|
An extreme example of Darwinians’ dependence on teleology
Zachary W. writes:
If you have a few minutes, I’d be interested in your opinion on J.B.S. Haldane’s thoughts re consciousness and evolution:Here is the passage Zachary linked. It’s from The Causes of Evolution by J.B.S. Haldane (1892-1964), p. 3:
The strangest thing about the origin of consciousness from unconsciousness is not that it has happened one in the remote past, but that it happens in the life of every one of us. An early human embryo without nervous system or sense organs, and no occupation but growth, has no more claim to consciousness than a plant—far less than a jelly-fish. A new-born baby may be conscious, but has less title to rationality than a dog or ape. The evolutionist makes the very modest claim that an increase in rationality such as every normal child shows in its lifetime has occurred in the ancestors of the human race in the last few million years. He does no claim to be able to explain this process adequately, or even to understand it. But he claims that such an increase in rationality is a fact of everyday experience. [Emphases added.]This is fantastic. Haldane is seeking to make plausible the Darwinian theory of the evolution of conscious organisms out of unconscious ones by comparing it to the process by which a newborn human baby grows into a child and slowly becomes more conscious. Haldane is clearly suggesting that because the growth of consciousness out of unconsciousness happens routinely and automatically in the development of each individual human being, it could have happened in the Darwinian transition from ape to man. But of course the analogy is absurd. Darwinian evolution has no inherent direction. But the human baby is programmed to develop consciousness. It has, if I may be so bold to use the word, a design, a built-in aim. Just as the acorn is programmed to become an oak, the human baby is programmed to become a conscious adult. What could be more teleological, more irresistibly fated, than an organism’s growth via pre-set stages to adulthood? So once again an exponent of the most anti-teleological belief system ever devised by the mind of man is making that belief system appear to be believable by draping it in a teleology. What a bunch of phonies!
The website where Haldane’s book is presented has a brief biographical description that says:
J.B.S. Haldane (1892-1964), one of the founders of the science of population genetics, was also one of the greatest practitioners of the art of explaining science to the layperson. Haldane was a superb story-teller, as his essays and his children’s books attest. [Emphasis added.] … Describing Haldane’s refusal to be confined by a “System” as a “light-hearted” one, [Egbert] Leigh points out … “Haldane’s work is even better than most modern popularizations in its balance between gentle rhetoric and logical rigor….I’m been a disbeliever of Darwinism since at around 1980. But since I read Ann Coulter’s Godless last year, in which she pointed out that all that the Darwinians have to offer by way of proof of their theory is “stories,” every time I see anything by a Darwinist I keep seeing the “stories” that Coulter talks about. For example, Richard Dawkins’s The Selfish Gene: a story. A gene is not selfish, a gene has no purpose, a gene (according to the Darwinian theory) undergoes a random purposeless mutation that by chance helps the organism that possesses the gene have more offspring, and so that gene is carried forward into the following generations. There is a complete lack of any purpose here. Yet the phrase “the selfish gene” has entered the modern consciousness, with its idea that the gene is the ultimate agent of evolution, using the organism in which it resides in the same way that man drives a car. The gene is the driver, the organism (e.g., us) is just its vehicle. This teleological tale and many others like it constitute the mental construct by which millions of people today understand the phenomena of life. But it is wholly false.
And so in Haldane is praised as a “story teller,” who found a “balance between gentle rhetoric (i.e. stories) and logical rigor. Yep, that’s it alright. Logical rigor would reveal the impossibility of the Darwinian theory, so gentle rhetoric, such as constructing an analogy between the evolution of human consciousness out of pre-human species and the development of consciousness in the life of an individual human child, is of the utmost importance for the survival of belief in Darwinism. Email entry |