I like pocket watches. I also like evolution. I don't like that one is being used to undermine the other. I purchased a pocket watch this weekend at an estate sale, and it's sitting here next to me finely tick-tick-ticking away the time. I do agree that it is finely crafted, and it does a great job of keeping the time (so long as I remember to wind it daily). But sitting here, listening to this pocket watch, and the clicking of my Dalek wall clock, and looking at my wrist watch, I've come to this amazing realization.
The watches and clocks are the evolutionary descendants of sundials.
OK, I know that it doesn't fit 100%, with pocket watches not being alive and not self reproducing, but it does work. Watches and clocks as we know them today didn't just magically spring into existence. Pocket watches haven't always existed either. Henry VIII didn't have one. Watches as we know them didn't show up until the 1920s. Telling time started as a simple marking of the progression of the sun across the sky. Then there was the "mutation" (invention) of the sundial, which allowed for more accurate measurement of time. There were several varieties of sundials, some more successful than others (variation). The more successful sundials were reproduced and spread out to dominance (non-random selection). Then there were more inventions (mutations) concerning the marking of time. The ones that worked survived, the ones that didn't are lost to time. Clocks came out of this and progressed on to pocket watches, wrist watches, and Dalek clocks. Even digital time pieces are part of this legacy, the next successful mutation in time keeping instruments.
So the next time someone brings up the "pocket watches mean evolution isn't true" argument, tell them that their finely crafted pocket watch is the evolutionary descendant of a sundial.
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ReplyDeleteRyan Linstad said...
ReplyDeleteLaia, I would like to first start off by saying your clever analogy made me laugh. I wouls also like to preface my discussion by referencing your previously posted blog entry titled "Response." When a creationist enters a museum with a closed mind, they are more likely to, as you put it, “twist[ing] it as they do everything else.” I myself like to put it as Christopher Hitchens so lovely puts it, “squaring the circle.”
Like watches, organisms in museums are under their share of scrutiny by creationists. Watches and organisms alike have their transitional models. The paleontological community has just yet to start finding these sundial-like organisms (Tiktaalik for example).
I would like to propose a new mechanism you omitted from your blog (to defend it) in order negate how an intelligent designist may dispute the transition of tracking the sun to sun dials. This mechanism is coevolution. Without the introduction of the species of man, time would have been limited to the shadows casted by objects like rocks or trees. Natural landscape Sundials that cast shadows like trees and rocks could be compared to earthly elements that once under the right conditions became protobionts. Just as under the introduction of man (analogous to environmental conditions to create protobionts), natural landscape sundials became well crafted and more fit, modern sundials. Additionally, coevolution is powerful enough to drive species to extinction (e.g. megafauna in the Americas with the introduction of human) and easily just as powerful to cause speciation. So the next time a creationist or an intelligent designist tries to square the circle of the evolution of watches, they are forgetting that once there is enough competition and variance in species in an environment, there may be ample pressures to speciate.
It’s a stretch. And perhaps as a hardcore Darwinist I am trying to square the circle. However, unlike watches, I, like all organisms, inherently have the capacity to follow the four postulates of Darwinian evolution.
I'm glad my musings made you laugh. "Squaring the circle" is an excellent description, I'm adding it to my lexicon.
ReplyDeleteI enjoyed this new perspective on the Pocket Watch dilemma. You definitely made a good point about the "common ancestor" of the pocket watch - something I'd never thought about before. I have to admit that I am not really sure where I stand in the debate, nor how I feel about the analogy. I've been pretty ignorant about the topic of evolution for most of my life, especially on the topic of human origins. I hadn't heard this analogy until a couple years ago and didn't think very critically about it then.
ReplyDeleteYou said that it doesn't fit perfectly, and I am going to expand on that, while trying not to sound too critical and/or supportive of intelligent design. I don't have a definite position on the topic and am just typing my thoughts as they come out! I think the biggest issue with the analogy is the fact that the sun dial isn't alive. The "mutations" that would have occurred to improve it's function and accuracy were invented....by people; the inventions were created. Obviously the pocket watch is inanimate as well but can be compared to the living system of humans because of the idea that it was "created" that way. Also the fact that the clock isn't really telling time - it is merely ticking and moving a lever around a circle.
I would agree that this example of a finely crafted pocket watch doesn't refute evolution or make intelligent design true. Maybe there are better analogies out there (that include living organisms) to make sense of the dilemma and provide conclusive answers. Or maybe there is a middle ground between solely evolutionary processes and creationism.
Laia,
ReplyDeleteThis is an excellent discussion of the pocket watch dilemma, a topic that I was not familiar with until reading your post. Your response to creationists is clever, and makes sense as long as you don't "over think" the logistics of the situation. I know that you said that this analogy doesn't fit perfectly, but I think you would have a very difficult time making a case with your analogy to a creationist for the following reasons:
1) One of the original issues with the pocket watch dilemma is that fallaciously concludes causation from a correlation between two scenarios that are unrelated. In the same way that it would be incorrect to assume that the complexity of our universe arose from intelligent design, it is incorrect to state that a sundial can "evolve" in complexity to the pocket watch you purchased this weekend. Evolution does not have a goal, but technological innovations most certainly do. Humans have been looking for a way to keep track of time more accurately for thousands of years, and over time we have gotten better and better at it. We are progressing toward a goal of perfection, something that evolution cannot do.
