Useless Darwinism Clutters Science

“Natural selection” and “evolved” are junk words that add nothing to scientific discoveries. They cloud, confuse, and mislead.

Biologists and their lackeys in the press have a bad habit of using the e-word “evolution” where it serves no purpose. They merely assume things evolve without demonstrating it. Such empty confabulating would be more appropriately spelled “evillusion,” a contraction of evil with illusion.

As Darwin conceived evolution by natural selection, it was not simply variation or change. It was meant to portray inexorable progress from bacteria to man by unguided, blind processes of nature. It was his creation myth, explaining even the human brain and consciousness without a personal Creator. Yet writers today lazily use the words evolution, natural selection and adaptation without even thinking about what they are saying. The words become placeholders for ignorance, making scientists feel comfortable in their laziness.

Darwinism is junk science. It’s time to clean house. Ask how it does anything in the following articles, other than to spew fogma.

Your brain evolved to hoard supplies and shame others for doing the same (The Conversation). Stephanie Preston at the University of Michigan easily wins Stupid Evolution Quote of the Week for waving the e-word Evolution like a magic wand. She tells the naive why store shelves are empty during the coronavirus epidemic.

The media is replete with COVID-19 stories about people clearing supermarket shelves – and the backlash against them. Have people gone mad? How can one individual be overfilling his own cart, while shaming others who are doing the same?

As a behavioral neuroscientist who has studied hoarding behavior for 25 years, I can tell you that this is all normal and expected. People are acting the way evolution has wired them….

But hoarding is actually a totally normal and adaptive behavior that kicks in any time there is an uneven supply of resources…

People will continue to hoard to the extent that they are worried. They will also continue to shame others who take more than what they consider a fair share. Both are normal and adaptive behaviors that evolved to balance one another out, in the long run….

That’s how the human species evolved, to get through challenges like this together.

‘Tis a pity this woman has wasted a third of her life without thinking coherently. To see how senseless this is, consider that Ms Preston has justified selfishness as normal and adaptive. You act the way Darwin makes you act. Darwin becomes the little devil on your shoulder, tempting you to hoard supplies and shame others who do the same, just like squirrels fighting over nuts. It gets worse; not only that, she portrays you as powerless to be unselfish, because you are a pawn of how “evolution has wired” us. You have no free will. In Darwin’s Stuff Happens Law, whatever is, is right. So why even write an article about this? Is it because Preston wants you to change your ways? No! You are powerless against the Dork Side of the Farce. It would be more merciful for Preston not to tell you about your fate. And for all you know, she is a pawn of evolutionary forces making her write stupid stuff. Otherwise, who is she to tell us how the rest of us evolved? What is she going to tell her shrink, that she has a Yoda Complex?

Her ‘explanation’ may give her readers some warm fuzzies, like a shaman at a campfire explaining to the tribe how humans emerged from the fire, and the fire gives them wisdom. But ask yourself if “evolution” really performed any service in this tale. It would be much kinder to tell them that God made us in his image with moral responsibilities. He wants us to be responsible instead of lazy, but also commands us to love our neighbors as ourselves. That’s not “adaptive” in a Darwinian sense; it’s morally right, and we have the free will to choose the right and shun the wrong, to pursue truth and resist irrationality. Preston knows better. She reveals her inner conscience in the statement, “Have people gone mad?” Notice what that implies: if people were rational, they would realize that hoarding and shaming are not only immoral but incongruous. But then she justifies that kind of craziness! It’s a cryin’ shame.

Small horses got smaller, big tapirs got bigger 47 million years ago (Martin Luther University at Halle-Wittenburg). Martin Luther, sound thinker that he was, would be appalled at the lack of rigor in this explanation of fossils in Germany. Why do some mammals get smaller? Evolution. Why do other mammals get bigger? Evolution. If this were a law of nature, all mammals would be the same. Since they are not, what is the lazy scientist’s way out? “It evolved.”

These geniuses in Luther’s hometown try to give a little more nuance to their nonsense:

“All the data indicate that the body size of the horses and tapirs developed differently not because of the climate, but because of different life cycles,” explains Bocherens. Small animals reproduce faster and die younger: Relative to their size, they don’t have to eat as much to maintain their body mass and can devote more resources to having young. Larger animals live longer and have lower reproduction rates. They have to eat more and therefore have fewer resources for reproduction – but, being large, face fewer predators and can range further [sic; farther] to get better food. That extends their lives and gives them more time to breed. The Geiseltal tapirs and the horses therefore likely maximized the different advantages of their respective life cycle strategies, which caused divergent body size evolution.

Contrary explanations would work just as well in Darwin Storybook Land: If the horses got larger and the tapirs got smaller, these DODO-heads would just move the characters around and feel just as self-satisfied with their sophoxymoronic anti-knowledge. Look how they put nonsense into Jargonwocky in their paper in Nature Scientific Reports: “Therefore, a divergent body size evolution could be the result of a maximization of selective advantages as both taxa evolve in opposite directions along the fast-slow life history continuum.” Woo.

After you finish bowing to King Charles at this display of rhetoric, look how his soothslayers* end their paper. It’s all futureware! Look for substance, not fluff:

As large herbivorous mammals appear in Europe relatively late in the Paleogene, a promising direction of further research is to better constrain when and how these body size-related life histories first evolved compared to larger continents. We were unable to replicate most of the diagnostic traits outlined for Geiseltal hippomorphs and tapiromorphs that otherwise largely underpin the regional biochronology, which suggests that previous alignment of Geiseltal with other localities is subject to arbitrary inflation of species diversity. This highlights the need for a reexamination of current biostratigraphic correlations of both Geiseltal and the Geiseltalian European Land Mammal mega-zone with the European terrestrial mammal chronology.

