearing a city, in framing a commonwealth; why may not several deities combine in contriving and framing a world?

Indeed, why not?

I suppose the reason William Paley bothered writing up his watchmaker analogy, more than twenty years after it had already been decisively destroyed by Hume, is that people lacked a good explanation of what could create complex organisms without design. For this we had to wait for Darwin in 1859. Darwin’s ideas on evolution through natural selection weren’t immediately accepted by everyone, which is why the watchmaker analogy has kept coming up and Dawkins had to argue against it much later.

The idea that technologies (such as watches) also follow an evolutionary process, with analogs to reproduction, mutation, and selection, is more recent. Hume already knew, of course that designing machines took “multiplied trials, mistakes, corrections, deliberations, and controversies.” But it was only when Dawkins wrote about memes in the 1970s that the parallel between biology and ideas became salient, and even today it hasn’t fully permeated the discourse.

As far as I know, the first people to directly make the argument I’m laying out above are Peter Richerson and Robert Boyd in Not By Genes Alone: How Culture Transformed Human Evolution:

William Paley’s famous Argument from Design would better support a polytheistic pantheon than his solitary Christian Creator; it takes many designers to make a watch.

They give many examples, from language (like English dialects) to technology (like the marine chronometer) to institutions (like churches). This was 2005. I think it’s correct that cultural evolution was only becoming mainstream then. Today it has become a bigger part of the discourse thanks, for example, to the works of Joe Henrich.

Come to think of it, maybe that’s one reason that creationism is weaker today — it has become more obvious that everything is evolved to some degree, even the things that are designed.

Or maybe it’s really just that there’s nothing new to say, not even the clever argument about polytheistic watchmakers that I was proud to have thought of while swimming the other day, only to realize that Richerson and Boyd had made it 20 years ago, and David Hume, in a way, 250 years ago.

Horologia Ferrea (“The Clockmaker’s Craft”), from Antwerp, c. 1591

1. To be fair, the actual quote says “an artificer or artificers,” so Paley wasn’t claiming it was literally one person. But it doesn’t look like he took the mention of the plural to its logical conclusion.