My next read

I’ve been meaning for a while to actually read The Blind Watchmaker, which has been sitting on my shelf waiting for an opportunity all this past month.

I’m only about 40 pages into it, but so far it’s engaging and interesting. It’s also fun to watch academic smackdowns:

[Bishop Montefiore] makes heavy use of what may be called the Argument from Personal Incredulity. In the course of one chapter we find the following phrases, in this order:

…there seems no explanation on Darwinian grounds…It is no easier to explain…It is hard to understand…It is not easy to understand…It is eqally difficult to explain…I do not find it easy to comprehend…I do not find it easy to see…I find it hard to understand…it does not seem feasible to explain…I cannot see how…neo-Darwinism seems inadequate to explain many of the complexities of animal behaviour…it is not easy to comprehend how such behaviour could have evolved oslely through natural selection…It is impossible…How could an organ so complex evolve?…It is not easy to see…It is difficult to see…

The Argument from Personal Incredulity is an extremely weak argument, as Darwin himself noted. In some cases it is based upon simple ignorace. For instance, one of the facts that the Bishop finds it difficult to understand is the white colour of polar bears.

As for camouflage, this is not always easily explicable on neo-Darwinian permises. If polar bears are dominant in the Arctic, then there would seem to have been no need for them to evolve a white-coloured form of camofulage.

This should be translated:

I personally, off the top of my head sitting in my study, never having visited the Arctic, never having seen a polar bear int he wild, and having been educated in classical literature and theology, have not so far managed to think of a reason why polar bears might benefit from being white.

In this particular case, the assumption being made is that only animals that are preyed upon need camouflage. What is overlooked is that predators also benefit from being concealed form their prey. Polar bears stalk seals resting on the ice. If the seal sees the bear coming from far enough away, it can escape. I suspect that, if he imagines a dark grizzly bear trying to stalk seals over the snow, the Bishop will immediately see the answer to his problem.