However
it may be challenged technically, Karl Popper’s idea that an argument or
hypothesis needs to be falsifiable in order to be judged as scientific is a
useful thought tool. My father
used to say, for example, that superstitious people could never be persuaded of
their errors because they could always come up with a defense of their belief. If their
rabbit’s foot didn’t bring good luck, he explained, they would say it was the
wrong foot, cut off at the wrong time, or whatever else worked for them. People who believe the world will end on a certain date
usually wake up the morning after convinced they just need to reread the texts
or redo the calculations, or that they prayed the problem away.
Evolutionary
explanations, when over-applied, follow the same illogic. Fidelity and infidelity, kindness and
cruelty, altruism and selfishness, monogamy and polygamy, all have “good”
evolutionary explanations.
Why? Because no mental or
physical condition or behavior could exist if it didn’t provide an evolutionary
advantage. So all we have to do is
come up with a logical-sounding, untestable theory, and we’ve “explained” it in
evolutionary terms.
There
are, however, serious objections to this line of thinking. The first, of course, is that any
explanation that can’t be falsified is no explanation at all. Evolutionary theorists provide an
evolutionary “explanation” for any human trait, including its opposite. All such theories are based on
conjecture, some of it supported to a degree by brain science, others simply
guesswork. Take optimism and
pessimism for example.
According
to Tali Sharot in The Optimism Bias “It is tempting to speculate that
optimism was selected for during evolution precisely because positive
expectations enhance the probability of survival. The fact that optimists live longer and are healthier,
combined with statistics indicating that most humans display optimistic biases,
together with recent data linking optimism to specific genes, strongly supports
this hypothesis.” So evolution
selected for optimism because it made people hopeful, perhaps they overcame
setbacks more readily – and perhaps a cheerful spouse was more appealing than a
gloomy one (because, of course, the partner recognized that a cheerful spouse
was a better bet to live longer and be more fertile, or at least more
enthusiastic about procreation).
So
why are there so many pessimists around?
Well, according to http://ironshrink.com,
“Pessimism,
like snake and spider phobias, may be an adaptation that promotes survival. Our
ancestors would have been poorly served by joyfully sniffing every flower while
they were hunting for lunch. Better they should have assumed that the world is
a dangerous place. A bit of well-placed pessimism would lead them to watch for
predators, pitfalls, and creepy-crawlies. But more than sensitizing our
ancestors to dangers, pessimism helped to solve problems. According to psychologist
Robert Leahy, “pessimism, avoidance, and retreat” were frequently the best
strategies for survival in the primitive environment.”
Likewise,
once theorists had established to their satisfaction that “fight or flight” was
ingrained in us by selection processes, others decided that “tend and
befriend” was just as useful, and was also selected for. A recent piece I read even suggested
that gossip had an evolutionary advantage. That seems puzzling to me. To gossip you need two things: language and secrets. Is it really possible that we developed
language and closed doors among hunter-gatherers who were in each other’s
company 24-7 far enough back in evolutionary time to allow gossip to be
selected for? I rather think that
gossip would be likelier to get the gossiper killed at a time when secrets
would have been hard to keep and the reaction of a pissed-off neighbor whose
sexual prowess had been under discussion was likely to have been a rock or a
club.
And
on the theories go. Homosexuality
is, of course, a giant stumbling block, since it seems the perfect evolutionary
disadvantage. But this doesn’t
stop the ingenious evolutionist.
Maybe being gay makes you more available to help raise your siblings’
kids, and so perpetuates your genes.
(The perfect family: Mom and Dad, Uncle Bruce and Uncle Randy, Aunt
Butch and Aunt Biker, and ten or so little ones perpetuating a whole bundle of
everyone’s genes.) Or else, men
who are more “feminine” are appealing to women as nurturers, and so may get in
ahead of Mr. Macho, even if they’re only slightly interested in the
ladies. (I suppose the correlate
is that tough women appealed to men because they could handle the saber-tooth
better and save the kids while dad’s out bringing home the wart hog bacon.)
And
here’s the perfect evolutionary out – maybe it’s sort of an accident. Maybe fairly delicate and kind men are
appealing, but in some cases the genes just go overboard and -- whoops – no gene survival
for Uncle Bruce. Though
evolutionists seem to have abandoned the old stories about elks whose antlers
got too big for them to walk, this out is always available, and further
illustrates the “I can explain everything” nature of overdone evolutionary
theory.
Accidents are the latest form of the evolutionary escape clause. If any sort of minimally
plausible evolutionary reason can be given for something existing in humans
today, then that proves the point.
However when forced into a non-advantageous corner (think appendices,
blind spots in the eye, and other anomalies), then the case falls back on the Kluge factor, to quote Gary Marcus’s
title for his book, subtitled “The Haphazard Construction of the Human
Mind.” Lots of stuff, like Topsy,
just grew, because it had to make do with what was available at the
evolutionary moment. So on the one
hand, we have no need for a Designer, because evolution can do the job all by
itself. Furthermore, the fact that
evolution does a poor job, giving us nipples on men, sickle cell, bad backs, bum
knees, and other irritations, is a second proof that there isn’t a Designer. For me, both God and Evolution are
equally likely to be misused as conversation-stopping Theories of Everything.
