The Solution To Evolution

Calm Sunshine of the Mind

Outside of politics, there are fewer more contentious subjects than “evolution”. I bring good news: there is no such thing as evolution; it is like probability. It is a summary of our knowledge, and not a force or a cause or even a condition. (People can’t keep probability straight, either.) So I beg you to be calm of mind as you read this. I am only criticizing science. And hoping, by doing so, we come to a superior understanding of biological change.

Reminder: The hardest task in all science, indeed all thought, and one abandoned today, is to try to prove yourself wrong. Not trying to prove the other guy wrong: we can all do that brilliantly. Yourself. Keep this in mind today. (Yes, you.)

Evolution cannot be true, it is false, and so cannot be believed, in the sense that it is a cause, which it isn’t, though it is taken as a cause or sometimes a name for a suite of causes, usually left somewhat vague, and anyway spoken of as it if it were itself a cause. Yet evolution is also trivially true, and can be believed, in its category-label definition: everybody observes biological change, and evolution is the name given to observed change. Yet one word with two non-interchangeable meanings leads often to the Equivocation Fallacy. Indeed, these fallacies abound in discussions of the topic.

Which means the trivial solution to evolution is to abandon the name, since its use only ever raises hackles and causes grief.

Fallacy Upon Fallacy

I also reject, in all possible dimensions, and categorically, the Evolution Fallacy, which states that “If evolution is true, than there is no need for God” (where here the word implies a cause). This was always an absurd claim. Even if per impossible that “evolution” is a cause, there has to be a reason this cause operates in the way it does. And if something else is responsible for that cause (in some chain of causes), then something must explain why the initial cause is the way it is. And so on down to why Nature is the Way It Is. And, thus, why there is something rather than nothing. The only satisfactory answer to that has always been God.

Some try to sneak God out a back door and say the “laws” of the Nature were selected “randomly”, and so we don’t need God to explain why “laws” are the way they are. This is an inane Push-Back Fallacy, in the same category of error multiverses are in. Stating that “laws” are chosen “randomly” is first of all meaningless, because there is no such thing as “randomness”: it is not a cause. And secondly, even if it were, there has to be some cause of that randomness which picks from some set of possible “laws”, and who or what is responsible for that set and that cause? If you want to avoid God, the only recourse is to infinite regression, which is silly. There is no escaping God.

That picking “laws” from some great Bin of Laws (Special Today: two laws for the price of one!) is goofy is a criticism I’ve made many times, so naturally I was happy to see it while reading CR Hallpike’s Darwinism, Dogma, and Cultural Evolution, who like Stove in Darwinian Fantasies (perhaps inaptly named, as we’ll see), rejects fanciful “evolutionary” accounts of Nature’s “laws”. And, of course, reject them for much human behavior, too. The knots people tie themselves in while explaining how the LGBTQWERTY+++23456 “community” plus abortion plus adoption plus birth control plus Equality plus etc. etc. etc. are ackshually “adaptive” is scientific high comedy. Enjoy the spectacle. However, that is a subject for another day.

No Speed Limit

What interested me is Hallpike’s claim, made in his other books, too, that the “speed of evolution” is too slow to account for change in behaviors among peoples. Here, though I accept his criticisms of the monumental over-certainties and errors of “evolutionary psychology”, I think he is wrong about the speed. There is no one single “speed”; and when some change happens, it can happen all at once.

At last we reach our subject. We saw earlier that a growing number of scientists are rejecting the co-called Neo-Darwinian Synthesis, finding its range of causes of biological change too small, incomplete. Incidentally, “Neo-Darwinian Synthesis” is an good name for the causes it touts, and so I’ll use in place of the E-word. Enterprising scientists dissatisfied with the Synthesis seek, rightly, to expand the list of causes, and embrace (what we can call) Paleo-Darwinism. Darwin’s original idea was Lamarckian, in part, claiming that the environment can change an organism, and that, sometimes, these changes can be passed down. The Weismann Barrier has been breeched! Epigenetics has exploded through the gap. Well, seeped through. Anyway, that changes the speed calculations.

There have been any number of arguments about the speed, i.e. the rate of change, of organisms under the Neo-Darwinian Synthesis (see e.g. “The waiting time problem in a model hominin population” by Sanford and others; Doug Axe’s Undeniable and his “The Case Against a Darwinian Origin of Protein Folds” (‘Darwinain’ is not a good name; also this); and Vox Day has a newish book on the subject). Many calculations show the Synthesis is too slow to account for the complexity and variety we see.

The Synthesis likewise does not adequately account for speciation. It doesn’t account at all for biogenesis. It cannot explain Behe’s irreducible complexity, the idea that some organisms appear with traits that could not have arisen through gradual change and adaptation.

There have been many sharp criticisms of all these things from the Neo-Darwinian ranks, which is well enough. But these ripostes do not answer all critics’ questions. And many, as we saw in the review of Denis Noble’s book, are badly motivated, under fear “that it let’s God back in.” God never left.

A Substantial Gift

I have given the example dozens of times, so why not once more: you cannot get water from hydrogen and oxygen in an “evolutionary” way. There is no natural selection occurring, and there is no “reproductive advantage” to water behaving in a way entirely different from either of its once-components (once hydrogen and oxygen form water, they no longer exist as separate substances in water, but only “virtually”, as they say; they become water). Noble uses the same argument with salt and its differences from chlorine and sodium. But we could make it for an endless range of substances. Indeed, we can make it for all substances.

Water is like water because its form was there, built into Nature from the beginning. It had to be, or we would never have gotten water. (I tried making this point many years ago, but it never stuck).

