Life, Evolution, and Design

Evolution, Design, and Absurdity

Can’t Get Here From There, Part One
There are many perfectly rational arguments for the nonexistence of God, assuming rationalism is the end-all and be-all of every belief system. It is like shooting fish in a barrel to take on arguments for God, though, when the barrel has been emptied of fish, and one is left with an empty barrel, it is a hollow victory and unpromising start from which to strike out into the world and create an ethic by which one can live, and a hope to which one can aspire. This being said, beyond empirical appeals to the fossil record, most “philosophical” arguments against an Intelligent Designer are fueled by a less-than-philosophical view of evidence, where everything is taken at face value and little effort is made to differentiate between hard literalism and the subtler points of soft analogy. Let us take The Watchmaker Analogy for example, where Creation must have a Creator by virtue of its apparent design. David Hume challenged this argument on the following grounds:

Hume argued that design, as defined as something that is created, applies to only a small fraction of the things we see. A watch may be designed, but a snowflake, it would be argued, is not. Snowflakes presumably follow natural processes where randomness is checked by laws that can be described mathematically, as with Mandelbrot fractals.

The difficulty with analogies, of course, is the assumption that things that are similar in some respects are similar in all respects; and this makes analogies no stronger than their weakest link. Calling God a Watchmaker is arguably a faulty analogy. Furthermore, calling God a Creator may be equally flawed. Perhaps it is not the case God creates anything, but that He is, in a dimension of timeless, space-less, causeless infinity, everything that is or ever will be. God-as-Noumenon addresses Hume’s infinite regression argument, where causation, being seen as an end-in-itself, demands a prefect designer have a prefect designer, and that prefect designer have a prefect designer, and so on and so forth, ad infinitum. Again, infinity is not a property of a finite world where finite designers create finite designs. (Nor, it can be argued, is perfection.) Infinity is the transcendental half of finitude, which means its origins can only fall outside perception and empirical inquiry. By logic, however, Hume makes a reasonable argument, but this is not the end of the discussion, only a missed opportunity for a deeper discussion since logic, when presented with infinity, has demonstrable limits.

Hume goes on to argue The Watchmaker Analogy is incomplete, because we have only human-designed artifacts to look at and no other kind of designed artifacts from which to make comparisons. The only comparisons we can make are between natural objects, such as trees, and creature-made objects, such as watches. It is supposed that some other kind of creation would appear different to us than what we encounter in either natural or man-made structures.

The weakness in this aspect of Hume’s case does not arise out of inferior logic, but inferior imagination (unless one believes imagination has less value than logic in contemplating unanswerable questions). Would not any creation by a “Divine” Creator be seen as natural by those emerging out of that creation? (That is, the contents assume the logic of the container that holds them.) Also, would not unnatural creations, as with creature-made creations, always strike these creatures as being mostly creature-like? This would include any extraterrestrial creations, which, as long as they had definite physical form, would only momentarily be regarded as supernatural.

To explain, if you were to present a computer to inhabitants of the Eighteenth century, they might initially regard the machine as supernatural. Yet the fact that someone could take an axe to it would quickly undermine this view. The most compelling feature of supernaturalism is not merely its fantastical first impression, but its ability to fend off or transcend natural obstacles like axes. Of course, science’s cheerleaders would say future technology (such as time travel) would look exactly like supernaturalism to the unacquainted. (As I will explain in coming entries, the only thing supernatural about science’s future is the faith of its truest disciples to believe in science’s eventual omnipotence.)

How then would a supernatural being’s handiwork be evaluated short of displays of matter-defying magic? Would there be inscriptions like “created by a Supernatural God” written in the DNA? Would this handiwork be required to violate known laws of physics?

Ironically, as to this last point, quantum mechanics make no natural sense by the measure of the hardcore empiricist, since there is nothing natural (i.e., common sensical) about it. Indeed, apart from quantum mechanics’ predictive powers, the subatomic world looks exactly like a supernatural realm. However, because there is regularity in atomic behavior, scientists choose to emphasize this aspect of their understanding of atomic structure. Here we see an allusion to our original point: Creatures created by a Supernatural God can easily lose sight of the miraculous nature of their existence because naturalism becomes the baseline default of their reasoning. Creatures, besides wondering at a world that defies their reason, must also get on in it. Naturalism, then, is mostly a necessary habit and not a true reckoning of things. On this score I am sure Hume and I will agree.

Can’t Get Here From There, Part Two
“A junkyard contains all the bits and pieces of a Boeing 747, dismembered and in disarray. A whirlwind happens to blow through the yard. What is the chance that after its passage a fully assembled 747, ready to fly, will be found standing there? So small as to be negligible, even if a tornado were to blow through enough junkyards to fill the whole Universe.” ~Fred Hoyle, The Intelligent Universe

Evolutionists’ best defense against the objection raised by Hoyle, as it pertains to abiogenesis, is to say Evolution does nothing by large dramatic jumps. It is not a single step from junk to a 747, but an accumulation of steps.

