page_title: Argument from poor design
section_title: Overview
hierarchical_section_title: Argument from poor design / Overview
caption_attribution_description: English: In this sketch of a fitness landscape, a population can evolve by following the arrows to the adaptive peak at point B, and the points A and C are local optima where a population could become trapped. Importing fitness landscape cartoon image originally included in Nupedia "fitness landscape" article-in-progress (originally titled "fig1.pdf"). The illustration was created by Claus Wilke in 2001 for Nupedia, under the GFDL. The article was in "open review" at Nupedia, but hadn't yet been approved. This file was converted from PDF to PNG and was originally located here: http://www.nupedia.com/newsystem/upload_file/700/fig1.pdf. As the original copyright holder of the image, I release it into the public domain.
context_page_description: The argument from poor design, also known as the dysteleological argument, is an argument against the assumption of the existence of a creator God, based on the reasoning that any omnipotent and omnibenevolent deity or deities would not create organisms with the perceived suboptimal designs that occur in nature.
  The argument is structured as a basic modus tollens: if "creation" contains many defects, then design appears an implausible theory for the origin of earthly existence. Proponents most commonly use the argument in a weaker way, however: not with the aim of disproving the existence of God, but rather as a reductio ad absurdum of the well-known argument from design.
  Although the phrase "argument from poor design" has seen little use, this type of argument has been advanced many times using words and phrases such as "poor design", "suboptimal design", "unintelligent design" or "dysteleology/dysteleological". The nineteenth-century biologist Ernst Haeckel applied the term "dysteleology" to the implications of organs so rudimentary as to be useless to the life of an organism.
context_section_description: The argument runs that:
  An omnipotent, omniscient, omnibenevolent creator God would create organisms that have optimal design.
  Organisms have features that are suboptimal.
  Therefore, God either did not create these organisms or is not omnipotent, omniscient and omnibenevolent.
  It is sometimes used as a reductio ad absurdum of the well-known argument from design, which runs as follows:
  Living things are too well-designed to have originated by chance.
  Therefore, life must have been created by an intelligent creator.
  This creator is God.
  "Poor design" is consistent with the predictions of the scientific theory of evolution by means of natural selection. This predicts that features that were evolved for certain uses, are then reused or co-opted for different uses, or abandoned altogether; and that suboptimal state is due to the inability of the hereditary mechanism to eliminate the particular vestiges of the evolutionary process.
  In fitness landscape terms, natural selection will always push "up the hill", but a species cannot normally get from a lower peak to a higher peak without first going through a valley.
  The argument from poor design is one of the arguments that was used by Charles Darwin; modern proponents have included Stephen Jay Gould and Richard Dawkins. They argue that such features can be explained as a consequence of the gradual, cumulative nature of the evolutionary process. Theistic evolutionists generally reject the argument from design, but do still maintain belief in the existence of God.
caption: Natural selection is expected to push fitness to a peak, but that peak often is not the highest.
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