WE ARE ALL CONTRAPTIONS

Date: December 14, 1986, Sunday, Late City Final Edition Section 7; Page 18, Column 2; Book Review Desk
Byline: BY MICHAEL T. GHISELIN; Michael T. Ghiselin is tha author of ''The Triumph of the Darwinian Method,'' and ''The Economy of Nature and the Evolution of Sex''
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THE BLIND WATCHMAKER By Richard Dawkins. Illustrated. 332 pp. New York: W. W. Norton & Company. $18.95.

EARLY in the 19th century it was intellectually respectable to justify one's belief in God by arguing from design. The theologian William Paley presented one version of that argument in his ''Natural Theology'': Suppose we find a watch. We cannot imagine a watch arising without a watchmaker. And because organisms are vastly more complicated than watches, it is even harder to imagine them arising without an organism-maker.

The young Charles Darwin, when he was preparing to become a clergyman, occupied what were said to have been Paley's rooms in Christ's College, Cambridge. He later remarked that he had greatly admired Paley's works, though he had failed to pay much attention to the validity of the premises. In ''The Origin of Species'' (1859), Darwin revealed to the world that the so-called watchmaker is actually a purely natural process.
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Darwin's next book, published in 1862, was entitled ''On the Various Contrivances by Which British and Foreign Orchids Are Fertilised by Insects, and on the Good Effects of Intercrossing.'' This was a deliberate attack on the argument from design, and indeed on the notion of purpose in the world in general. Even the title was ironic, for Paley had said that there can be no ''contrivance without a contriver.'' Darwin managed to achieve two major goals. He showed how complex and remarkably effective adaptations could in fact be built up by small steps through natural selection. And he turned the argument from design on its head: Nature produces what we might call contraptions rather than contrivances. In other words, natural selection predicts both adaptation and maladaptation. The latter makes no sense as a deduction from the creative action of an omniscient and omnipotent being. Carried to its logical conclusion, the argument from design gives rise to the argument from incompetent design, hence to an argument for atheism.

The Harvard botanist Asa Gray was one of Darwin's ablest supporters, but the book on orchids was a bit much for Gray's religious sensibilities. He devised a theory that John Dewey later called ''design on the installment plan'': God works by natural selection but includes a dose of providence by guiding variation along definite lines. Darwin replied that a deity who did that would have to foresee everything in evolutionary history, leading to a very heterodox theology.

All this ought to be common knowledge, but it is not. Special creation - the watchmaker's work -was decisively refuted over a century ago, and evolution soon became as well established as the circulation of the blood. But people keep reinventing the same old arguments, sometimes with minor variations. Richard Dawkins is no exception. He never mentions Darwin's book on orchids. He attributes the argument from imperfect design to Stephen Jay Gould, and something like design on the installment plan to the Bishop of Birmingham, Hugh Montefiore.

Be this as it may, in ''The Blind Watchmaker,'' Mr. Dawkins succeeds admirably in showing how natural selection allows biologists to dispense with such notions as purpose and design, and he does so in a manner readily intelligible to the modern reader. Science and technology have advanced a great deal since Darwin's day, and Mr. Dawkins takes ad-vantage of opportunities to explain difficult concepts by means of some modern analogies. He has programmed his personal computer to show how complex patterns can be built up in small steps through processes much like natural selection. He further shows how such processes as the development of embryos can be elucidated by comparison with computers.

Such analogies have their limitations, but at least they make it easier for somebody with just a little familiarity with computers to understand how evolution works. Many errors about evolution are due to thinking about genes as if they formed blueprints or pictures of an entire organism. When we conceive of the genetic material as a program that controls development, we should not expect that material to look anything like the organism itself. If we understand that, we find it less puzzling that a string of chemicals can specify the structure of anything so complicated as the human brain. NOT content with rebutting creationists, Mr. Dawkins presses his arguments against those who claim to have invented serious alternatives to the generally accepted ''neo-Darwinian'' view. The theory of punctuated equilibria, for example, proposes that the rate of evolutionary change varies, so that sometimes change is rapid, sometimes none occurs at all. Evolution by jerks, or rapid steps, has been confused with evolution by saltations, or leaps, in which major change would occur in a single generation. Mr. Dawkins accuses Mr. Gould, the leading propagandist of the puctuational view, of misleading people by using ''saltation'' to describe two very different processes. Orthodox theory rules out leaps, but emending it to allow for a lot of rapid steps means only a change in emphasis.

Some critics of what is purported to be neo-Darwinism have claimed that evolution is due to variations constrained by the kinds of changes that can occur in the course of embryological development. This is supposed to be something other than the ''random mutations'' of neo-Darwinism. But traditional evolutionary theory has never asserted that variation is random in the sense that one change is as probable as another. Darwin wrote a whole book, ''The Variation of Animals and Plants Under Domestication,'' explaining how embryology affects evolution. Again, Mr. Dawkins does not discuss that book - nor do the authors against whom he argues so well.

As Mr. Dawkins points out, the arguments presented against evolution by creationists turn out to be addressed to the incredulity of the ignorant. If you cannot imagine something, then it cannot be true. If something seems out of line with ordinary experience, it must be attributed to supernatural influences. Such are the thought habits of uncultivated intellects - children, savages and simpletons. The existence of primitive thought habits makes a great deal of sense in terms of evolutionary biology. Our brains are here because they helped our ancestors to get through the day and to outreproduce their neighbors. They are good enough for us to learn to think in a disciplined and rigorous manner, but it takes much effort and some talent to master the principles of probability theory and the subtleties of celestial mechanics or population genetics. So we should only expect that anthropomorphism, teleology and other inadequate ways of thinking should persist in everyday life and even - as something like vestigial organs - in learned discourse. AS a friendly observer of American life, Mr. Dawkins, who teaches at the University of Oxford, expresses concern about the political activities of creationists. His book may provide assistance for those attempting to defend science from sectarian attacks. However, those to whom the creationists appeal for support are those who are least qualified to judge the issues. The average high school graduate knows virtually nothing about evolution because there is a long tradition of watering it down, placing it at the end of the textbook or even deleting it altogether from the curriculum.

Evolution has been muted or suppressed at even the highest levels of instruction, and not just in the United States. Mr. Dawkins says that when he was an undergraduate, some of Darwin's theories about sex were not taken seriously by biologists. One reason why they are now taken very seriously is that a few actually read what Darwin wrote. When eminent biologists at universities like Oxford and Harvard, who write books about evolution for the general public, overlook so much of Darwin's contribution, one wonders all the more about their colleagues and their students.

An old story has it that a proper Victorian lady responded to the idea of our kinship with the apes by saying it might or might not be true, but that if it were, she hoped that it would not become generally known. Although widely known, our humble ancestry has been handled like any other matter deemed inappropriate for polite conversation or apt to corrupt our inferiors. Treating evolutionary biology as a topic to be discussed only among academic specialists becomes increasingly difficult as research continues to give so many impressive results. Many people are fascinated by evolution, and they want to learn more about it. And many such people would love to read about matters that others would conceal from them. ''The Blind Watchmaker'' fills such needs perfectly. Readers who are not outraged will be delighted.