Yet how does adding steps between the ridiculous and the sublime, by a process of blind Natural Selection, make their impossible marriage obvious in hindsight? (Critical steps, it must be noted, that remain undiscoverable by those employing this argument.) If the Devil is in the details, then clearly evolutionists are prepared to paper over them with vague appeals to addition that takes place behind closed doors in faraway times. By their reason, what is missing on inspection is only the middle part, and since we have junk on one hand and 747s on the other, and since junk and 747s are made of the same stuff, what is required is only the elaborate sequence by which one was converted into the other. This sequence can never be established with complete certainty as to all its particulars, since it is removed from us by millions if not billions of years. Still, we can be assured, evolutionists tell us, that pragmatic science invents nothing more than is necessary to account for life’s emergence.

Yes, by mathematical inevitability, all the parts of a 747 could eventually fall into place. If we employ The Infinite Monkey Theorem,* where, allowing for an infinity of opportunity to get it right,* even one monkey could write Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, then this must be allowed as a possibility. However, why should there be precisely 26 alphabetic characters at one end and Romeo and Juliet at the other? The analogy assumes more than is presented in the analogy. If there were 27 characters in the alphabet set, infinity might simply allow for a copy where the one extemporaneous character never appeared. If there were 25 characters in the alphabet set, then the play could not be written, period. Of course, I would be accused of presenting a faulty analogy in this latter example since we have precisely 26 characters being used in Romeo and Juliet. These must be the starting ingredients. The Anthropic Principle applies: if here is where you find yourself, then here is where you must be.

Here I am being beaten over the head with a syntactically correct copy of a masterwork, and infinity, like a barn door that can never be completely closed in point of argument, thwarts me at every turn. Again I will say: Infinity cannot be a description of any physical universe; infinity is noumenal.

Regardless, I am denied a “design” because infinite opportunity* might theoretically produce a syntactically correct copy of a play that mistakenly looks like a conscious design. The number of alphabetic characters aside, let us considers the notion of advantageous junk that just happens to be lying around. The natural state of parts to be just as they are does not translate to any addition, no matter how long you permit monkeys to bang on typewriters. In other words, there is nothing “junk” in what junk comes to be in that junkyard. The impossible alphabet is even more impossible than the impossible play. Taken together, it is more likely both alphabet and play, as brute facts, are mis-described where it is claimed only exhaustive mathematics can produce them.

Returning to the evolutionists’ central argument: Accepting the premise that nothing so extravagant as life is achieved by a single jump, then why do they feel compelled to invent concepts like Punctuated Equilibrium to allow for jumps elsewhere in Evolution’s narrative, since there is no better explanation? Again, Punctuated Equilibrium is deduced as an occurrence but not explained as a mechanism, which makes it more a concept of the historian than of the scientist.

Again, we are told that atoms found in chaos and non-life are no different from atoms found in order and life. We are supposed to pause and marvel at this: That the molecules of iron oxide in rust are the same as those found in the paint pigment of a Rembrandt masterpiece. Is anyone but a reductivist genuinely impressed by such grossly simplified comparisons? Regardless, allowing that an atom-for-atom replication of a living organism may give you a facsimile of life, nowhere in this assemblage is it explained how one necessarily leads to other, or how the sequence should have come about, or why.

(*“Primate behaviorists Cheney and Seyfarth remark that real monkeys would indeed have to rely on chance to have any hope of producing Romeo and Juliet. Monkeys lack a theory of mind and are unable to differentiate between their own and others' knowledge, emotions, and beliefs. Even if a monkey could learn to write a play and describe the characters' behavior, it could not reveal the characters' minds and so build an ironic tragedy.” ~quoted from Wikipedia, Infinite Monkey Theorem.)

(*See The Mis-measure of Ample Opportunity below for a refutation of this premise.)

(*Naturally, the evolutionist would say that an infinity would not be needed, only an open-ended block of time; and, of course, this is precisely what they give themselves.)

(*Beyond this, I would be remiss in not pointing out the conundrum of intelligent syntax being required to make the case that its “appearance” does not necessarily signify intelligence.*)

(*This is an ironic about-face where some in artificial intelligence insist that the “appearance” of intelligence in computers, by Turning’s Imitation Principle, effectively constitutes consciousness. In this branch of science at least, earning the label of “conscious intelligence” involves clearing fewer obstacles than those met with in Natural Selection.)

Can’t Get Here From There, Part Three
Natural law can explain every piece of a clock and its workings, it goes without saying. But does this also apply to their assemblage? Can a just-so arrangement of parts just happen to achieve functionality? We have bricks, and we have buildings. Why bricks should be perfectly suited to make buildings, and come to make buildings, is regarded as a useless question. Here we avoid the miraculous nature of the whole for the sake of its less-miraculous parts, because to get around design this is where we must start: at the point where parts display their simplest assembly, and with the hope the rest can be massaged into place.

Richard Dawkins is just such a masseur. Expanding on Hume’s by-design critique, he claims computer simulations create “highly complex systems” working from a simple set of rules, and they do not require an Intelligent Designer.

