Evolutionist Says Evolution Evolves

At risk of starting an infinite loop,
a Darwinist playing computer games
goes off the rails in Darwin worship

 

— No one should doubt that Darwinism is out of control after reading today’s news. —

A short press release from the University of Michigan uses the e-word evolution 38 times, including 5 times in the title itself. Evolutionary biologist Luis Zaman, instead of running behind a bush in shame to escape the press, is shown smiling for the camera. He claims that evolution is so creative, it learned how to evolve itself!

But if evolution evolves, does the evolution of evolving evolution evolve too? How about the evolution of evolving evolution of evolving evolution? Where does the doom loop stop?

Evolution, evolution, evolution: How evolution got so good at evolving (University of Michigan, 13 Feb 2025). When this evolutionary biologist begins by assuming evolution, you know he’s on shaky ground. He looks at the remarkable adaptation of life to its environment, but instead of seeing the hand of God, he sees in his imagination the face of the Bearded Buddha, Charles Darwin. It’s all downhill from there.

Now, a University of Michigan study shows that perhaps why evolution is so effective is that evolution is itself something that can evolve. The research is published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

“Life is really, really good at solving problems. If you look around, there’s so much diversity in life, and that all these things come from a common ancestor seems really surprising to me,” said Luis Zaman, an evolutionary biologist at U-M and lead author of the study. “Why is evolution so seemingly creative? It seems like maybe that ability is something that evolved itself.”

Of course Zaman is not sure about any of this. “Whether evolvability itself can evolve is a question,” he says. But he is so under the influence of Darwine he cannot even conceive of reality existing outside the fogma. In his imagination,

the major fuel of evolution are the mutations that increase an organism’s fitness, increasing their ability to survive in the current environment, the most. But evolvability is not about increasing fitness. Instead, evolvability increases the future potential of an organism’s fitness.

“This forward-looking feature of evolvability makes it contentious,” Zaman said. “We think it’s important. We know it happens. Why it happens and when it happens is something we’re less clear about.

But if you don’t know why it happens, or when it happens, how can you know it happens? Simple. Stuff Happens. That’s the essence of Darwin’s theory, the Stuff Happens Law. Mutations (chance) happen by sheer dumb luck, and then a blind Selector (i.e., an Idol who gets “really, really good at solving problems” over Deep Time) selects them by sheer dumb luck. The Selector doesn’t do this on purpose, because Darwin got rid of purpose when he constructed his idol. The Selector doesn’t care. Having no eyes, it sees not; having no ears, it hears not. Those who make idols become like them: blind, deaf, and dumb.

Luis Zaman and his lazy friends proved their imaginary scenario by playing computer games instead of studying real biology in the field. Their “computational model” assumed evolution to see how evolution would evolve. And then (surprise, surprise), it evolved!

Their imaginary computer scenario included imaginary beings that consumed imaginary red berries or imaginary blue berries that could mutate to become either healthy or poisonous. What’s an imaginary creature going to do in this scenario, when the programmed goal of the game was to survive? In this game of red-light blue-light, the computer game “allowed” digital organisms to play with mutations and thereby increase their fitness. They didn’t get the bulletin that mutations are almost always harmful. How many digital organisms had to die digital deaths for a few lucky ones to win this fitness contest? Don’t ask. Darwinians don’t care about individuals. They only care about populations.

The researchers found that when they “cycled” between these two environments, the populations in each environment were to be able to jump back and forth between these opposite environments and be successful in both.

In particular, cycling between environments caused the populations to have a thousandfold increase in mutations that would allow them to successfully switch between eating red berries and blue berries in each environment.

This gang apparently didn’t read the reviews about Avida, the computer software they depended on for their imaginary trip (Evolution News 2009, Evolution News 2014). No one these days should be using this flawed software to obfuscate (Evolution News 2018).  But on they went, frolicking heroically in the quicksand. Their Avida divination game lured them on, promising enlightenment if they continued playing for millionzzz of yearzzzzz:

They found that if the environment fluctuated too quickly, they didn’t see an increase in evolvability. But what was interesting was that even relatively long cycle periods—hundreds of generations—could lead to the evolution of and maintenance of evolvability.

“Once a population has achieved this evolvability, it seems like it didn’t get erased by future evolution,” Zaman said.

This implies that once evolution evolves to be better at evolution, that evolvability is here to stay.

If evolvability is biological nirvana, why hasn’t every organism achieved it in billions of years? Did these imagineers think to measure evolvability as a function of time? Humans should be the least evolvable, and bacteria the most, if their notion was testable. But they couldn’t test their notion, because “the evolutionary processes that shape this ability to adapt (evolvability) remain elusive because of the required resolution and timespan of observations.”

This led them to abandon empirical science and go to the computer game parlor, where meditating on Deep Time and wearing a Lady Luck rabbit’s foot makes miracles possible.

Direct observation of the evolution of evolvability is intractable due to the timescales and resolution of historical data that are required and presents a major challenge to addressing this question. A holistic picture of the various processes that drive the evolution of evolvability is necessary to understand why evolution is so effective and to limit (or harness) its future potential.

That’s why they ran to computer games as divination tools to “see” evolution in imaginary worlds over imaginary Darwin Years. The whole computerized scenario, though, is riddled with logical blunders. If they had done rigorous work, they would have applied Darwinism not just to imaginary organisms inside the software, but to the computer software and hardware itself. Likely the system would have gone TILT after the first mutation to a line of code or to a physical circuit.

An accomplice implicated in spreading the story was Morgan Sherburne of Michigan News. Zaman’s partners in this “study” (how hard did they study?) were Bhaskar Kumawat, Alexander Lalejini, and Monica M. Acosta. The entire National Academy of Sciences could also be accused of facilitating this waste, fraud, and abuse by publishing it in PNAS. The paper uses the e-word 210 times.

Observing the behavior of these evolutionary biologists suggests a hypothesis: the more Darwine consumed, the more one gets pleasure at reiterating the e-word. For maximum titillation, recite the infinite loop: “the evolution of the evolution of the evolution of the evolution of …… the evolution of the evolvability of evolution.”

A favorite pastime in the Darwine Drinking Pub is singing. Outsiders passing by on the way to work hear the songs of the inebriated who have not yet passed out, wondering if this is how their tax money for science is being spent:

The Darwin in the tale
The Darwin in the tale
Hi, ho, scenario
The Darwin in the tale.

The creature takes a red,
The creature takes a red,
Hi, ho, scenario
The creature now is dead.

The blue one now is it
The blue one now is it
Hi, ho, scenario
The blue one now is fit.

A poison hits the blue
A poison hits the blue
Hi, ho, scenario,
His fitness turns to goo.

The red evolves a plop
The red evolves a plop
Hi, ho, scenario
The red is now on top.

Avida is the thing
Avida is the thing
Hi, ho, scenario
The thing to please the king.

How dry I am
How dry I am,
Only Charley knows
How dry I am.

Tiny bubbles
In the Darwine,
Make me sloppy,
Make me feel fine.

Tiny bubbles
Make me warm all over,
Passing peer review
No problemo every time.