Evolution of mind?

Wolpert on evolutionary ‘Just so’ stories

The key evolutionary idea related to our minds is that of adaptiveness; that is those behaviours, thoughts and beliefs that help us humans to survive better. Genes can determine variants in such processes and evolution will select those individuals that survive best, and will so select those genes. The problem is to identify just what those characteristics are and how genes affect them, and to distinguish them from those that arise from interaction with the environment and learning. Alas, much of the evolutionary biology that I will use is similar to Kipling's 'Just So' stories, like how the camel got its hump. It is very difficult to get reliable evidence to show whether one is right or wrong. One cannot go back in time, but I hope that this book, like Kipling's, is both interesting and entertaining.

(Lewis Wolpert is a high profile evolutionary paleoanthropologist.)

Lewis Wolpert, Six impossible things before breakfast: The evolutionary origins of belief, p. xi, Faber and Faber, London, 2007.

Peer review is good for . . .?

“If peer review is good at anything, it appears to be keeping unpopular ideas from being published.”

William A. Wilson, Scientific Regress, First Things May 2016; “America's most influential journal of religion and public life” www.firstthings.com/article/2016/05/scientific-regress

Peter Dodson: feathered dino ‘dates’ undermine dino-to-bird evolution

American biologist Edward Osborne Wilson recognized the distinction between operational and historical science.

Leading evolutionist: evolution is a historical science, in contrast to observational science

Darwinism a cult? (Peter Hitchens)

The following challenge to the British Broadcasting Corporation appeared on the Peter Hitchens feature page of the International Express (UK), on 5 January 2000:

“Darwin’s bizarre cult

The BBC teased religious leaders by asking them if they believed in the literal truth of the great Bible stories. I would like to ask BBC chiefs and the rest of our secular establishment if they believe in the literal truth of evolution. Evolution is an unproven theory. If what its fundamentalist supporters believe is true, fishes decided to grow lungs and legs and walk up the beach. The idea is so comically daft that only one thing explains its survival—that lonely, frightened people wanted to expel God from the Universe because they found the idea that He exists profoundly uncomfortable.”

Note: British columnist Peter Hitchens is the brother of Christopher Hitchens, who was famous for his very public stance in opposing faith in God. Peter, like his brother, was once an atheist, but partially as a result of seeing the fruit of atheism in Soviet Russia, he is now a Christian.

Quotable Quotes archive

Birch & Ehrlich: Evolution “outside of empirical science”

“Our theory of evolution has become, as Popper described, one which cannot be refuted by any possible observations. Every conceivable observation can be fitted into it. It is thus ‘outside of empirical science but not necessarily false’. No one can think of ways in which to test it.”

Reference

Charles Birch and Paul Ehrlich, Evolutionary history and population biology, Nature 214:352, 1967.

“I hope there is no God!”

Thomas Nagel

“I speak from experience, being strongly subject to this fear myself: I want atheism to be true and am made uneasy by the fact that some of the most intelligent and well-informed people I know are religious believers. It isn’t just that I don’t believe in God and, naturally, hope that I’m right in my belief. It’s that I hope there is no God! I don’t want there to be a God; I don’t want the universe to be like that. My guess is that this cosmic authority problem is not a rare condition and that it is responsible for much of the scientism and reductionism of our time. One of the tendencies it supports is the ludicrous overuse of evolutionary biology to explain everything about human life, including everything about the human mind …. This is a somewhat ridiculous situation …. [I]t is just as irrational to be influenced in one’s beliefs by the hope that God does not exist as by the hope that God does exist.” ¹

Reference

Nagel, Thomas, The Last Word, pp. 130–131, Oxford University Press, 1997. Dr Nagel (1937– ) is Professor of Philosophy and Law at New York University. Return to text.