This may be demonstrably true, but we are light-years away from this kind of one-dimensional complexity to what we see around us in three-dimensions. The computer that executes the complex system does not create itself, or the binary language by which it does its computations. Even given emergent complexity, as with self-generating patterns found in flowing fluids, we do not approach anything like a living organism. Still, science maintains no “life force” is required to explain living organisms: “Life” can be explained by first the dynamism of atomic structure, and then by higher orders of self-generating structure such as found in genes. Again, we need not jump from complete chaos to orderly life in a linear move, since natural algorithms and feedback loops can be inserted to improve the mathematical impossibility of getting from there to here.

Queerly, this assertion is made from distinct observations within distinct fields of science, and though there is scientific understanding in each field (say quantum physics and genetics), there is no dovetailed conversion where one understanding naturally becomes another. This disconnection can be likened to trying to use fashion design to understand automotive design, and not getting much beyond a discussion about upholstery. As we will explore shortly, many scientists own this can’t-get-there-from-here dilemma and devise quasi-philosophical notions like Holism to bridge the gap. However plausible (and necessary) this move is as a philosophical overview, each new level of magnification into reality, no matter how consistent it may be as a science in its own right, requires a new understanding and a distinct vocabulary.

Yes, computations used to achieve algorithmic order are self-executing by rule, but the real world is not a pristine, simple one-dimensional model of complexity. What, then, is needed for living organisms to emerge and consequently create computers that simulate simple one-dimensional models of complexity? In Dawkin’s estimation, the only missing ingredient is time—lots and lots of time.

The Mis-measure of Ample Opportunity
“Luck and opportunity are the residue of design.” ~John Milton

However, I recall a mathematical puzzle posed by Simmel to refute Nietzsche’s concept of eternal recurrence, where three wheels rotating on the same axis were initially lined up by a mark on each wheel’s circumference. If the second wheel rotated twice as fast as the first, and the third was one-over-a-projection of the speed of the first, then the initial alignment would never recur. If every potential combination, it is presumed, repeats given enough time, then not even infinity would reproduce this configuration. In short, time could not guarantee unlimited access to every conceivable variable or combination of variables so they may fall into place for life to emerge. Dawkins might concede this point, but argue that not every variable need be available for life to accidentally flower. Still, this concession does not aid his thesis—it only adds burden to those elements that are continuously available to make the most of an already difficult situation.

(*Most scientists have given up on trying to create complicated DNA out of primordial soups cooked in laboratory test tubes, and have lowered the bar to RNA, where, with coaxing, two of the four elements required to make it have been replicated. We were told that, evolutionarily speaking, it was a hop, skip, and a jump from making amino acids in vats of toxic goo to life itself, and now we are told it is a hop, skip, and a jump from bases and sugars to amino acids to something that might be a stepping stone to life.)

Can’t Get Here From There, Part Four
One need not go as far as this to undercut Dawkin’s faith in incremental improvements of accidental materials. Many-Worlder David Deutsche as lectured on the mathematical odds of us being here, and his calculations start well before we get to primordial soups, single cell organisms, and random mutations:

Since the Universe is almost entirely made of empty space, the chances of us being near a star are slim to none. Then, allowing we would be near a star, the chances of us being in orbit around a stable star are even more remote. Then, allowing for us being in orbit around a stable star, the chances of that star being at the right distance and right temperature so life may evolve on our planet are so statistically unlikely, it is impossible we should exist.

True, one can conceive complexity and order without a God, but in view of the inevitable role chaos plays in foiling any advantages complexity or order may unintentionally create, one does need something rising through the noise to point the way out. If chaos is the natural outcome of most activities, regardless how much order is present from the outset, then something more than order or complexity is needed to affect the desired outcome. This implies either a self-editing mechanism (algorithm) that conveniently favors order, or an external pressure that intends or forces an outcome. As a mechanical process cannot posit value in what it creates, and as we nonetheless perceive value in what is created, then value and mechanics together are either a happy coincidence or, more probably, an intended marriage for our consumption—and this can only favor metaphysics and not blind mathematics. Such extraordinary measures, since not randomness, would not only explain the orderly traffic jam we see around us, but also our existence as thinking things that reflect on orderly traffic jams.

Coextension: A Variation on The Chicken and The Egg Problem
“The crucial test is whether one’s pet theory can distinguish between selection for trait A and selection for trait B when A and B are coextensive: were polar bears selected for being white or for matching their environment? Search me; and search any kind of adaptationism I’ve heard of. Nor am I holding my breath till one comes along.” ~Jerry Fodor, Why Pigs Don't Have Wings

Here we are presented with another variation on needing a flashlight to illuminate a flashlight: If polar bears were selected for being white, then their environment would be immaterial to this selection. They would already be white. In this case, we simply have white bears straying into a snowy climate and finding a suitable home. If, on the other hand, polar bears were selected for matching their environment, then their white color would be immaterial. They would have already been adapted to their environment, so there would have been no pressure to “select for” for any color. That a polar bear is white and camouflaged for its environment—these facts must be taken together if Natural Selection is to be taken seriously. Therefore, random adaptation fails as a mechanism for “natural” selection.

Natural Selection cannot formulate an “object” in what it does, let alone a problem and a solution. A Noumenal Will, however, as an oppositional force to itself in all phenomena, is the built-in solution to every situation it constitutes.

