Those who reject Darwinism point to elegant works of nature and find in them an intelligent design at work. They argue that you can tell just by looking at Mount Rushmore that there was a designer behind it; it’s not makeshift, jury-rigged, or accidental. Certain features of nature are so elegantly well-suited to their environment and function that they seem as crafted as a sculpture. Typically, the biologist responds by accepting the design of Mount Rushmore while disputing the design of, say, the human eye or some bacteria’s flagella. The biologists then provide a detailed account of how the flagella or the eye evolved, the crucial elements of which are that each variation arose at random as a small step, and each step produced reproductive or survival advantages and was thus “selected” by the environment. The engine of change in evolution is random genetic variation that gives the possessor of the gene an advantage so that more genes like the useful one get passed on.
Another way to refute the claim would be to argue that Mount Rushmore wasn’t designed, either. This argument is annoying, even enraging, because it implies that you are not the boss of you, that when you “decide” to do something, you are no more in control of what you do than Al Michaels is when he describes what is happening on the field during a football game. Even the offensive coordinator “chooses” a play that works best in his imagination, and his success as an offensive coordinator depends on the extent to which the opponents in his imagination are like the opponents on the field. We want to believe that we control ourselves, and attachment to that belief creates great confusion in psychology. A science of natural laws holds that if there is a God in Heaven, he isn’t affecting events on earth; a corollary is that if you have a soul, it isn’t pulling any strings, either.
From my book on early memories:
There is just no getting around the fact that Skinner does not believe in the mind. In a behavioristic account, there is the body and there is behavior and there is nothing left over to ascribe to a mind. … Put simply, the only evidence we have of a mind is the seeing of images that are not in front of us, hearing ourselves think, and feeling, tasting, and smelling things that are not there. The fact that every bit of evidence that we have of minds comes from our five bodily senses I find a bit suspicious. The fact that the mind is said to be the part of us that is immortal I find even more suspicious. We believe in an entity of which we have no evidence and the existence of which would allay our deepest fears. Descartes said, I think therefore I am, claiming that the existence of his mind was the one thing he was certain of. A behavioristic reply might be: I hear words when nobody is speaking them, and even though I call this thinking, all it proves is that I have ears and I have heard people speak.
The behavioristic notion of not having a mind analogizes people to rats and pigeons. Even biologists who are utterly committed intellectually to our descent from other animals balk at this analogy. They think there must be something in the complexity and size of the human brain that produces consciousness, and they believe that this consciousness distinguishes us from other animals (Wilson, 1998). As noted, though, there is nothing in what is called consciousness that is different from what we hear, see, and so on. Behaviorists think that people are certainly more complicated than pigeons, because our bigger brains make us more responsive to deferred consequences, conflictual contingencies, and peculiar reinforcers. However, behaviorists do not see us as fundamentally different from pigeons. Objections to behaviorism include statements like, pigeons roost on statues of people, not the other way around. These arguments are designed to appeal to our pride, not to our reason. Skinner (1971) answered these arguments in his book, Beyond Freedom and Dignity, and I will not rehash his rebuttal here, except to note his use of the word, dignity. A behavioristic account of humanity is an undignified account; it is therefore a humble account, and it is not surprising that many behaviorists are drawn to similarly humble accounts of humanity, such as Taoism and Buddhism (Hayes, Follette, & Linehan, 2004; Baer, 2003).
Mount Rushmore did not spring full-blown like Athena from the head of Zeus. Tourism was sparse in South Dakota. One famous tourist beacon was New Hampshire’s Old Man of the Mountain, which virtually everybody accepted as looking like a person only coincidentally (it collapsed in 2003). I’m certain that a lot of people had a lot of ideas about how to bring tourists to South Dakota. I’m certain that even the guy who “thought it up” had a lot of ideas. I put “thought it up” in quotes because what he really did was generate a whole bunch of images and words, and then he recognized one of them as having merit and promoted it. His idea met with success and failure, and the aspects of the idea that met with success continued and the aspects that met with failure died out. For example, he suggested one mountain range for the attraction, but the Lakota said no. He also suggested that the figures depict famous people from the West, but the sculptor and eventually Congress said no. When the four presidents were decided upon, the sculptor wanted torsos included for Washington and Lincoln, but production ended with busts when war-production replaced public works expenditures.
Even the sculpting itself, like all art, was a process of editing and imagination. Imagination, selected by survival advantages, enables us to try out an action with very little cost. As noted, an imagination is only as useful as its alignment with reality. Artists have a lot of ideas and edit them. Good artists continue editing them even after they are expressed. The editing ends when the artist sees what she expected to see, or when she sees something better and can’t imagine anything even better than that, or when she runs out of time. An artist can only be as good as her aesthetic judgment, just as someone with no sense of humor cannot reliably write comedy.
So rather than concede that Mount Rushmore was designed, I prefer to say that a lot of ideas were considered, some of them were expressed, some were selected and some not. This applies not only to the blueprints but also to the execution. Chisel here or chisel there? According to the artist’s image of Lincoln, here, not there. The mountain and the expectations of funding sources controlled the sculptor’s behavior as surely as a golf course controls Tiger Woods’ behavior. In fact, what makes Tiger Woods a great golfer is that the golf course controls his behavior more thoroughly than anyone else’s.
Michael Karson, Ph.D. 
I tried to add something to this and couldn’t; all the interesting thoughts that came to mind in response are actually just restatements of what you, yourself, had said or implied. Like, “Yes– and thinking about design, intention and volition in nature lead us to think about… oh. Right.”
I like your post, Michael.
Where we get caught is in the great duality characterizing mind or other, perceiver or perceived, designer or design. One of the great oversights of industrialized education concerns basic training in both/and, and neither/nor understanding.
Designer and design are co-arising phenomena, just as WB Yeats notes below:
“O body swayed to music,
O brightening glance,
How can we know
the dancer from the dance?”
And when notions of both drain away, only the actional context remains.
“Life is larger than logic” (Zhuangzi).
take care, -john