How old Charlie attacked Intelligent Design with Occam's razor

Intelligent Design Certain features of the

universe and of living things are best explained by an intelligent cause, not an undirected process such as natural selection

Thinly veiled dancing girls god...

Occam's razor Lex parsimoniae When competing hypotheses are

equal in other respects, the principle recommends selection of the hypothesis that introduces the fewest assumptions and postulates the fewest entities while still su ff i c i en t ly answer ing the question.

Old Charlie Old Charlie stole the handle, and

the train it won't stop going, no way to slow down...

Locomotive BreathJethro Tull

Evolution by natural selection

The process by which traits become more or less common in a population due to consistent effects upon the survival or reproduction of their bearers

“We can allow satellites, planets, suns, universe, nay whole systems of universe, to be governed by laws, but the smallest insect, we wish to be created at once by special act. “

- Old Charlie

Er, not so easy... “It is grindingly, creakingly, crashingly obvious that, if

Darwinism were really a theory of chance, it couldn't work.”

- Richard Dawkins

Climbing mount improbable

The mechanism of natural selection

Heritable variation exists within populations of organisms.

Organisms produce more offspring than can survive.

These offspring vary in their ability to survive and reproduce

Douglas Adams

If you try and take a cat apart to see how it works, the first thing you have on your hands is a non-working cat. Life is a level of complexity that almost lies outside our vision; it is so far beyond anything we have any means of understanding that we just think of it as a different class of object, a different class of matter; 'life', something that had a mysterious essence about it, was God given, and that's the only explanation we had. The bombshell comes in 1859 when Darwin publishes 'On the Origin of Species'. It takes a long time before we really get to grips with this and begin to understand it, because not only does it seem incredible and thoroughly demeaning to us, but it's yet another shock to our system to discover that not only are we not the centre of the Universe and we're not made by anything, but we started out as some kind of slime and got to where we are via being a monkey. It just doesn't read well.

Disturbing trends

The burden of proof

Jab, jab, jab...

Ahh, the comfort...

McDonald: “Now a lot of people find great comfort from religion. Not everybody is as you are – well-favored, handsome, wealthy, with a good job, happy family life. I mean, your life is good – not everybody's life is good, and religion brings them comfort.”

Dawkins: “There are all sorts of things that would be comforting. I expect an injection of morphine would be comforting – it might be more comforting, for all I know. But to say that something is comforting is not to say that it's true.”

But hey, the world is ...“You can’t just say there is a God because well, the world

is beautiful. You have to account for bone cancer in children. You have to account for the fact that almost all animals in the wild live under stress with not enough to eat and will die violent and bloody deaths. There is not any way that you can just choose the nice bits and say that means there is a God and ignore the true fact of what nature is.”

- Stephen Fry

And about beauty...

Isn't it enough to see that a garden is beautiful without having to believe that there are fairies at the bottom of it too?

-Douglas Adams

And the evidence...

Universal biochemical organisation and molecular variance patterns

DNA sequencing The proteomic evidence also supports the universal

ancestry of life Comparative Anatomy Embryology Vestigial Organs Biogeography

The meaning of life – Monty Python

Lady Presenter: Well, that's the end of the film. Now, here's the meaning of life.

[She is handed a gold-wrapped booklet.] Lady Presenter: Thank you, Brigitte. [She clears her throat, then unwraps and examines the gilt

booklet.] Lady Presenter: Well, it's nothing very special. Uh, try and

be nice to people, avoid eating fat, read a good book every now and then, get some walking in, and try and live together in peace and harmony with people of all creeds and nations.

Footnote

If you assume there’s no afterlife, you’ll likely have a fuller, more interesting life.