Darwin Unhinged: The Bugs in Evolution

An Evolutionary Argument Against Physicalism

Christoffer Skogholt

Abstract

According to the dominant tradition in Christianity and many other religions, human beings are both knowers and actors:beings with conscious beliefs about the world who sometimes act intentionally guided by these beliefs. According to philosopher of mind Robert Cummins the “received view” among philosophers of mind is epiphenomenalism, according to which mental causation does not exist: neural events are the underlying causes of both behavior and belief which explains the correlation (not causation) between belief and behavior. Beliefs do not, in virtue of their semantic content,enter the causal chain leading to action,beliefs are always the endpoint of a causal chain.If that is true the theological anthropology of many religious traditions is false.JP Moreland draws attention to two different ways of doing metaphysics:
serious metaphysics and shopping-list metaphysics.The difference is that the former involves not only the attempt to describe the phenomena one encounter, it also involves the attempt of locating them, that is explaining how the phenomena is possible and came to be given the constraints of a certain worldview.Fora physicalist these constraints include the atomic theory of matter and the theories of physical, chemical and biological evolution.Mental properties are challenging phenomena to locate within a physicalist worldview, and some physicalists involved in “serious metaphysics” have therefore eliminated them from their worldview.Most however accept them, advocating “non-reductive physicalism” according to which mental properties supervene on physical processes.Even if one allow mental properties to supervene on physical processes, the problem of mental causation remains. If mental properties are irreducible to and therefore distinct from physical properties,as the non-reductive physicalists claim,they cannot exert causal powers if one accepts the causal closure of the physical domain
– which one must, if one is a “serious physicalist” according to physicalist philosopher of mind Jaegwon Kim.Alvin Plantinga,in his Evolutionary Argument against Naturalism,
shows that if mental properties,such as the propositional contentof beliefs, are causally inefficacious, then evolution has not been selecting cognitive faculties that are reliable, in the sense of being conducive to true beliefs. If the content of our beliefs does not affect our behavior,the content of our belief is irrelevant from an evolutionary standpoint, and so the content-producing part of our cognitive faculties are irrelevant from an evolutionary standpoint.

The “reliability”– truth-conduciveness – of our cognitive faculties can therefore not be explained by evolution, and therefore not located within the physicalist world view. The only way in which the reliability of our cognitive faculties can be located is if propositional content is relevant for behavior. If we however eliminate or deny the reliability of our cognitive faculties, then we have abandoned any chance of making a rational case for our position, as that would presuppose the reliability that we are denying.

But if propositional content is causally efficacious, then that either – if we are non-reductive physicalists and mental properties are taken to be irreducible to physical properties – implies that the causal closure of the physical domain is false or-if we are reductive physicalists and not eliminativists regarding mental properties-it shows that matter qua matter can govern itself by rational argumentation, in which we have a pan-/local psychistic view of matter. Either way, we have essentially abandoned physicalism in the process of locating the reliability of our cognitive faculties within a physicalist worldview. We have also affirmed the theological anthropology of Christianity, insofar as the capacity for knowledge and rational action is concerned.

I'd like someone to define the adjective 'informational' - preferably including an example.

Furthermore, what other nouns can be converted into adjectives using the suffix 'al'.

I wonder how some of these discussions work in a language with a stricter grammar than English.

An Evolutionary Argument Against Physicalism

Christoffer Skogholt

"The “reliability”– truth-conduciveness – of our cognitive faculties can therefore not be explained by evolution, and therefore not located within the physicalist world view."


I would question this, at least as an all-inclusive statement of truth.

For the time being leaving behind all the academic philosophy-speak, although Darwinist evolution theory (primarily RM + NS) is bankrupt, surely some evolution really has happened through the "natural selection" involved in the interface with physical reality. A simple example being when an herbivore animal sees signs of and hears sounds of a predator. The long history of surviving and reproducing individuals has produced a mechanism by which the animal is then driven to run and attempt to escape. This mechanism is instinctual fear - an immaterial emotion, a property of consciousness. Evolution has somehow produced a mechanism by which the animal reacts in a specific way to the true nature of the threat in the physical world. If this aspect of the animal's consciousness wasn't in accordance with the way the world works, the animal probably wouldn't survive.

The break with Darwinism is primarily in the Darwinist insistence that the fuel or source of variation (especially new and irreducibly complex innovations) of such advantageous genetic changes must absolutely be random with respect to reproductive survival - mostly random gene mutations.

Anyway, in this way, there has been feedback between human thoughts and beliefs about the world ("cognitive faculties") and the hard physical results of actions in the world motivated by these thoughts and beliefs. In many areas, when the two are incompatible the belief has had to change or there would be problems, sometimes even of survival. A human example in cultural evolution would be the invention and subsequent development of Stone Age, bronze and iron tool technology, driven by human needs and indirectly by survival, and constrained and molded by the way the physical world works.