2) As Christy stated, the biggest issue with this argument is that the pocket watch is not alive. In order for this analogy to make sense, we would have to assume that intermediates between the pocket watch and the sundial were literal "descendants" of the pocket watch, which makes sense when you think about it abstractly, but it would be hard to make the argument that the sun dial passed heritable traits on to the pocket watch.
Overall, I think your analogy is very clever, and is a great attempt at explaining an argument that doesn't effectively refute evolution. Personally, I stand somewhere between these two arguments, but coming up with an analogy that accurately describes a phenomenon can be very difficult to do!
I particularly like David Hume's analysis of Paley's watchmaker analogy, which can be found, like most things, on Wikipedia:
ReplyDeletehttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Watchmaker_analogy
I know folks sometimes don't accept computer simulations since they too are "designed" for providing answers to questions like this. However, the simulation is designed to match real life situations by satisfying various simple assumptions. If you accept assumptions like 1. Life replicates 2. Variation results from imperfect replication 3. Traits are heritable 4. Some variants survive better than others, then you can simulate them out and see that complex systems can result.
"Also the fact that the clock isn't really telling time - it is merely ticking and moving a lever around a circle."
-Not sure that this matters. The cow doesn't realize how tasty it is, but still; because it is it interacts with the environment in such a way that results in more cows. (We like to eat them, we farm them, kill of their competitors, diseases, and feed them past reproductive age). The watch interacts with the environment in a way that promotes its reproduction, which in this case is carried out by designers; it need not tell time itself.
Great analogy! I just wanted to expand on an idea in a previous comment, that of coevolution. Would it be too far-fetched to say that humans that aren't watchmakers are co-evolving with timepieces? I haven't the slightest idea how to make a watch, yet I can read one to gain information about what the time is. A watch would have no purpose if humans could not read it and so it would then go "extinct." As timepieces "evolve" from sundial to clock, humans "evolve" to be able to read the device. If someone created a crazy complicated clock that only he could read, would that species in clock phylogeny persist?
ReplyDeletePerhaps a bit too much of a stretch? I just thought it was an interesting concept..
Alissa P
Nice pocket watch analogy fallacy. This reminds me of the "Tornado in the junkyard" false analogy by Sir Fred Hoyle and his defense against abiogenesis.
ReplyDeleteLaia,
ReplyDeleteThis is a great analogy. I think that along with mutation, your analogy is also able to show fitness. Different watches have different levels of fitness for different environments. The fitness of a heavy-duty watch, and a rolex would be very different depending on which environment they are in.
I had never heard of the pocket watch analogy prior to this post, and I'm glad you brought it up. I believe this argument really encompasses the debate between on the existence of evolution. If someone can draw a comparison to prove their point, no matter how outlandish, they will. The pocket-watch could have been any man-made object in this argument and meant the same thing. Two unrelated things cannot show causation. This is just like saying: "Many plants receive their green color from chlorophyll, and my shoes are green. Therefore my shoes have chlorophyll." This statement is false because shoes don't have chlorophyll, and I've never owned green shoes.
Evolving clocks is a very interesting analogy; one that's clearly fun to play with. I would argue with the clock dilemma, not by making an analogy to clocks evolving (because they were designed after all), but by talking about the evolution of our perception of time. With sundials, we were able to imagine hours. As our ability to make more accurate clocks increased we gained minutes, seconds, and so on. Even if our tools were designed, our ideas evolved.
ReplyDeleteI would also mention to someone citing the clock dilemma that organisms are not perfectly engineered like clocks. We have vestigial organs, for example. Also the laryngeal nerve that has to go through the aortic arch is clearly not well designed.
I liked this pocket watch analogy a lot. I had never really heard of the pocket watch dilemma until we had the lecture in class. And I honestly find it hard to comprehend how anyone can believe that if a watch is complex and must be created, evolution must be false. But I really like how you were able to take the pocket watch and show how things change (or mutate) to a state that is beneficial and can over time become more complex and intricate.
ReplyDeleteSince it wasn't mentioned earlier, I'll post the response that Darwin had to the argument that complex features couldn't be any less than what they are. Referring to the complex human eye, he says, "When it was first said that the sun stood still and the world turned round, the common sense of mankind declared the doctrine false; but the old saying of vox populi, vox dei, as every philosopher knows, cannot be trusted in science. Reason tells me, that if numerous gradations from a simple and imperfect eye to one complex and perfect can be shown to exist, each grade being useful to its possessor, as is certainly the case; if further, the eye ever varies and the variations be inherited, as is likewise certainly the case and if such variations should be useful to any animal under changing conditions of life, then the difficulty of believing that a perfect and complex eye could be formed by natural selection, though insuperable by our imagination, should not be considered as subversive of the theory."
I think Darwin does an excellent explanation of how you need to think about very small changes accumulating to become something else, not that they are instantly complex.
I'm glad I read this post because this is the first that I've heard of it. Great analogy that gets your mind racing about it. There are a lot of great concepts that makes the pocket watch analogy comparable to evolution.
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