Never Trust an Evolutionary Psychologist
Anxious? Depressed? Having a bad relationship?
Darwinists will say it’s all just a meaningless game.
Evolutionary psychologists treat their fellow men and women as lab rats in natural selection simulations. They try to figure out why people act the way they do using models based on game theory. Nothing is right or wrong in their schemes; it just is. Can someone with beliefs like this help you?
Darwinism, furthermore, is deterministic. We are all puppets of our genes. As the late Darwinist professor at Cornell William Provine often said, there is no free will in evolution. So what’s the use of evolutionary counseling? Why have debates, negotiations and policies? Whatever will be, will be. Nothing is right or wrong. If you want a safe society where virtue is prized and vice is condemned, don’t let Darwinians get anywhere near government leaders!
Psychopaths: why they’ve thrived through evolutionary history – and how that may change (The Conversation, 12 Feb 2023). Get this: Jonathan R. Goodman, a researcher in Human Evolutionary Studies at the University of Cambridge, thinks that psychopaths are an evolutionary success story. Keep him away from City Hall!
From an evolutionary point of view, psychopathy is puzzling. Given that psychopathic traits are so negative, why do they remain in successive generations? Psychopathy seems to be, in the words of biologists, “maladaptive”, or disadvantageous. Assuming there’s a genetic component to this family of disorders, we’d expect it to decrease over time.
But that’s not what we see — and there’s evidence that the tendencies are, at least in some contexts, an evolutionary benefit. According to my own research, the reason for this may be down to the ability to fake desirable qualities through deception.
Cooperation without punishment (Nature, 21 Jan 2023). Evolutionary psychologists play games with human lives. They build “models” of how cooperators and “cheaters” manipulate each others’ behavior. The players in their games don’t have to be human beings, mind you. They could be lemmings, hyenas or bacteria. Cooperators are not more “moral” than cheaters because there are no morals in the Stuff Happens Law.
How dangerous can evolutionary games get? These two evolutionists think their model works if there’s no punishment. That’s right; following these guys might lead to letting all the felons out of prison!
In our evolutionary model, the population contains heterogeneous conditional cooperators whose decisions depend on past cooperation levels. The population plays a repeated public goods game in a moderately noisy environment where individuals can occasionally commit mistakes in their cooperative decisions and in their imitation of the role models’ strategies. We show that, under moderate levels of noise, injecting a few altruists into the population triggers positive reciprocity among conditional cooperators, thereby providing a novel mechanism to establish stable cooperation. More broadly, our findings indicate that self-governance is possible while avoiding the detrimental effects of punishment, and suggest that society should focus on creating a critical amount of trust to harness the conditional nature of its members.
Please, please do NOT listen to the advice of these two authors. They need mental help themselves to cure their Yoda Complex.
To encourage sustainability, we must remember we are apes, not angels (New Scientist, 21 Sept 2022). The Darwinist authors of this highly-evolutionary news magazine don’t believe in angels, of course. Their solution to society’s problems is to make everybody act like apes. But can apes act like angels?
To show how illogical their position is, watch them tell other people what they “must” do. “Rather than trying to conquer our evolved desire for status, we must switch the symbols used to display it,” they say. But there are no “musts” in evolution. Darwinian philosophy is an amoral, stuff-happens universe of accidents with no truths, no goals, and no moral compass. And what is a symbol if not a pointer to an immaterial thought? The only beings capable of symbolic thought are humans. Saying they evolved from apes begs the question of evolution.
Tell them to get lost. ‘Who are you to tell me what I must do? I don’t take advice from apes!’
All you need to know to kick these charlatans out of the university and out of corporate boardrooms or anywhere else they might cause damage is to realize that they are complete, utter hypocrites. Hypocrisy is a vice that is built into the Yoda Complex, because the Darwinist refuses to get off his exalted frame and subject himself to the evolutionary forces that he thinks make other people do what they do. Hypocrisy characterizes the evolutionary psychology subculture. They cannot live with their own beliefs, so they have to steal from the Biblical worldview.
If they really, really believed that humans are apes that arrived without any Creator or moral compass or absolute standard of right and wrong, they would have to believe that amoral, mindless forces made them what they are to improve the fitness of their selfish genes. If this realization hit them sufficiently hard, they would shut up and resign themselves to swinging from the trees hooting nonsense. Evolutionary psychologists have nothing to say to people who value truth and righteousness. Nothing! You can’t get blood from a turnip. Would you move into their model home, when it’s a house of cards built on a foundation of quicksand in a windstorm?
Must we keep repeating the logic of this? Any time people open their mouths and state a proposition, they are presuming the existence of absolute truth and morality. This is not to say that any human can reach those realities, but speaking at all presumes absolute truth and morality exist. Why else try to convince anyone of anything? When an evolutionist makes any sense, it is because he or she is appealing to the image of God planted in every human heart—an image with a conscience that knows deep down that truth matters. They didn’t get that from apes.
When an evolutionist seeks to convince you that his or her evolutionary model of human behavior is true, here’s how to shut them up real quick: tell them you’re onto their game. You realize they’re just trying to prove their fitness at your expense, and you are not going to let them. They can’t argue with that, because cooperators and cheaters “emerge” in their own evolutionary games.
If they insist that they’re telling the truth, and that we “should” believe them, reply, “Oh, so you do believe that truth matters. Does truth evolve?” Either way they answer, they lose. If truth does evolve, then what they are telling you today could be false tomorrow. If truth does not evolve, then they are supernaturalists in spite of themselves: they espouse immaterial realities that are eternal. This conundrum makes the arguments of the most ardent atheists break down, too, like Sam Harris who gave a famous Ted Talk about how morality might evolve. The moment he opens his mouth to teach, his evolutionary worldview dies, because he expects you to believe he is telling a worthwhile truth and not just screeching like an ape. Why are evolutionists like Bret Weinstein so distressed with the direction of academia? What gives Jordan Peterson nightmares about the evils in modern society? They know deep down that truth matters, but they can’t get truth or morality from evolution!
Think this over until you are mentally immunized from falling for evolutionary mind games. They can’t get truth or morality from their own table, so they sneak into the Biblical smorgasbord of values without paying the price. Demand accountability. If they want to taste truth and virtue, they must get in line and pony up.*
*The good news: Jesus paid the price for us. All our welcome at his table. All one has to do is turn around and accept his gift to enter freely. But the gate is narrow and low; one has to remove old baggage (false philosophy like evolution) and stoop (be humble before their Creator).
Want real help from a better source? Watch this 4-minute video.