Exaptation and Other Jury-rigs
Evolution confronts such paradoxes with concepts like exaptation and feedback loops, where, for example, feathers initially evolved to regulate body temperature and then were co-opted for flight.

Gould raises the possibility that the first feature might have no function, yet might nevertheless be co-opted for a later function. This seems unlikely for a wing since, as Mivart argued, an intermediate wing would have no function and afford no advantage to its species. Darwin vigorously argued against Mivart’s point by stressing how a wing must have been co-opted from a useful trait, where feathers and limb served function(s) prior to their adaptation to flight.

Still, one is compelled to regress this argument back on itself: Setting aside the simple appeal of a limb morphing into a wing, would a means to cool blood (feathers) be built upon the grounds of something else useful? Indeed, would every link in the chain beneath the feather require a useful but unintended forbearer to precede it? At some point we hit a plateau of arbitrariness where Natural Selection has little to select from, and consequently this chain of reasoning ceases to be reasonable. At this basic state of affairs, Natural Selection is required to multitask, which requires something like coextension to get anywhere at all.

Darwin, massaging the difficulty of getting from nothing to something, describes how many “designs” in Nature are poorly designed. Natural Selection simply “jury-rigs” solutions to problems. He has much to offer by way of evidence: Vestigial structures, latent in biology, and DNA sequencing are often used as examples of adaptation building over preexisting road, and whatever function that road served. With avatarism, traits long lost or passed through in the embryonic state reappear in the species, and for whatever reasons.

I do not dispute Evolution’s resourcefulness in making it up as it goes along on the back end of things. I doubt, as a process born of complete chaos, it can even get started on the terms it is presented. Darwinism, regardless, is reified in being able to blow off whatever miasma it finds itself in. It becomes the god that can lift itself out of nothingness, where, in having no “object” in what it does, it muddles through with something akin to genius.

A Reduction to Absurdity
I do not see much point in arguing design where design is presented as science, since where scientific methodology is evoked, science methodology can dispute.* There may be a number of curious scientific points to be illuminated by the design community, but this can only nibble away at the edges of something that is more fundamentally flawed in scope. Tit-for-tat, growing out of differing rational assessments of empirical evidence, is an unproductive line of attack, because everything that exists in finite reality, where finite understanding is regarded as the end game, avoids the obvious: finitude cannot explain infinitude as finite experience—it can only defy intuition with mathematical proof. Yet mathematical explanation never satisfies reason completely, even though it is reason alone we seek to quell in offering the proof.

The larger debate is not in quibbling over details, no matter how compelling they may be as details, but rather in looking at the big picture, which requires philosophy or faith but not, as an end in itself, simply digging in the dirt with a spade or scribbling numbers on a piece of paper. Science may use a variety of means to construct its labyrinthine explanations, but where it is asserted that the inconceivable becomes the conceivable as a matter of discovery, this is only achieved by the conceivable becoming the inconceivable.*

More practically, we are made to believe that, given an infinite amount of time, life was destined to evolve. Yet this is only to use one unexplained phenomenon (infinite time) to explain another unexplained phenomenon (self-directed matter). Given this impossible predicament, it is the great conceit of scientific reductivism to believe itself to be in possession of anything more than physical processes that cannot otherwise account for themselves. The debate, from this end, always begins in the middle of the debate; and by this means inconvenient paradoxes are left out of the discussion.

Contrary to scientific reductivist assertion, religion and metaphysics are not bound to scientific methodology for their legitimacy. Some in science pay lip service to the idea science and religion do not overlap, but this is less to patronize its opposition than to shutdown any deeper discussion into ontology and epistemology. The news and print media, which tars all questioning of Evolution’s first principles as the misguided preoccupation of conservative evangelicals, is obliged, by its lack of curiosity in a more comprehensive discussion, to let all-knowing science have the last word: Science and religion do not overlap: meaning, only the former can claim legitimacy as an extant explanation for the world. Science, therefore, is the sole arbiter of all that can be arbitrated by virtue of what it chooses to talk about.

Those in the Intelligent Design camp nevertheless play into the game, for they too believe themselves to have more than they can demonstrate by their own “scientific” terms. The central problem in this debate is one of believing ultimate reality is rational by our understanding and, consequently, knowable down to the umpteenth degree. Whether by scientific methodology or articles of faith, this debate proceeds from a mutually agreed upon faulty premise. Creationism’s best scientific position should be one of skepticism, where one does not need to explain how God created the Universe in detail but rather show how science cannot explain the Universe regardless how many details it amasses. Consequently, I believe ultimate reality is closer in essence to Intelligent Design than to the materialist model advocated by Richard Dawkins. Simon Conway Morris, who developed the idea of Convergent Evolution, is a professor of Evolutionary Palaeobiology at the University of Cambridge, and he shares something of this view:

“That satisfactory definitions of life elude us may be one hint that when materialists step forward and declare with a brisk slap of the hands that this is it, we should be deeply skeptical. Whether the “it” be that of Richard Dawkins’ reductionist gene-centred worldpicture, the “universal acid” of Daniel Dennett’s meaningless Darwinism, or David Sloan Wilson’s faith in group selection (not least to explain the role of human religions), we certainly need to acknowledge each provides insights but as total explanations of what we see around us they are, to put it politely, somewhat incomplete.” ~Simon Conway Morris

