The Pony Fish鈥檚 Glow by George Williams, Basic Books, $20,
ISBN 0 465 07281 X
HAVE pity on poor William Paley, the 18th-century cleric. Paley received
a savage beating 11 years ago at the hands of that militant atheist Richard
Dawkins, now professor of the public understanding of science at Oxford
University. In The Blind Watchmaker, Dawkins rubbished Paley鈥檚 argument
that the functional beauty of the human eye proved the existence of God.
Now the old man鈥檚 reputation once again faces an intellectual heavyweight.
George Williams is emeritus professor of biology at the State University of New
York and, like Dawkins, a staunch defender of Darwin鈥檚 theory of evolution. He
again takes Paley鈥檚 example of the eye and explains how the illusion of divine
purpose can arise from the arbitrary forces of natural selection.
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Paley died in 1805, four years before Darwin鈥檚 birth, so he could not have
anticipated his posthumous role as an Aunt Sally for evolutionary biologists.
And both modern authors do concede that the ideas explained in his 1802 book
Natural Theology made sense according to the information available at
the time. But, as Williams says in The Pony Fish鈥檚 Glow, the structure
of eye reveals an absence of forward planning in its back-to-front arrangement
of sensory cells, nerve fibres and blood vessels in the retina.
The pony fish of the title is a startling example of successful design
resulting from a series of happy accidents. It has a luminescent belly and might
appear to have landed itself in deep water by advertising itself as a potential
snack for predatory species. But Williams explains how the glow disguises the
fish鈥檚 silhouette when viewed from below.
Williams鈥檚 book takes the Neo-Darwinist argument into new areas. Although his
tone is less confrontational, he is as dismissive as Dawkins of the 鈥渕oral
fallacies鈥� resulting from religious belief. The idea that fertilisation is the
defining moment when a potential life becomes a human entity is demolished in a
carefully argued assault on the anti-abortion movement.
Physicians are another target. He argues that traditional medicine has
frequently ignored the lessons of evolution. One example is the use of drugs to
inhibit mild fever, when the fever is the body鈥檚 protective response to an
infection. But medics are not the only people who would benefit from this book.
As Williams says: 鈥淭here is no aspect of human life for which an understanding
of evolution is not a vital necessity.鈥