Is the watchmaker blind, is culture left to chance?
In his book The Blind Watchmaker: Why the Evidence of Evolution Reveals a Universe without Design (1986), Richard Dawkins cited 18th-century theologian William Paley’s argument that if we find an object as precise and complex as a clock on a heath, we can assume that it did not come into being spontaneously, but was designed. Paley applied this argument to nature to prove the existence of God. Dawkins believed that Darwin’s theory of natural selection provided an answer to Paley’s argument:
“Natural selection, the blind, unconscious, automatic process which Darwin discovered, and which we now know is the explanation for the existence and apparently purposeful form of all life, has no purpose in mind. It has no mind and no mind’s eye. It does not plan for the future. It has no vision, no foresight, no sight at all. If it can be said to play the role of watchmaker in nature, it is the blind watchmaker” (Dawkins 1996, p. 5).
Dawkins argued that natural selection could have created the animal world even without the will of God, and Donald Campbell argued that cultural selection could have created knowledge and civilization even without the will of man. In his works of the 1950s and 60s, Campbell put forward the theory of “blind variation and selective retention,” according to which man creates cultural variations randomly, without foreseeing the future course of events, and these variations are then subjected to selection in which only those variations that have proven useful are stored and passed on through learning. Learning is “the retention of adaptive response patterns for subsequent utilization, thus abbreviating the trial and error process” (Campbell 1959, p. 158). Taking Dawkins and Campbell’s argument further, we can conclude that man is not a subject of culture at all, that culture does not need human design, that meanings develop on their own: they arise randomly and are passed on through involuntary learning. However, some people feel uneasy with this assumption:
“…Historical analyses of scientific and technological change suggest that cultural change is not quite so directed, and foresight not quite as accurate, as commonly assumed. Historical figures often claim retrospectively to have guided cultural change in particular directions, yet such claims may have the benefit of hindsight and be self-servingly exaggerated. However, there is a general lack of systematic evidence regarding this issue, at least compared to the careful experiments conducted by Luria and Delbrück in biology. We should therefore be prepared to accept that cultural evolution may, at least in some instances, be directed rather than blind and that there is a valid difference here between cultural and biological evolution” (Mesoudi 2011, p. 46). [Luria and Delbrück’s experiments in the 1940s showed that mutations in bacteria are not the result of selection pressure, but occur by chance.—A.K.]