Science Quote by Richard Dawkins

Explanations aim to show how an outcome could reasonably arise from underlying conditions; they raise its probability by revealing the steps, constraints, and mechanisms that produce it. When an outcome is complex and statistically rare, more structure is needed to make sense of it, so the explanatory burden grows. A puff of smoke dispersing is easy to account for because many microstates lead to it; a smoke ring persisting needs special conditions and so calls for a richer story. In probabilistic and information terms, what is simple or common compresses neatly; what is intricate or improbable demands more information to describe and more machinery to justify.

Richard Dawkins uses this point to frame the central achievement of evolutionary theory. Organisms look designed because their arrangements are exquisitely unlikely under random assembly. Treating them as if they appeared all at once makes them mystifying. Natural selection dissolves the mystery by replacing one leap of astronomical improbability with a long chain of modest, cumulatively filtered steps. Each step is probable enough under the right ecological pressures; the accumulation yields the spectacular. This is the logic behind his Mount Improbable metaphor: scale the easy slope by increments rather than attempting the sheer cliff in a single bound.

The idea also undercuts the move to explain complexity by invoking an even more complex designer. If something is too intricate to be accounted for by gradual processes, postulating a vastly more intricate agent only deepens the improbability; the cure is worse than the disease. Better explanations do not merely add entities but show how constraints, feedback, and selection elevate the likelihood of outcomes that would otherwise be vanishingly rare.

Beyond biology, the maxim guides clear thinking. Prefer accounts that turn a puzzle into a series of ordinary steps, and be wary when a proposed solution inflates the mystery it promises to solve.