Darwin Mysticism Slides Through the Media
It’s illogical and pseudoscientific,
but it always gets a pass. Why?
— Here is proof in their own words that Darwinism is a religion —
Evolutionary biologists and their promoters in the media pride themselves on the ‘scientific method, rationality and evidence.’ Their intolerance of anything sounding ‘religious’ (true or not) can be career-threatening to Darwin skeptics. But the undertone of Darwinian explanations for biological phenomena, when you look carefully, is mystical: it presumes a spiritual presence driving organisms upward to higher planes, granting them powers to innovate complex organs to improve. It’s almost a return to pagan animism: the spirit of the trees, the spirit of the lion, and the spirit the tiger. The omnipresent spirit of Darwin pervades all things, enabling them to evolve and win the competition. And what is the prize? Another mystical concept: fitness.
This is the religion of academia. Watch it play out in the news.
Why our brain uses up more energy than that of any other animal (New Scientist, 19 May 2023). Carissa Wong’s subtitle reveals the religious subtext of Darwinian animism: “Our brain’s high energy demands, particularly in certain key areas, may have enabled us to evolve uniquely advanced cognitive traits.”
Notice the illogic and the pseudoscience here. It’s illogical because it confuses cause and effect. Did the energy demands come first? Why? Our ape ancestors (according to the story) were doing fine, happy in the trees, screeching at each other, picking of each other’s parasites, and having sex. If the apes had higher energy demands, then every animal did, but none of them grew bigger brains. Why did evolution pick on apes only? Sounds discriminatory—without a mind to do the discrimination.
Stating facts about human brains as they are now implies nothing about evolution. Wong couches her language in hope, raising the perhapsimaybecouldness index, and shields any potential criticism by intimating that evolutionary explanations might cure diseases if we just give the evolutionary wizards more power.
The human brain has greater energy demands than that of any other animal, especially in certain important regions, which may have been key to the evolution of our complex cognition. Knowing how energy use differs across the brain could also help us better understand and treat certain conditions, such as Alzheimer’s disease and depression.
It’s pseudoscientific, because it presumes (by blind faith) that some mystical spirit “enabled us to evolve” our unique human traits. It gave its permission to an ape pair to begin its slow march to humanness. It’s as if the Spirit of Darwin spoke: ‘Come thou down, O simple ape, from the trees and walk. It will be difficult, but I will be with thee to guide thy brain to bigger size with more powers. I will simultaneously give thy whole body more effective use of energy to power thy large brain. And with thy large brain, I will grant thee the supreme gift of consciousness and logic. With it, thou mayest embark on a new plane of evolution: the ability to think critically. Finally, instead of being satisfied with food and sex, thou willst embrace a new, higher form of pleasure: understanding.’
Is there any science here? No. It’s all speculation, rife with escape clauses and possibility thinking. On top of the fallacy of personification, the article commits another logical fallacy: begging the question of evolution.
Some mammals have bigger brains and more nerve cells, or neurons, than humans, making it unclear how we evolved a uniquely advanced ability to think critically and use language to communicate.
Valentin Riedl at the Technical University of Munich in Germany and his colleagues wondered whether understanding how our brains use energy could help to explain our complex cognition.
But that’s the question at hand! Did humans’ “uniquely advanced ability to think critically and use language” arrive by evolution? Don’t beg it!
None of the facts in the article about how many watts the human brain uses, or how hormones are distributed in parts of the brain, are relevant to this key issue: how could a human brain evolve from an ape brain and achieve critical thinking? Instead of addressing that conundrum, Evolutionists go mystical, attributing the powers of the human mind to the spirit of the environment. Why? Because they have ruled out from the get-go the possibility that the brain was created with these powers. Intelligence can explain intelligence, but chance mutations cannot. To get the blood of critical thinking out of the turnip of chance, evolutionary wizards must conjure up mystical powers in Darwin’s Stuff Happens Law.
How evolution has influenced the shape of the brain (University of Vienna, 26 April 2023). Question-begging pervades this article, too. It’s one thing to scientifically correlate brain regions with their functions. It’s another thing entirely to say they evolved. Scientists can legitimately compare human brains with animal brains, but the issue is whether human brains evolved from animal brains by Darwin’s chance mechanism of random mutation and natural selection. It is pseudoscientific to assume what they need to establish. It is illogical to think that thinking is a product of Darwinian evolution. Darwin himself realized that convictions in a monkey’s mind cannot be assumed to be reliable (see quote above). This press release begs the question that human brains evolved from animal brains, but according to Darwin himself, they cannot know that with any reliability.
