ENST: Darwinism as Mental Illness
Some evolutionary biologists exhibit
signs of obsessive-compulsive disorder,
as this recent example shows
The Convoluted Concept of Evolving Evolvability
David Coppedge
Evolution News & Science Today, March 27, 2025
Try to wrap your mind around the concept that evolvability evolves by natural selection. On second thought, don’t. It’s not conducive to mental health.
Valuing charity, I try to approach new evolutionary papers with dispassionate tolerance, seeking understanding before forming an opinion about them one way or another. This one was a particular challenge. It’s like trying to imagine a Mobius strip wrapping a Klein bottle in hyperspace. What on earth is meant by natural selection favoring the evolution of evolvability? Is this even a potentially useful notion for understanding how the world works?
Mentions of “evolvability” here at Evolution News can be found scattered through articles by several contributing authors, but none I searched for have treated it in detail. Now that two papers on evolvability have appeared in separate journals in February 2025, it’s a good time to examine the concept.
The first paper, in PNAS, led by Luis Zaman from the University of Michigan, will not require much analysis, for two reasons: (1) The authors are consumed with Darwinism to the point of absurdity, and….
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Comments
Articles on your fellow creationist websites look into psychological profiles on Darwin as well as his predecessors (Hutton and Lyell) as well as his followers. As I have written in the past, Darwin’s predecessors as well as minions had dark personalities and motives.
Let’s include Hoyle’s spicy comment:
“Because the old believers said that God came out of the sky, thereby connecting the Earth with events outside it, the new believers were obliged to say the opposite and to do so, as always, with intense conviction. Although the new believers had not a particle of evidence to support their statements on the matter, they asserted that the rabbit producing sludge (called soup to make it sound more palatable) was terrestrially located and that all chemical and biochemical transmogrifications of the sludge were terrestrially inspired. Because there was not a particle of evidence to support this view, new believers had to swallow it as an article of faith, otherwise they could not pass their examinations or secure a job or avoid the ridicule of their colleagues. So it came about from 1860 onward that new believers became in a sense mentally ill, or, more precisely, either you became mentally ill or you quitted the subject of biology, as I had done in my early teens. The trouble for young biologists was that, with everyone around them ill, it became impossible for them to think they were well unless they were ill, which again is a situation you can read all about in the columns of Nature [magazine].”
(Hoyle, F., “Mathematics of Evolution,” [1987], Acorn Enterprises: Memphis TN, 1999, pp.3-4).
🙂