Trouble for Natural Design

Abstract

Despite the recent trend of framing biological adaptation in terms of natural design, this chapter points to trouble for that approach. In this chapter, I hold that arguments for natural design are in fact untenable. I provide a substantive argument for the thesis that a design implies the existence of a designer and conclude that naturalists who reject a natural designer (God) should therefore also reject natural design. A design, as well as its cousins the program, blueprint, and recipe, is a standard of correct form for the phenotype of an item. That is, it represents what the item is to be like in the end and rules out alternative outcomes as defective. But phenotypes, as we know, are a result of a genotype plus the environment. Even if we hold fixed some genotype, we still need to specify a “correct” or “natural” environment for that genotype to inhabit to arrive at a norm for the phenotype. Only mental activity is capable of the feat of representing intended environmental conditions, which is how we say that an artifact turned out contrary to its design. Therefore, without mental activity, design is in fact an impossibility.