“Any attempt to explain, entirely in naturalistic terms, the fact that the universe can now understand itself seems doomed to failure. Not only is the Creation open-ended and endlessly fertile, suggesting that in the future science itself faces an infinity of understandings, but so too there is good evidence of realities orthogonal to every-day experiences. Rather than trudging across the arid landscapes skimpily sketched by the materialists, we need to accept the invitation and accompany the Artist that brought Creation into being.” ~Simon Conway Morris

(*Historically, early proponents of God, souls, and the uniqueness of thinking man looked to natural science for proofs. Their lines of reasoning are easily attacked today, since science has come a long way in constructing natural explanation for phenomena. However, reductivists prefer tackling Dark Age straw men where they oversimplify the debate as being only one between reason and superstition.)

(*This is not only true for science but also true for metaphysics.)

Intention and Occam’s Razor
For those who see the appearance of reality as being sufficient to explain its own ontology, this conclusion is achieved by employing a paradox where intelligibility prefigures its own application in reaching this conclusion. If there was no intelligibility to reality, then reality as we understand it could not exist. Indeed, the concept of existence is only an extension of intelligibility.* We cannot step outside this existence to contemplate the riddle. A Russell-like paradox confronts us with every attempt to form a big picture, since only the contents of our experience are perceived phenomenally—never the container.

Our mind in effect is more like the container than the contents—is more like the eye than what the eye sees. Where this mind, this intelligibility, posits existence, this owes to its noumenal dimension, which the mind can only characterize as transcendental on reflection. Following from this, for contents to be intelligible in reason, they must be differentiated in space and sequential in time; and for contents to be so perceived in this manner, some aspect of the observer must exist outside of space, time, and causation to put everything in context. This container-aspect is not physically reductive of the contents, it ideally prefigures them.*

If reality is accidental and has no inherent meaning, then how do we come to this conclusion in a world where we intend much and find meaning in everything? Do we delude ourselves because we impose these qualities retroactively? If one ponders this question seriously, where meaninglessness gains meaning by way of value-neutral fluke, one is forced to make a perversion of Occam’s razor: Many impossible things are assumed simply for the argumentative purpose of making reality soulless. If the simplest explanation tends to be the best, then isn’t it more likely we perceive ourselves as having souls because this concept is a natural extension of reality itself?

(*Physicist John Wheeler grasped the essential mind component of ultimate reality, and how there was no Universe without a mind to perceive it.)

(*More on this in our next round of discussions about the relationship between mind and matter.)

 

Evolution and The Psychology of Culture

Selective Natural Selection
“In truth, reductivists gaze into a starry heaven with just as much wonder as do mystics and theists, though without explaining how anything born of soulless accident should merit soulful reflection. To claim the value we attach to stars is a function of our endorphins may be true as a technical matter, but it is not the thought of endorphins that induces endorphins—it is the thought of something immaterially bigger than ourselves.” ~from Omar's letter, Chapter Twenty-five of Icarus Transfigured

Scientific reductivists are quick to argue impersonal scientific laws—and only impersonal scientific laws—determine the world we have; and these laws inexplicably (if conveniently) favor order over chaos and life over non-life. It is an extraordinary leap of faith to suggest blind energy and dumb luck should eventually lead to photosynthesis and Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel—but there you have it with a straight face.

However, reductivists undercut their argument in the God-like way they describe these determined, impersonal laws. The word “elegant” pops up often, which, arising from soulless matter, is a morbidly personal way to characterize something that is impersonal. Value as a human concept is by definition nonscientific and personal, yet it abounds everywhere as the unexamined fact in supposedly value-neutral fact-finding pursuits. The way many cosmologists lament the prospect of an ever-expanding, ever-diminishing Universe is a curious thing, for example. Why should an expanding or contracting Universe matter as an outcome to any branch of science?

Many in evolutionary biology insist Natural Selection is value-neutral: It plays no favorites. Though it can be argued Evolution is brutally cutthroat, it is preferable among biologists to glowingly emphasize the “biodiversity” and “ecological balance” that comes about when random selection does its thing. Many go so far as to suggest it is incumbent upon us as top dog in the food chain to be stewards of the planet and protect this balance and rich diversity. Yet if Evolution plays no favorites, and by this random process our species becomes top dog, then why should we show favoritism toward those species lower than us on the food chain? Indeed, even if we were to recklessly destroy our habitat, as species before us have surely done, then is this not also Natural Selection at its value-neutral best? Either Natural Selection posits no value in any outcome or there is some compelling reason for us to circumvent it as a process.

Perhaps the most torturous bit of logic among evolutionists is to ignore implications that arise from Natural Selection’s absence of ethics. Short of this acknowledgement, advocates choose either to pretend ethics do not matter or that they are somehow allowed for by other less defined means. As philosophy, Evolution is inescapably nihilistic, though curiously few if any evolutionists are nihilists. This disconnection between brute circumstance and sanguine disposition either indicates a lack of intellectual sobriety in looking Evolution square in the eye, or it exposes an unwillingness to recognize there is more to being ethical than simple willful delusion. The dilemma for the evolutionary advocate can be likened to the engineer of camera equipment who assumes beautiful photographs are already built into his apparatus.

