Thank Evolution that Nothing Is Evil (or Good)

When evolutionists discuss the evolution of war, or of monogamy, or of religion, they rob mankind of any basis for judging good and evil.

Cooperation evolves:  Another paper typical of the “evolution of cooperation by game theory” genre appeared in PNAS recently.  Revealing the Darwinian assumptions, the abstract states, ” In evolutionary models of indirect reciprocity, natural selection favors cooperation when observability is sufficiently high.”  Working with 2413 human participants as their lab rats, the authors implied their evolutionary model applies to all human behavior – including altruism and some of the most noble human ideals.  It’s all evolutionary selection.  It works the same way in yeast, except that humans have an inexplicable habit of helping people they don’t know, even when observability is zero.  “In sum,” they confidently assert nonetheless, “we show how indirect reciprocity can be harnessed to increase cooperation in a relevant, real-world public goods game.”  But is increased cooperation good?  Who judges what is public good?  And who harnesses the harnessers?

Monogamy as an evolutionary strategy:  All the science news outlets repeated, without question, a claim in Science Magazine, based on an open-access paper in PNAS, that monogamy evolved from male infanticide (paper’s title: “Male infanticide leads to social monogamy in primates”).  The article begins with a photo of the royal couple with new baby, presumably as pawns of a large evolutionary game, thereby robbed of all dignity.  Typical quote from the article:

Resolving this debate is important, researchers say, especially for understanding the evolution of human mating behavior. Although humans aren’t completely monogamous, “the emergence of pair-bonding in humans was a major evolutionary transition, which dramatically altered the evolutionary trajectory of our species,” says Sergey Gavrilets, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. Many researchers think that we could not have evolved our large brains without joint parental care during the extended period of helplessness required for infant brains to grow to their full size. “Understanding the forces that drove that transition can help us better understand the causes of human uniqueness,” Gavrilets adds.

Science Daily repeated this idea in two articles. Another uncritical news source was Live Science, although its staff writers allowed for other factors in the “evolution of monogamy” (and, incidentally, “the evolution of infanticide”).  Regardless of what other mammals do, none of these sources even considered whether monogamy is right or wrong for humans on any other basis than evolution.

Thank evolution for… menopause:  Got hot flashes, women?  “Thank evolution,” Science Daily says.  Thanking presumes the purposeful appreciation for an intentional good act, or (in sarcasm), the despising of a purposefully bad act.  Obviously, one cannot thank evolution, a non-intelligent, purposeless process.  The fact that “menopause sets humans apart from other primates” might lead some to suppose a reason humans are set apart, but Darwinian evolution can come up with a “number of hypotheses” to explain any observation.  The article is full of questions, possibilities and suggestions.  That’s the habit of evolutionary explanations: imagining scenarios that portray humans, with all their uniquenesses, as descendents of apes through natural selection.

Child sacrifice:  A more grotesque case of human evil was described in PNAS about Inca child sacrifice. Mummies of victims were seen to have been drugged before their deaths, and were probably seduced by the conviction they were helping the tribe in some way. The authors are very careful to describe, but not condemn, the treatment of these young victims:

Examination of three frozen bodies, a 13-y-old girl and a girl and boy aged 4 to 5 y, separately entombed near the Andean summit of Volcán Llullaillaco, Argentina, sheds new light on human sacrifice as a central part of the Imperial Inca capacocha rite, described by chroniclers writing after the Spanish conquest. The high-resolution diachronic data presented here, obtained directly from scalp hair, implies escalating coca and alcohol ingestion in the lead-up to death. These data, combined with archaeological and radiological evidence, deepen our understanding of the circumstances and context of final placement on the mountain top. We argue that the individuals were treated differently according to their age, status, and ritual role. Finally, we relate our findings to questions of consent, coercion, and/or compliance, and the controversial issues of ideological justification and strategies of social control and political legitimation pursued by the expansionist Inca state before European contact.

With language like that, can any of them argue that what the leaders did was wrong?  Maybe coercion was an evolutionary strategy for survival of the tribe.  Who could argue otherwise?  Live Science found good in this abhorrent rite: “After being selected for the deadly rite, the Maiden likely underwent a type of status change, becoming an important figure to the empire; the other two children may have served as her attendants.”  One of the paper’s co-authors found even more to praise in Inca child sacrifice:

“[The Maiden] became somebody other than who she was before,” said study lead author Andrew Wilson, an archaeologist at the University of Bradford in the U.K. “Her sacrifice was seen as an honor.“

Perhaps so, but was the Maiden not deceived by an evil system of lies, her life cut short unnecessarily?  How could an evolutionist argue that?  Live Science called it a method of social control that probably created a climate of fear, but that’s not the same thing as calling it evil.  In evolutionary terms, social control through fear might just be a workable strategy for survival; if not, well – lots of animal populations go extinct.

Darwinian doctrine is a deadly poison on humanity.  It robs our humanness of everything that is good, true, or beautiful.  In Darwin’s imaginary universe, nothing is good, because there are no eternal, objective moral categories.  Stuff just happens.  Nothing is beautiful, because beauty is just a sensation of material neurons.  And nothing can be true, because Darwinian materialism denies the non-materiality and necessity of reason or logic.  Ay, there’s the rub: Darwinism destroys itself.  It cannot judge whether itself is good, true, or beautiful.  Indeed, it cannot be any of the above!  Such categories are ephemeral; they evolve, too, and can just as easily become their own opposites (evil is good, lies are true, ugliness is beautiful).  Such a position is hopelessly muddled and incoherent.  It destroys all reason, including reasons to argue for Darwinism.  The universal acid has eaten itself.

Darwinists have lost their way.  They are wandering about, blinded by their own fogma.  Rescue them, and you will rescue humanity.  It would be a good, true, and beautiful thing to do.  Really.