The results confirm that the shape of the brain has developed in parallel with the organ’s function over the course of its evolution. “By evaluating the various growth patterns, we were able to identify seven clusters that expanded together during the evolution of the brain and which correspond to specific aspects of cognitive abilities in animals and humans,” explained lead author Ernst Schwartz from the Computational Imaging Research Lab (CIR) at MedUni Vienna’s Department of Biomedical Imaging and Image-guided Therapy. As a result, the brain adapts to its environment by first expanding its visual attention areas before other areas involved in higher cognitive functions, such as language and memory.
Saying that “the brain adapts itself to its environment” is true for individuals, such as those born with part of their brain missing, but that says nothing about a human brain arising from an ape brain. Sadly, the article says next, “The study was conducted in partnership with researchers from all over the world.” The Darwin mind virus has become endemic on Planet Earth.
Evolution: Mini-proteins in human organs appeared ‘from nowhere’ (Max Delbruck Centre via Phys.org, 17 Feb 2023). Functional proteins appeared from nowhere? This latest example of the Poof Spoof shows the faith of evolutionary biologists in chance.
Ruiz-Orera’s bioinformatic gene analyses revealed that most human microproteins developed millions of years later in the evolutionary process than the larger proteins currently known to scientists.
Millions of years later, they just “developed” from nowhere. Impossible, they should have said, questioning their assumptions. Instead, they appealed to mystical powers of evolution:
Yet the huge age gap doesn’t appear to prevent the proteins from “talking” to each other. “Our lab experiments showed that the young and old proteins can bind to each other—and in doing so possibly influence each other,” says lead author Dr. Jana Schulz, a researcher in Hübner’s team and at the DZHK. She therefore suspects that contrary to long-held assumptions, the microproteins play a key role in a variety of cellular functions. The young proteins might also be heavily involved in evolutionary development thanks to comparatively rapid “innovations and adaptations.”
“It’s possible that evolution is more dynamic than previously thought,” says van Heesch.
The spirit of evolution has more tricks up her sleeve than previously thought. What were they thinking? That thinking evolved?
Humans evolved to walk with an extra spring in our step (Queen’s University, 31 May 2023). The human foot is a marvel of engineering. Years ago, we quoted a physiologist who said that it is “a biomechanical masterpiece.” These scientists at Queen’s U marvel at it, too, describing the spring in our step provided by our arches (see David Rives short video about this). But evolutionists expect us to believe that masterpieces of bone, muscle, tendons, nerves, blood vessels, and skin equipped with thousands of sensors, all arranged according to engineering principles, are products of chance and time. Do you have enough faith to believe in miracles like that?
A new study has shown that humans may have evolved a spring-like arch to help us walk on two feet. Researchers studying the evolution of bipedal walking have long assumed that the raised arch of the foot helps us walk by acting as a lever which propels the body forward. But a global team of scientists have now found that the recoil of the flexible arch repositions the ankle upright for more effective walking. The effects in running are greater, which suggests that the ability to run efficiently could have been a selective pressure for a flexible arch that made walking more efficient too.
Selective pressure: what is that? Can you measure it? What are its units? Can it be described with equations, like fluid pressure? As used by evolutionists, this phantom “selection pressure” is something very different from a force that can be measured with the scientific method. It is a mystical force driving animals to “innovate” wonderful new biomechanical masterpieces.
That’s the pseudoscientific part. The illogical part is thinking that humans “evolved” an arch “to help” us walk on two feet. Which came first? Did an ape try walking on two feet, and then urge itself to evolve arches? Funny; all the great apes are still knuckle walkers or tree swingers after all the millions of years that humans supposedly evolved to be critical-thinking upright walkers. Or did an arch appear by chance first, then a pre-human ape found out that it helped it walk on two feet? Either way, such non-empirical speculations beg the question of evolution.
These are just sample stories from the news. Such mystical, illogical presentations of evolution are very common. You see them in the press releases but also in the journal papers. It’s time to call it out for what it is: illogical, mystical pseudoscience. Chance cannot make human brains. Chance cannot do anything functional worth talking about. Cloaking chance with personified terms like “natural selection” is a dodge, like inventing “natural voting” as a term and pretending it makes sense scientifically.
This is what smart scientists are left with when they abandon design in their toolkit for explanation. They fool themselves into thinking that thinking evolved. But in every case where we can observe complex machinery coming into being, intelligence is clearly a necessary and sufficient cause. That empirical truth implies a supreme engineer behind life: one who is also logical and real, not mystical.
Knowledge of God is within our hearts; it can be acknowledged or rejected. But to reject God is to reject logic, too (see Jay Seegert explain this). Paul said it best in Romans 1:21, “For although they knew God, they did not honor him as God or give thanks to him, but they became futile in their thinking, and their foolish hearts were darkened.” And so we can add one more adjective to illogical, pseudoscientific and mystical: ungrateful.