Organ's rule

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Orgel's rule ( Engl .: Organ's rule or organ's second rule ) is named after the evolutionary biologist Leslie Orgel and was - by Daniel Dennett actually more in jest - by Francis Crick , one of the discoverers of the DNA molecule, situated. The formulation of the rule is:

• " Evolution is cleverer than you are " ("Evolution is more sophisticated than you are").

This rule should by no means be understood as an empirical law, but at best as a heuristic rule that defines a search strategy for finding new solutions to biological problems. As such, it could be justified , for example, by previous success or, more generally, by the often observed superiority of evolutionary trial-and-error strategies over predictive planning by human intelligence. This is especially true if complex systems are affected.

This second rule of Orgel can also be interpreted as a response to scientifically untenable objections to biological evolution , which especially makes clear the fallacy of Argumenta ad ignorantiam (arguments from ignorance). It is an argument ad ignorantiam if someone draws the wrong conclusion from a fact for which he knows no natural explanation or cannot imagine that the fact cannot be explained naturally in principle. In particular, Organ's rule makes it clear that z. B. does not constitute evidence against the emergence of complex (molecular) biological systems according to the theory of evolution if it is currently unknown how this development took place, or if some cannot imagine the development according to the theory of evolution. It also makes it clear that many pseudoscientific objections to the theory of evolution are based on a tacit assumption, contrary to Orgel's rule and unfounded, according to which human planning (or more generally planning by a human-like "intelligence") is fundamentally superior to biological evolution or natural mechanisms.

There is also another Orgel rule (which is why the above is probably called the “second” rule), which was published by Leslie Orgel in a 1960 publication in the Journal of Inorganic and Nuclear Chemistry . This states that molecules of the type MX_4Y_4 should adopt a dodecahedral stereochemistry .