Evolutionist Calls Everyone Crazy

Last month she called everyone a hypocrite (07/06/2008).  This month, Robin Nixon of Live Science called everyone crazy.  Her latest article is entitled, “Why We Are All Insane.”  But then, how could we trust her explanation?
    Attributing everything about humanity to a blind process of evolution, Nixon wove a tale of mythical ancestors going a little nuts to survive:

Natural selection wants us to be crazy – at least a little bit.  While true debilitating insanity is not nature’s intention, many mental health issues may be byproducts of the over-functional human brain, some researchers claim.
    As humans improved their gathering, hunting and cooking techniques, population size increased and resources became more limited (in part because we hunted or ate some species to extinction).  As a result, not everyone could get enough to eat.  Cooperative relationships were critical to ensuring access to food, whether through farming or more strategic hunting, and those with blunt social skills were unlikely to survive, explained David C. Geary, author of “The Origin of Mind” (APA, 2004), and a researcher at the University of Missouri.
    And thus, a diversity of new mental abilities, and disabilities, unfurled.

Nixon deflected the charge of calling everyone crazy with a lateral pass to Geary.  But it sounds a little twisted to think of natural selection wanting anything – especially wanting something as crazy as making its products crazy but not too much so.
    She proceeded to explicate how craziness is a by-product of natural selection having done too good a job on the brain.  Using an analogy by Randolph Nesse, author of The Handbook of Evolutionary Psychology [Wiley, 2005], she said, “Just as horse breeding has selected for long thin legs that increase speed but are prone to fracture, cognitive advances also increase fitness – to a point.”  The point for our brain is narcissism, anxiety, guilt, and other forms of mental illness:

Perhaps to check selfish urges, in favor of more probable means to biological success, social lubricants such as empathy, guilt and mild anxiety arose.
    For example, the first of our ancestors to empathize and read facial expressions had a striking advantage.  They could confirm their own social status and convince others to share food and shelter.  But too much emotional acuity – when individuals overanalyze every grimace – can cause a motivational nervousness about one’s social value to morph into a relentless handicapping anxiety.

In other words, natural selection bumbled by giving us aptitudes but failing to consider the law of unintended consequences.  Forget about joy, she says.  Quoting Geary, Nixon asserted “nature cares about genes, not joy.”  (That is “The Nature of Joy,” one of her subtitles that would surprise C. S. Lewis.)
    But wouldn’t the unintended consequences become maladaptive and lead to our extinction?  Crazy as it sounds, Nixon has it all figured out. 

Certain types of depression, however, Geary continued, may be advantageous.  The lethargy and disrupted mental state can help us disengage from unattainable goals – whether it is an unrequited love or an exalted social position.  Evolution likely favored individuals who pause and reassess ambitions, instead of wasting energy being blindly optimistic.
    Natural selection also likely held the door open for disorders such as attention deficit.  Quickly abandoning a low stimulus situation was more helpful for male hunters than female gatherers, writes Nesse, which may explain why boys are five times more likely than girls to be hyperactive.
    Similarly, in its mildest form, bipolar disorder can increase productivity and creativity.  Bipolar individuals (and their relatives) also often have more sex than average people, Geary noted.
    Sex, and survival of one’s kids, is the whole point – as far as nature is concerned.  Sometimes unpleasant mental states lead to greater reproductive success, said Geary, “so these genes stay in the gene pool.”

Natural selection thus worked by intelligent design.  It chose attributes that are advantageous.  It favored certain individuals.  It worked to increase productivity and creativity.  It worked to fill the earth with selfish, crazy hypocrites who don’t care so much about the environment as sex and survival of one’s kids – the “whole point” of evolution.  If natural selection made you depressed, hyperactive, bipolar and obsessed with sex, why fight it?  Deal with it.
    In this view, rationality is merely a by-product, not the goal.  But then, where would a rational person categorize Nixon’s explanation – on the side of reason, or of acting out, like a marionette on a string, the forces of natural selection on her own mind?

That scientists and science writers can continue to write such self-refuting nonsense with audacity is a sign that we have much work to do.  Darwinian thinking is a blight on rationality and a force for wickedness (see recent example on Evolution News).  It excuses everything that is evil as the inevitable consequence of forces beyond our control.  But then it turns around and engages in rational discussion as if rationality had any meaning.  It’s like vacuuming out a skull and filling it with gravel, and expecting it to still think.
    This hypothesis is crazy on multiple levels.  If everyone is crazy, then rationality is what is truly crazy.  On what basis could anyone claim that mental illness is “abnormal”?  Why would anyone have a longing for joy?  From whence did “social lubricants” arise?  And if natural selection favored bipolar nuts by making them promiscuous, then the eugenicists were nuts to interfere.  Obviously, you are more fit if insane.  The eugenics advocates should have sterilized the philosophers instead of the imbeciles.
    Darwin put the inmates in charge of the science asylum.  The nature in human nature is to be rational and moral.  Rationality and morality refer to things that are true, universal, necessary and certain – the opposite of natural selection’s contingency and purposelessness.  The Starving Storytellers, under the banner of Charlie, their patron saint, have made a mess in the halls of science (12/22/2003 commentary).  A complete housecleaning is in order.
    For those of you who still think and think that thinking matters, fight back against nonsense.  Enlighten these poor fools who insist on shooting their own brains out.  Help them understand that they cannot say such things.  Give them shock therapy for their Yoda complex (09/25/2006 commentary).  Help them off their pedestals as self-styled rational scientists, and welcome them into the pool of crazy, selfish, hypocritical, sex-crazed objects of natural selection.  After a few minutes of grunting and scratching their armpits, maybe they will get the message: “This is crazy.”