The kicker, then, the sentence that explains it all, and our true solution to evolution: The form was there before the form was occupied.

Which means the solution is to return to Aristotelian notions of causality, which is to say, of explanation. The full explanation of things, and not just efficient causes, which leave out three-quarters of the picture.

There has to be a reason water is the way it is. The form of water was occupied once there was sufficient hydrogen and oxygen, and the correct conditions. Hydrogen and oxygen did not become, say, neon or gold, and couldn’t. They became water because that is the Way Things Are. The change from H and O2 was instantaneous, if you like. But it only seemed so, because the causes that brought the two together met the formal cause, which was present Since The Beginning.

New species are the same, and so is irreducible complexity. The new forms, in this case biological forms, are already there, in Nature, and always were. (And they had their own cause!) These biological forms sometimes become occupied. It is only a conjecture, but surely new ones yet remain to be occupied. Any new species is different than the others in essence, in form, in kind, and not in degree, in the same way water is different than hydrogen or oxygen (and the same way oxygen is different than hydrogen, even though they are made by the same virtual components). So, too, the rational nature (accompanied by language) in Man.

Life Is Worth Living

Life itself is the same. The formal cause of life was there, and had to be there, in Nature, and authored by Nature’s God. There was no “evolutionary advantage” to life appearing: nothing to select. Life had to come about by means other than “evolution”, i.e. the causes in the Synthesis.

Hallpike (pp 4-5; emphasis original):

The position from which I begin is the logically inescapable one that in order for selection to operate there must already be something there to be selected, so the fundamental question must be how things originate, how they are produced or constructed in the first place. The [Neo-]Darwinist might respond that whatever exists must itself have already passed through the process of selection, but there is not “must” about it. We know that in the inorganic world, such as the evolution of galaxies, stars, planets, and solar systems (Ress 1998), the weather systems and geology of planets, and the table of the elements, sub-atomic structures, and crystalline forms, the operation of physical laws on simple interactions produces more complex forms of order in which selection can have played no part. For example, snowflakes are not hexagonal because this gives them some adaptive advantage.

Amino acids, the building blocks of proteins, were originally self-organised as well, and the first replicating particles must also have been the product of self-organisation, so it seems rather unlikely that it [self-organisation] then simply ceased to operate throughout the rest of biological evolution, and indeed mathematical biologists are finding more and more examples of ordered structures in organisms that are spontaneously generated (e.g. Stewart 2011, Wagner 2014).

In our terms, “spontaneously generated” means applying the formal cause, and “self-organization” means filling the form. (Of course, I don’t endorse his use of “evolution” here, as shorthand, which leads to grief, as we saw above.) Hallpike does not seem aware of the distinction between kinds of causes, and in a way he has rediscovered what Aristotle first showed us.

In any case, he is right. “Evolution”, i.e. the Synthesis, cannot explain how forms (such as species) arise, and that includes the form of life itself. Again, the Synthesis has no account of biogenesis. But Genesis does. In the sense, I hasten to add, that there has to be a Cause of causes, and Genesis names that. That list of causes includes the cause—the form—of a rational man.

Opportunity

Scientists, in their fear of God, have sunk themselves in some deep kimchi by abandoning Aristotelian notions of cause. This causes (good pun!) them to miss out on many discoveries. But there those discoveries are, just waiting to be plucked. Men like Noble, now ending his career (he is 89), and Rupert Shelldrake (84), are trying to change that. (Both, not coincidentally, I think, Englishmen.) If you are a young scientist, this is your chance. Of course, you’ll likely have to be far from academia to advance the field. Academics are wee cowering timorous beasties, and increasingly female, and therefore Consensus driven. This makes it next to impossible to bust free from well ensconced error.

Even if you have freedom, it won’t be easy. I have already said that we can’t predict all the details of a new form from existing ones. But I could be wrong about that, in the sense that certain outlines of forms may be predictable to some, but perhaps not full, degree. Both in biology and for the rest of Nature. Shelldrake has his morphic fields (which we might call formic fields). It could be nothing more than ignorance holding us back, since too few people have looked into this.

Not Enough Time

It would remiss if I did not answer the Young-Earth Objection. Many believe various versions of an earth about 6,000 years old, or as old as you like, but with Man in particular being miraculously created about that long ago. If this is your belief, understand I have no interest in talking you out of it. Young Earth is one of those ideas that causes horror in old “new atheist” crowd, but though I think it is false, I think it is also harmless.

But if you’re holding onto this belief because you (perhaps secretly) think the Evolution Fallacy is true, which it isn’t, then you don’t need to. It is indeed a miracle, and in the strongest definition, that the form of Man was created by God. Forms must have causes: all things not self-existent much have causes, and the only self-existent being, Being itself, is God. In the theory we can call God’s Nature (and not the other way around), Man was created by God, as all things were. All forms arise from the mind of God, and he created the causes that lead to those forms being filled.

There are no observations in science, to include biology, that disprove God. So there is no reason to be against “evolution”, as long as it is properly understood. If you are interested in how religion and biological change are consonant, when properly understood, I once again recommend this essay by the late-great Mike Flynn.

Video

https://youtu.be/PI8oWAUlmGk

All my work is free and user-supported. Here’s how to help:

• Subscribe at Substack (paid or free!)
• Cash App: $WilliamMBriggs
• Zelle: use email: matt@wmbriggs.com
• Buy me a coffee
• Paypal
• Other credit card subscription or single donations
• Hire me
• Subscribe at YouTube
• PASS POSTS ON TO OTHERS