Crazy Darwinism Needs Shaming

Censorship of Darwin skeptics has
given license for absurd speculations

Darwin’s notion (yes, notion, not scientific theory) that mindless nature “selects” for fitness (equated to survival) and that this random shuffling of matter produced human brains out of slime over millions of years has been taken to ridiculous levels.

What came first, life or evolution? Self-replicating molecules demonstrate basic principles of Darwinian evolution (2 Dec 2024, Univ of Groningen via Phys.org). The Darwin lovers who wrote this must have been drunk on Darwine. They make natural selection a god. What else would you call something that creates everything in the universe? Anything that exists must have been naturally selected! Why would Nature publish this idea?

In a paper, titled “Competitive exclusion among self-replicating molecules curtails the tendency of chemistry to diversify” published in Nature Chemistry on 29 November, Sijbren Otto, Professor of Systems Chemistry at the University of Groningen, demonstrates that key principles of Darwinian evolution, such as survival of the fittest, also manifest themselves in simple non-living systems.

Otto and his team used a system of three different self-replicating molecules, that, under the right conditions, grow and divide spontaneously. When set up to compete against each other, all requiring the same chemical building block to grow and replicate, one of them eventually outcompeted the others.

This is an example of “survival of the fittest.” However, when they required different building blocks, all replicators were able to “survive” and co-exist. This resembles how species co-exist in different ecological niches.

These results demonstrate that the basic principles of Darwinian evolution can act on non-living materials, suggesting that evolution predates life. The next step is to investigate where Darwinian evolution can lead such non-living materials.

“This work sheds new light on how life may have emerged from non-living materials and marks an important step in the synthesis of new forms of life in the laboratory.”

Wonder what others are thinking? It’s your ‘lizard brain’ talking (22 Nov 2024, Northwestern University). You don’t have a lizard brain. Dr Bergman debunked that three years ago (5 Nov 2021), and showed how that Darwinian notion led to serious violations of human rights via frontal lobotomies (22 Jan 2019). The Darwin Party members at Northwestern didn’t get the message.

“We spend a lot of time wondering, ‘What is that person feeling, thinking? Did I say something to upset them?’” said senior author Rodrigo Braga. “The parts of the brain that allow us to do this are in regions of the human brain that have expanded recently in our evolution, and that implies that it’s a recently developed process. In essence, you’re putting yourself in someone else’s mind and making inferences about what that person is thinking when you cannot really know.”

The study found the more recently evolved and advanced parts of the human brain that support social interactions — called the social cognitive network — are connected to and in constant communication with an ancient part of the brain called the amygdala.

This is all bunk. The human amygdala is a complex, functional part of the brain. It takes in sensory information and helps associate it with stored emotional memories, so that we can respond quickly to risks and rewards instead of having to learn them new every time. Why not turn this notion around, and say that lizards were endowed with a stripped-down amygdala that is not as good as ours?

This “lizard brain” concept is also illogical. You are a whole person, not a collection of evolved and ancient parts talking to each other. Why would your frontal lobe listen to a lizard anyway? Using Braga’s logic, any part of the body could be called ancient. Do humans have lizard lips, too? Fish guts? Frog legs? Snake eyes? The only lizards in this story are the Darwinians speaking with forked tongue.

Darwinism Is Useless Anyway

Those still claiming Darwinism is “science” will be hard put to find an example where the Charley’s Stuff Happens Law has helped researchers do productive work. Recent examples:

Stabilizing selection in an identified multisensory neuron in blind cavefish (18 Nov 2024, Hildebrandt et al., PNAS). This team thought that cave fish would show evolutionary change in the largest neuron in their brains. When they looked, there was no evolution.

The absence of predators and the loss of vision predict massive reductions in this neuron and a loss of its visual dendrite. However, while cave life has sufficed to remove functional eyes, all morphological and functional features of this neuron are conserved and subject to a complex and presently not understood stabilizing selection with a continued role of its ventral dendrite.

Darwinism was wrong. Evolution didn’t grant Hildebrandt and pals the coveted “understanding” that Darwin promised (28 May 2021). Note: “stabilizing selection” is not evolution. It is stasis, the opposite of evolution (see 2 Sept 2019). The neuron didn’t evolve!

How did Humans Adapt to Digest Starchy Foods? (5 Dec 2024, The Scientist). Evolution, if true, predicted that a gradual increase in the number of amylase proteins that can digest starch would confer an evolutionary advantage. Did evolutionary theory provide understanding? No.

All this suggests that having more AMY1 copies is beneficial for mammals that consume a lot of starch, but oddly, scientists still haven’t determined exactly how multiple copies of a salivary amylase gene might confer an evolutionary advantage. “If you don’t have salivary amylase, in theory, you can still eat bread without any problems,” said Gokcumen. “You can still digest it, you still get the calories.”

More copies should have helped our ancestors. Gokcumen says, “getting a jump start on digestion may enable people to extract more calories from the starches they consume”; but again, evolutionary theory didn’t help: “this has never been conclusively proven,” he adds. And why would humans evolve more amylase if they don’t even have taste receptors for starch? It doesn’t make sense. There must be an evolutionary answer out there in the dark forest of futureware, where the snipe of understanding is waiting to be caught.

Gokcumen plans to explore these hypotheses in the future, using enzymes in people’s spit as a window into the complex evolutionary history of humans.

Deep-sea marvels: How anglerfish defy evolutionary expectations (2 Dec 2024, Rice University). Readers can explore this additional sad story about how evolutionary expectations were defied by actual observations. One quick example:

The researchers also compared anglerfish clades across different habitats and found more unexpected results. Coastal species like frogfish, which live in diverse and productive coral reef environments, exhibited much lower rates of evolutionary change than their counterparts in the deep sea.

Do you see a pattern here? The articles claim things evolved, but the evidence denies it. Where has Darwinian evolution helped explain anything in a way that would survive the hard questions that a Darwin skeptic could ask? Why is the NSF funding this nonsense?

At The Conversation on December 3, Aroney and Zeitlyn had fun pointing out five ancient means of divination used by shamans to predict the future. But how is Darwinism different? Its practitioners use bones, crystals and computer models as divining tools, but their fundamental beliefs are just as unrealistic as thinking that spider divination will give understanding to a shaman in Cameroon.

These pseudoscientists must be shamed out of the academy. They are leading students off the empirical cliff into Fantasyland.