Is Darwinism a Free Lunch Scam?

Neurobiologist William H. Calvin commented at the AAAS meeting this week about the claim that modern humans lived much earlier than thought (see 02/16/2005 entry).  To him, it means that we need to rethink our assumptions that bigger brains are smarter, according to a report on EurekAlert.  If “Homo sapiens was walking around Africa 200,000 years ago with a brain of our size,” the article paraphrases his comments, “we spent – with a few exceptions – the next 150,000 years doing more of the same.”  Something must have happened that suddenly caused a “spectacular” burst of cultural innovation.  “This creativity probably marks the emergence of the whole suite of higher intellectual functions, each of which requires some structuring to fit everything together,” he said.  What could have triggered it?  Was it the evolution of syntax, multitasking, logical thinking, games with arbitrary rules, or fondness for discovering hidden patterns, or some combination of the above?  “It’s likely that they all are sharing some neural machinery for handling structure and judging coherence.  Improve one by natural selection, and you may improve the others too.  The free lunch is alive and well in biology.”

The very thing that should have made him realize Darwinism is so rotten it needs to be tossed overboard caused him, instead,to wave the magic wand of “emergence” and toss it into the salad bowl.  Now, he’s trying to sell this free lunch to his starving Darwin Party comrades.  There ain’t no such thing.  Let’s hope the attendees brought their own, with meat, and that it was intelligently designed.