Magical Thinking by Evolutionists

Natural selection is a magic wand to
evolutionists. It creates scientists from fish.

— Darwinian magic is a deduction from the Myth of Progress —

C. S. Lewis described the core of universal evolutionism as a mystical (i.e. non-empirical) belief in inevitable progress:

By universal evolutionism I mean the belief that the very formula of universal process is from imperfect to perfect, from small beginnings to great endings, from the rudimentary to the elaborate: the belief which makes people find it natural to think that morality springs from savage taboos, adult sentiment from infantile sexual maladjustments, thought from instinct, mind from matter, organic from inorganic, cosmos from chaos. This is perhaps the deepest habit of mind in the contemporary world. It seems to me immensely unplausible, because it makes the general course of nature so very unlike those parts of nature we can observe. [source]

It is this core belief that underlies many claims by evolutionists about where things came from. The “Darwin Fish” icon illustrates the magic: fish sprout legs and crawl ashore. Similarly, insects and birds sprout wings and fly into the air, or humans grow big brains and become philosophers. Let’s take a look at some examples of magical thinking from recent science news articles.

Sophisticated Sonar by Processed Meat

Toothed whale echolocation organs evolved from jaw muscles (Hokkaido University, 8 April 2024). The sonar in whales and dolphins is an irreducibly complex system of coordinated parts that work together for function. Its elaborate design can be appreciated in this Illustra Media animation (illustration below). But to these evolutionists, echolocation just happened, arising from bone, fat, and muscle. Like magic, “It was part of the evolutionary shift away from chewing to simply swallowing food, which meant the chewing muscles were no longer needed.” Sounds shifty.

Essential parts of the dolphin echolocation system. (From Living Waters, by Illustra Media). This is what fat, muscle and bone do, given millions of years of the Myth of Progress.

Animals by Typo

Chance or “Stuff Happens” is not a scientific explanation.

Evolution‘s Recipe Book: How ‘Copy Paste’ Errors Cooked Up the Animal Kingdom (Centre for Genomic Regulation, 15 April 2024). Try creating some prose or poetry by typos. Or try creating a full course meal by mixing together ingredients off the shelf while blindfolded. That’s how we got animals, according to these geniuses in Spain, who employ the essential skill of Darwinian thinking: imagination.

“Our genes are like a vast library of recipes that can be cooked up differently to create or change tissues and organs. Imagine you end up with two copies of a recipe for paella by accident. You can keep and enjoy the original recipe while evolution tweaks the extra copy so that it makes risotto instead. Now imagine the entire recipe book is copied – twice – and the possibilities it opens for evolution. The legacy of these events, which took place hundreds of millions of years ago, lives on in most complex animals today,” explains Federica Mantica, author of the paper and researcher at the Centre for Genomic Regulation (CRG) in Barcelona.

These claims ascribe a mystical agency to evolution. It tweaks. It takes advantage of possibilities. It maintains a legacy. Just imagine! Think of all the animals that owe their emergence to the Big Tweaker in the Sky. Maybe she looks like a fairy with a wand.

Photographic Memory by Magic

Black-capped chickadee (Wikimedia Commons)

Mountain chickadees have remarkable memories. A new study explains why (University of Colorado, 17 April 2024). A half-ounce bird—the mountain chickadee—can remember tens of thousands of locations where it stored seeds for winter use. We know that computer memories have remarkable capacities, too, but they don’t fly and live outdoors in summer heat and winter snow, and they don’t lay eggs to hatch new computers. So how did these little birds get this amazing capability? It evolved.

There is no trait in the living world that cannot be “explained” by the magic words, “it evolved.”

• The findings could help biologists better understand the evolution of spatial memory in animals….
• Understanding what genes are associated with the bird’s spatial memory can help biologists track how the trait evolves….
• For the last one million years, the mountain chickadees in the Rocky Mountains have evolved independently from those in the Sierra Nevada Mountains. The team hopes to investigate whether the two groups of birds have evolved spatial memory in the same way across different geographic regions.

And to hope for extra government funding, they toss this in: “We hope to track how chickadee’s spatial memory evolves under pressure from climate change.”

For contrast, look at this prior study on chickadees that doesn’t refer to evolution at all: “Chickadees are Memory Geniuses. Their Barcode-Like Neural Activity May Be To Thank” (Columbia University, 29 March 2024). These scientists may be evolutionists, we don’t know; but they apparently didn’t need evolutionary notions in this press release. Instead, they spoke of the memory trick by the birds in “barcode” terms, analogous to engineering design.

Recommended Resource: Dr Randy Guliuzza’s lecture “A Theory of Biological Design: Bringing an Overdue Revolution to Biology” was posted April 10 on the Logos Research Associates YouTube Channel. In the first part of this outstanding presentation, Dr Guliuzza explains in detail the magical, mystical thinking inherent in natural selection. Watch the first 44 minutes if you can (it starts at 4:40). The remainder of the 90-minute presentation shows an example of his alternative way of explaining biological change from an engineering design perspective. Then, he answers questions from the side chat. Dr Guliuzza, with degrees in engineering, medicine and theology, is president of the Institute for Creation Research (ICR).

See also “Evolution as Magical Thinking” by Neil Thomas at Evolution News.