Calling Darwinism teleological is not an exaggerated accusation. At the very least there is a latent pantheism among some evolutionists, and an assumed affinity between all creatures on this planet that must flow from an unscientific notion of shared dignity. This is naturally undeclared, as only the scientific demonstration of shared biology is offered as compelling reason for environmental intervention. Still, Darwinism is objectified (reified) ipso facto as an agent of the good, and as appealing as this may be to our moral and anthropomorphic reason, Darwinism cannot be so depicted or praised.

It is not my intent to deny scientists their emotional affinity with the Natural World, only to point out that in a Natural World dictated by survival of the fittest, there can be no benevolent guiding hand in randomness. Natural Selection, here, in worshipful feeling if not in intellectual honesty, is simply a surrogate for God; and this need in all men is a clue.

One Size Fits All: When Sociology Becomes Science
“You find that people cooperate, you say, ‘Yeah, that contributes to their genes perpetuating.’ You find that they fight, you say, ‘Sure, that’s obvious, because it means that their genes perpetuate and not somebody else's. In fact, just about anything you find, you can make up some story for it.” ~Noam Chomsky

I accept, with limitations, Evolution as a reasonable deduction from evidence. But—again—we are talking about process or a mode and not the thing-in-itself. Accident is arguably one means by which life evolved on this planet, yet to insist planetary order of this magnitude is logically deducible from chaotic quarks is to insist Victorian houses are logically deducible from their welcome mats. Many scientists accept that causation breaks down in the realm of quantum physics, yet in the next breath many will just as readily insist everything we are in human thought and deed, from morality to mental illness to art to religion, can be causally explained through evolutionary biology. However, this is less a demonstration of fact than a profession of belief.*

Sociology relies on rational argument for its proofs, and because it is difficult to determine the necessary connection between an individual’s stated motive and an individual’s action, or to divine a motive where testimony cannot be relied upon, this presents problems when motives and actions are translated to the group.* Hence, empirical deduction in sociology comes up wanting. With sociobiology, the influence of society has been replaced by the influence of animal behavior and biology as seen through the lens of Darwinism; and since animal behavior is as straightforward and as empirical as actuarial tables used by insurance companies, sociology gains scientific respectability. Furthermore, as sociology becomes biology, so does psychology, since group behavior now becomes the meta-narrative for all individual behavior. However, what we have done in this compression is go from a mind-shapes-matter argument (posited in sociology) to a matter-shapes-mind argument (posited in sociobiology), and as if the mind-versus-matter debate never took place in the Enlightenment two hundred years ago.*

It can be argued there are less politics and more empiricism in sociobiology than in sociology, but the sociological dimension of the new science remains a rational and cultural matrix. Similarly, sociobiology, because it implies behavior is determined at both an individual and societal level by way of the organism’s biology, came in for criticism from liberals: Dog-eat-dog cannot be the sole reason for our existence, where even empathy is viewed as a form of selfishness. Since science is convinced it has no agenda in what it does, and since many scientists are liberal-minded by default, this perception was problematic. The term “sociobiology” was dropped in favor of “evolutionary psychology,” and reductive science proceeded on its merry, less-hindered way to do exactly what it had done before: beat plough shares into swords for the sake of selfish genes.

Though life itself is regarded as an accident in Natural Selection, nothing derived from it is seen as incidental to it. Evolutionary psychology provides a rational explanation and utilitarian purpose for all things by a reductivist scheme; and like Marxist theory in days of yore, it becomes the coarse sieve through which everything is facilely reduced to absurdity. For example: according to some in evolutionary psychology, guilt (moral conscience) arises in our mind because our bad actions done to second parties can be communicated by language to third parties, which in turn may damage our reputation, which in turn may be injurious to our ability to procure mates and procreate, which in turn prevents us from passing on our genes. Thus, guilt over sin is simply Natural Selection’s way of making sure we get laid. Another example: Evolutionary psychology tells us the reason why spouses cheat is because biology urges them to diversify the genetic makeup of their offspring. Simultaneously, evolutionary psychology tells our need to be faithful to spouses arises because of our need to protect our offspring. Whatever we do, evolutionary psychology accounts for our reasons in doing it, which makes evolutionary psychology unfalsifiable as science since no test can be constructed by which a prediction will arise that, if it does not pan out, challenges the underlying premise.

However, such one-trick-pony explanations of morality lose some of their appeal when we think about situations where it is applied without an obvious rational advantage. For example: where morality directs people to aspire to a selfless good, as when someone gives charity anonymously. An even more elaborate evolutionary explanation is required here, for one can imagine the evolutionary psychologist analogizing the selfless act to selfish sperm: both can be cast as widely and as indiscriminately as possible in an overabundance of our procreative tendency.* Though this explanation too can be made to fit, we are straying out of science and into quasi-theology in making it.