But who is going to actually have to prove anything that they have just left to future research? Where is the accountability? There is none! Darwinians are welcome to speculate endlessly. One never has to be right in Darwin Fantasyland. One just needs to be a loyal citizen of the emperor and an admirer of his new clothes. This earns you the coveted D-Merit Badge, which makes you sought after by fawning reporters, and grants you free admission to all the choice conferences funded by the NSF, replete with tasty morsels and flowing Darwine.

*sooth = truth, reality , or fact. A soothslayer is, well, you get the drift.

Sitting, squatting, and the evolutionary biology of human inactivity (PNAS). Observation: when people have no chair to sit on, they squat. Oh, but there must be an evolutionary explanation for that!

Inactivity is a growing public health risk in industrialized societies, leading some to suggest that our bodies did not evolve to be sedentary.

Hold on – who was led to suggest that our bodies evolved? Arrest him for impersonating a scientist! (see 16 July 2014).

Here, we show that, in a group of hunter-gatherers, time spent sedentary is similar to that found in industrialized populations. However, sedentary time in hunter-gatherers is often spent in postures like squatting that lead to higher levels of muscle activity than chair sitting. Thus, we suggest human physiology likely evolved in a context that included substantial inactivity, but increased muscle activity during sedentary time, suggesting an inactivity mismatch with the more common chair-sitting postures found in contemporary urban populations.

If only, if only. If only evolutionary biologists had to face serious critiques from those outside the Darwin Party, these storytellers would be shamed back to the stone age. But the totalitarian dictatorship of the ruling Darwin Party forbids it.

Their “Inactivity Mismatch Hypothesis” ain’t worth squat. So, evolution made the Hadza hunter-gatherers get some metabolic benefit from squatting? But guess what, storytellers! Evolution also made moderns like you prefer sitting in chairs. Try your hand at making up a story about that. How about, “We suggest that chair-sitting likely evolved in a context that included substantial attendance at scientific conferences, but increased brain activity during sitting time, suggesting a mismatch from the ancient habit of squatting in holes in favor of using toilet seats.” Works just as well.

Genomic landscape of the signals of positive natural selection in populations of Northern Eurasia: A view from Northern Russia (PLoS One). Oh great. More Darwinian racism. Just what the world needs.

Natural selection of beneficial genetic variants played a critical role in human adaptation to a wide range of environmental conditions. Northern Eurasia, despite its severe climate, is home to lots of ethnically diverse populations….

In addition to population demography, natural selection is an important force that shapes the genetic variability of populations. It leads to changes in the allele frequencies of particular loci if they are adaptive and increase population fitness in specific environmental condition.

So, let’s all go off and figure out who’s the fittest of them all. The authors even do brain function comparisons between tribes. Haven’t we had enough of that? But that’s not all that’s wrong with this paper. They don’t even know their own evolutionary theory! Natural selection is not a force. That’s a farce. Natural selection is “Stuff Happens.” No matter what happens, natural selection did it. And how do you detect positive selection? A gene exists! If a gene is there, it was positively selected, because, obviously, it survived, dummy. Haven’t you heard of survival of the fittest?

Oh, the fit will be survivors and survivors will be fit,
And survivors will survive to prove the fitness of the fit.
Oh, this natural selection, it’s so simple isn’t it?
‘Tis ruthless marching on.

More hints of Darwinian racism can be found in this jargon-rich paper:

It was also interesting to find among the top targets of positive selection the genes with known roles in the functioning and development of the nervous system (e.g., NRG3 and NBEA) that confirmed the proposed great role of such genes in local adaptations of humans after they left Africa. Generally, the distribution of both these and many other selection signals demonstrated geographic and group (regional) specificities, suggesting the contribution of population structure and ancestry to the adaptation.

Darwinian racism is so ugly, and it led to such atrocities, it must be stopped early on. These seven racists should read what University College London said this week about their institution’s past involvement in eugenics (Nature, 14 April 2020):

We wish to correct Angela Saini’s misleading claim that University College London’s geneticists were “willing to overlook” their department’s links with the Galton Laboratory, founded for research into eugenics in 1904 (Nature 579, 175; 2020). This undermines several decades of determined effort by us and our predecessors to confront the laboratory’s troubling history.

Over the years, this engagement has informed ethical debates relevant to our research. It has guided the development of genetic-counselling protocols and the debunking of the foundations of eugenics, as well as the related issue of ‘race’ as a biological concept. We have taught this pernicious history to tens of thousands of students who have taken our various courses.

Today’s scientists are stepping on each other to distance themselves from the philosophy that produced eugenics (instigated by Darwin’s cousin, Francis Galton). So why would Darwinians even go there today? This shows that Darwinism is not just useless, but potentially dangerous and ugly.

We run across so many of these Darwin-drunk articles each week, it’s hard to narrow them down to just a few for one entry. Some day, the world will laugh and groan at the Darwin Party. How did such idiotic ideas ever get promoted to the noble name of science? How could so many of the world’s brainiest people be so deceived?

Do your part to bring that day. Laugh harder. Darwinists cannot stand that. They want prestige. If you fight them, they have a bigger army to stomp you. But if you laugh and snicker, like the little boy in The Emperor’s New Clothes, it might start a movement. “The evolution of squatting.” Hmph. Giggle. Tee-hee. Snicker. Chortle. Guffaw. Wa-HOO!