The simple mechanism of feedback with the physical world looks to have shaped many human beliefs and even ways of thought, though of course not all by any means. The history of the many totally implausible attempts by the field of evolutionary psychology to apply evolutionary concepts to human spiritual and other mental characteristics (including altruism) testifies to this. But still, if our cognitive faculties did not in many areas tend to automatically converge on truths of the physical world through the mechanism of feedback, then the long history of the human race (especially in cultural evolution) would not have taken place.

"The “reliability”– truth-conduciveness – of our cognitive faculties can therefore not be explained by evolution, and therefore not located within the physicalist world view."


I would question this, at least as an all-inclusive statement of truth.

I do agree there has to be some congruence between the reality that informs survival in this life and our mental faculties. But if we look at Donald Hoffman's research we do see that Truth is arguably sacrificed for the lowest resolution picture that provides the passing on of genes.

However, a more salient point is that article specifically challenges the reductive (Consciousness is Illusion) and epiphenomenal (Consciousness exists but has no Causal Power) strains of the Physicalist-Atheist faith.

Common ancestry or actually common design - a look at the evidence, and yet another nail in the coffin of Darwinism.

From the book Heretic: One Scientist’s Journey from Darwin to Design, by Matti Leisola and Jonathan Witt, quoted in https://evolutionnews.org/2021/10/forbid...on-design/ :

"In 1965 one of the most important scientists of the last century, Linus Pauling, and biologist Emil Zuckerkandl, considered by some as the father of molecular biology, suggested a way that macroevolution could be tested and proved: If the comparison of anatomical and DNA sequences led to the same family tree of organisms, this would be strong evidence for macroevolution. According to them, only evolution would explain the convergence of these two independent chains of evidence. By implication, the opposite finding would count against macroevolution.

So what were the results? Over the past twenty-eight years, experimental evidence has revealed that family trees based on anatomical features contradict family trees based on molecular similarities, and at many points. They do not converge. Just as troubling for the idea of macroevolution, family trees based on different molecules yield conflicting and contradictory family trees. As a 2012 paper published in Biological Reviews of the Cambridge Philosophical Society reported, “Incongruence between phylogenies derived from morphological versus molecular analyses, and between trees based on different subsets of molecular sequences has become pervasive as datasets have expanded rapidly in both characters and species” (emphasis in original).

Another paper, published the following year in the journal Nature, highlighted the extent of the problem. The authors compared 1,070 genes in twenty different yeasts and got 1,070 different trees."

Darwinism depends on the assumption that all life evolved from a single common ancestor through a long series of small, random genetic mutations over millions of years, which would predict that the anatomical and DNA sequence data would organize into identical family trees. But the evidence above that family trees based on anatomical features contradict family trees based on DNA molecular similarities (the persistent failure of a single tree of life to emerge) indicates that the undirected Darwinistic random mutation plus natural selection process only explains modest differences among closely related species, not "macroevolution" or whatever the process has been that was responsible for the major advances, structural and behavioral differences in particular between classes, families and genera.

In the absence of any other candidates, this leaves intelligent design as the only other imaginable origin of these patterns of evidence. That is, a common intelligent designer or designers reusing genetic information for common purposes, and inventing fresh DNA sequences for innovations. The actual data shows that common descent isn’t generally the case. A common designer is.

Michael Behe's conclusions on the pervasive devolution phenomenon of broken genes involved in Darwinistic evolutionary adaptation have recently been even further confirmed by new research on both mammoths and yeast.

Michael Behe, from https://uncommondescent.com/intelligent-...evolution/" :

In Darwin Devolves, I mentioned work on DNA extracted from frozen woolly mammoth carcasses that showcased devolution: “26 genes were shown to be seriously degraded, many of which (as with polar bear) were involved in fat metabolism, critical in the extremely cold environments that the mammoth roamed.” It turns out that was an underestimate. A new paper that has sequenced DNA from several more woolly mammoth remains says the true number is more than triple that — 87 genes broken compared to their elephant relatives.
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(There is now) a wonderful new laboratory evolution study of yeast. Helsen et al. (2020) used a collection of yeast strains in which one of each different gene in the genome had been knocked out. They grew the knockout yeast in a stressful environment and watched to see how the microbes evolved to handle it. Many of the yeast strains, with different genes initially knocked out, recovered, and some even surpassed the fitness of wild-type yeast under the circumstances. The authors emphasized the fact of the evolutionary recovery. However, they also clearly stated (but don’t seem to have noticed the importance of the fact) that all of the strains rebounded by breaking other genes, ones that had been intact at the beginning of the experiment. None built anything new, all of them devolved.
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There are very significant implications to all of this: Darwinistic evolutionary adaptation seems to progress by breaking existing genes in such a way as to confer a survival advantage in a niche environment; the result is a more “brittle” species with fewer options for surviving further environmental stresses; the mystery of the origin of the original genes is in no way explained by natural means at any step in the process. Rather than Darwinian evolution providing a mechanism for the “origin of the species,” it much more adequately explains the demise of species.