One cannot deny that biology, at face value, is an amoral force that intends no consistency in what notions it places in our heads, including contradictory impulses about fidelity to spouses. The world, it follows, is a moral jumble because morality is attached to some biological impulses and not others. Morality leads into contradiction where specific actions with projected material benefits send us in different directions. However, where we replace “morality” with “virtue” and consider “the good” as an end in itself, as with our example of the anonymous benefactor, morality becomes a subset of a larger idea: Value in Itself. This, I argue, is the falsification of evolutionary psychology’s reductivist premise: Not all motives are related to real world outcomes. In some cases they remain abstract, meaning they have no home in any object of sense.

Yes, we share biology and behaviors with the animal kingdom, though as Schopenhauer pointed out, as big as the leap is from non-life to life, the leap from animal to man is of equal or greater distance. Evolutionary psychologists routinely lowball the extraordinary capacity of the human mind to acquire and formulate knowledge, and so make little material distinction between (let us say) Shakespeare and ground squirrels, since the similarity of their animal natures must be the thing by which both can be explained. Man might be a reed, as Pascal said, but he is a thinking reed. Nietzsche went further, concluding the distance between man and man is greater than the distance between man and animal. In other words, it is left to men of insight to grasp the significance of insight in man.

(*Stephen Jay Gould was an early critic of sociobiology, claiming, by his concept of exaptation, that intelligence was an “unintended” consequence of Natural Selection, so is irreducible from strict Darwinism. Sociobiology is clearly more mind than matter, and so more philosophical speculation than true biology. [One could extend the same criticism to his idea of punctuated equilibrium.] Of course, as a materialist, Gould was forced to defend the sovereign domain of the humanities from the ravages of reductivism where he portrayed intelligence and creativity as fluke accidents, though one wonders if he grasped the irony of praising with faint damning.)

(*Ironically, where human behavior may possess a surprising degree of predictability when looked at as a whole, assumptions about individual behavior are rarely reliable.)

(*Reductive science insists mind [which would include the ground for human behavior] is only matter [a byproduct of our material bodies]. Consequently, mind can only reflect the dictates of matter. As we will discover in the next round of entries, this subservient view of mind in the mind/matter relationship is scientifically insupportable.)

(*Once you get the hang of it, conjecture of this kind is easy, as long as you keep the endgame [passing on genes] in mind. Such reasoning is a form of pseudo-precisionism, where one begins with plausibly related suppositions. However, as more suppositions are added in rational micro-steps, the disparate connection between the first supposition and the conclusion is made to seem inevitable by winning demonstration.)

Darwinism as Fashion
Neo-Darwinism, as a self-referential, self-validating system of deduction, has reduced human beings to bundles of competing, deep-wired animal impulses.* We are who we are not by the unique character of our synthetic intuition, ability, or value, but by Evolution’s cold appraisal of our predicament in allowing us limited license to act. However, by the measure of current research and consensus in genetics, our genes display adaptability when coupled with stimuli in our personal environment.* In other words, we are not as determined by our inherited genetic makeup as we are led to believe. We have a degree of free will in shaping who we are as individuals. It is not simply the case of our biology influencing our beliefs, desires, and actions as many evolutionists contend, but that our beliefs, desires, and actions can influence our biology as well. This new understanding is due to the study of epigenomes (variant biochemical markers), which play a role in turning genes off and on. Hence, when strict evolutionists say, “That causes this,” they fail to account for reciprocal effects of this on that, which can only come about where mind directs as much as is directed.

More subtly, Evolution’s imposed hierarchy from without fails to consider the very psychology of psychology itself,* for mind directs not only aspects of our biology, but also our schemes for understanding it. Psychology is at work in what the psychologist chooses to emphasize as fitting the narrative. It may seem a simple business to connect the dots between a disgust for incest with gene selection, and then to leap from such direct biological impulses to indirect associations where you have artistic creativity being linked to sexual attraction, but this is done with little thought for magnitudes of graduating complexity in human experience at each juncture. The growing range of popular culture book and magazine topics on what fashionable Evolution has to say about this, or what fashionable Evolution has to say about that, makes Natural Selection sound increasingly like a cult of personality and less like a rigorous scientific program. By extending its precepts and presumptions to culture at large, evolutionary psychology, as a field that is as imaginatively fertile as the very imagination it fails to take into account, must share the fate of all fads in culture.

This too shall pass.

(*In terms of raw animal urges and survival of the fittest, the young are better examples of what typifies evolutionary psychology’s stereotype than adults. As one ages, one becomes more human, which, in all its subtleties and refinement, is poorly described [let alone explained] by science. Nietzsche, in his criticism of Darwinism, was early to point out how the subtle shading of human values could not be sole product of a process where the lowest common denominator is the ultimate goal.)

(*A personal example of this comes by way of autism, which gives me [the author] an odd mix of strengths and weaknesses. Two of my strengths are curiosity and a strong will, through which I have not only acquired talents but also improved my I.Q. level over the years. Autism provides the semblance of a template for who I am, but not the specific formulation of what I become through my own efforts.)

(*Environment affects behavior, and behavior affects the environment. Perhaps a microbe cannot pack his bags and move to another pond should his dry up, but we, to some degree, can. We not only adapt to our present environment, but we also invent new environments for ourselves. More subtly, if we think about culture as another form of environment, where necessity is the mother of invention, we understand how the reverse is also true: invention is the mother of necessity. The relationship between behavior and environment is symbiotic, and evolutionary psychology, even if influenced in part by biology, comes to exert its own influence in this relationship—not out of randomness but out of will.)

The Evolution of Evolved Man
It is easy to become disheartened when one looks at the daunting fossil record and sees only layers of teeth and violent demise; human history, where one plays the cynic, displays a similar tendency to ruthlessness. From our current rarified moral view, which we each nurture as a perspective, there appears to be no point to existence beyond struggle where this rarified moral view is asserted paradoxically as essential. Looking at the mute evidence alone, this is the only message one can glean.

Yet millions of years of purely barbaric life breaks with the emergence of Stone Age Man, though more centrally in the artifacts of culture he left behind in cave drawings, musical instruments, and burial rituals. Profoundly, these refined attributes, which we instantly recognize as our own, appear to have been there from the very beginning, as cultured man seemingly exploded fully formed onto the scene some thirty-thousand years ago. Along with these edified traits—and perhaps because of them—the concept of empathy (deduced from burial rituals) also emerged. If one accepts that mind and matter are identical in ultimate reality, then it is reasonable to assume Evolution has teleology in where it evolves, even if this end is not fully seen at every juncture. Dinosaurs may have been “soulless” beasts in their day, but this does not mean their existence was soulless.

It was not for God to create Man in His Image out of magic, but out of Laws of Metaphysics to which even God is bound. Many doubters argue what good is Personality in a God where Law suffices to reveal all? What is gained by needing a God to comport to human characteristics when He is more like an impersonal algorithm? Again, the noumenal and phenomenal do not share a causal relationship. They share an Identity. This is where metaphysics becomes physics, and where physics becomes us. We can only have evidence of this piecemeal process as phenomenal specimens seeking phenomenal evidence; and we, as empathetic creatures, are that evidence.

Altruism and Pity: Flies in The Ointment
It is telling how, with a begrudging admission to the power of human compassion, evolutionary science feels a need to concentrate on this weak link in its survival of the fittest mindset, even dedicating a branch of study to selflessness. It is only because Natural Selection believes it can concoct an alternatively materialistic explanation* for altruism that it pursues its study, whereas with more “inconclusive” examinations into (let us say) the nature of human consciousness, science has less conviction in even framing the question.

Science should at least be credited with acknowledging its problem, for in previous generations of bold atheistic thinkers, who were similarly devoted to the new creeds of science and sociology, the goal was to lay waste to convention and superstition. Yet these brave new thinkers failed to admit they were hanging onto the baby even as they threw out the bathwater. Altruism and pity were things worth holding onto, it seemed, even though they could have no materialistic foundation in themselves:

“The eighteenth century did not find that pity where it found its pagan liberty and its pagan law. It took this out of the very churches that it violated and from the desperate faith it denied. This irrational individual pity is the purely Christian element in the eighteenth century.” ~from William Blake By G. K. Chesterton

One curiosity in the study of altruism is how its presence mathematically prevents the dog-eat-dog Natural World from descending into chaos. One idea explaining natural sustainability comes from marrying altruism with game theory, where the two best approaches, namely turn-the-other-cheek and tit-for-tat, produce the best outcomes in human relations. Obviously, turn-the-other-cheek would always be effective if achievable, but, by illustration of the Natural World, it is mostly aberrant. Tit-for-tat, which more closely resembles the world we live in, only works IF one does not retaliate ALL the time. This raises a question: What is the regulator? If one appeals to an algorithm that periodically chooses not to respond to an insult or betrayal, then when, where, and how is this forbearance to be indulged? Someone must consciously choose not to act, even if when and where they act does not mathematically matter. An algorithm cannot choose for itself. This is akin to the halting problem earlier discussed as applied to computers, where a computer must make a choice that does not come down to an algorithm.

Altruism is not explained by the math, even if the math predicts results consistent with altruism’s periodic exercise. By the numbers alone, altruism may be discarded as nothing more than a curious tick or “McGuffin” required to push the plot along. (This logic is similar to that employed where we need only parts of a 747 and an assembled 747, and any “in-between” is speculation to be avoided where math can paper over absurdity.)

Another mathematical explanation of altruism comes when we look at selflessness and genetic relations. A brother, for example, is more likely to die for a sister than he is for a cousin, because they are more closely related; consequently, this can be explained in a formula. However the math may roughly describe the degree of relation where sacrifices are made (and who would doubt it as a general idea), this clearly has limits. Where is the math for when a stranger risks his life for another stranger? Not only does math fail in this instance, but so does reason: the stranger can offer no rational explanation for why he endangered himself.*

(*For Schopenhauer, altruism is transcendental self-identification, as only the Noumenon exists beneath appearance; and this metaphysical identity, common to all, is more closely related to reactive feeling than reactive reason, which is why we act before we think. Our default is only instinctual in that it is universal, for our empathy not only extends to strangers but to other species—even distantly related species. Moreover, this empathy not only covers all forms of life, but inanimate objects and settings to which the human heart turns its attention.)