Tuesday, March 11, 2025

Life, Reproduction, and the Paradox of Evolution

My article “Life, Reproduction, and the Paradox of Evolution” appears in a special issue of the journal BioCosmos devoted to exploring the nature of life. (And fear not, dear reader, the articles are open access rather than behind a paywall.)

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51 comments:

  1. Paul D. Van PeltMarch 12, 2025 at 4:41 AM

    I will await comment(s) here, acceding to greater minds than mine. Am curious to see what may be offered, concerning the piece on paradox of evolution. Will frame my own remarks, accordingly.
    Thank you!

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  2. AnonymousMarch 12, 2025 at 7:10 AM

    Dr Feser, I am grateful you are taking the time to discuss critiques of evolution. I'm Catholic but grew up Protestant, and this was a much bigger issue for us back then. My impression is that evolution is a bit of a third rail for Catholics. We don't want to be fundamentalists, and Catholic's hospitality toward reason and science makes us more like to seek a harmonization of evolution with Genesis than our Protestant neighbors.

    However, and perhaps this is just my Protestant baggage, but I am much less sanguine about this. At least, the Darwinian explanation must be false as it totally defies common sense and simply makes teleology an illusion.

    Whatever Catholics think of the hardcore "young earth" creationists (some of their theories are admittedly a bit nutty), I think being willing to criticize this theory using the superior firepower of Thomism would certainly be welcome.

    Thanks again for all your work,
    JMM

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    1. The DeuceMarch 26, 2025 at 7:41 AM

      I'd like to second this and also personally thank Ed for addressing this topic. I've been deeply discouraged by how so many Catholic apologists and theologians dance around it.

      The core of Darwinian theory is to purport to show how all apparent function in biology, up to and including the human intellect, is categorically explained by and reducible to blind mechanism.

      The explanatory logic of the theory requires that there be no divine guidance - not even divine providence - grounding the origin or existence of the human intellect or any other biological function, otherwise the reductive explanation fails. It also entails that living organisms including human beings are mere mechanistic aggregates of matter compiled accidentally over time, not substances with essences.

      Once one accepts that central premise, it is impossible to salvage any coherent idea of natural law, any sort of moral realism, any sort of theism pertaining to human affairs, and any realist concept of the human mind, human thought, the self, or human reason. And once the human person has been eliminated in this way, all understandings of God based on the doctrine of analogy are likewise severely (probably fatally) undermined.

      This premise is the remaining intellectual linchpin of atheism, of the sexual revolution, of the whole modernist and post-modernist projects. But the majority of Catholic apologists and philosophers seem to either tiptoe around it and treat it as a minor side issue, or attempt to accommodate and syncretize it.

      When I see them prattling on about natural law and so forth without dealing with the elephant in the room, it strikes me as an exercise in rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic. Such arguments cannot possibly gain any traction when you've given away the whole store from the beginning. (apologies for the mixed metaphors)

      There is indeed a desperate need for Thomists to step in and attack this issue with their superior firepower.

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    2. The DeuceMarch 26, 2025 at 7:41 AM

      (cont)

      On the one hand, the spiritual and cultural devastation rooted in the Darwinian rejection of real teleology has reached a fever pitch. Countless souls are being herded into hell, countless people fallen into nihilism and despair. Our culture has fallen into madness and confusion, wrought by the radical nominalism that follows from elimination of real telos in biology. Western society is rapidly dying.

      At the same time, however, scientists at the cutting edge of biology and evolution are increasingly realizing that the reductive view of organisms as accidental aggregates is simply unintelligible, that the holistic sophistication that is increasingly revealing itself simply cannot be described in Darwinian terms. There is growing reluctant acknowledgment in philosophy of mind that a reductive materialist account simply cannot work.

      Meanwhile, the critiques of the empirical failures of Darwinism by the ID community have become increasingly sophisticated and difficult to brush off, and have been getting an increasingly respectful hearing among secular scientists acknowledging these as serious problems. The demand for a "third way" view of evolution is increasing under the recognition of a need for one.

      This is the perfect combination of dire spiritual need and intellectual opportunity for Thomists to strike while the iron is hot. While secular scientists and ID guys are both increasingly recognizing the logical and empirical problems with the Darwinian account, they are largely still under the sway of Ockhamist, Cartesian, and Paleyian assumptions regarding biological function, so they can only articulate the problems in an inchoate way, and can only stumble in the direction of a solution.

      Thomists are the only ones with the ability to "fill in the blanks" here, to articulate the root of the problem, to show why precisely the Darwinian account of function is incoherent rather than merely improbable, to situate the empirical problems with the theory in a coherent metaphysic, and to show what a working "third way" must be like.

      Anyhow, I'm extremely grateful to Ed for giving this critique for exactly this reason. So to echo JMM, thank you Ed for all your work.

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  3. Paul D. Van PeltMarch 12, 2025 at 11:12 AM

    OK. That was quite enough. Kirk, out.

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  4. SMackMarch 12, 2025 at 11:25 AM

    Thank you, Dr. Feser. A nice article. I'm going to have to meditate longer on just why the admitted deficiency in explanation of natural selection for reproduction leads to *teleology* specifically. I'm not doubting that it does. Just saying I need to think this over more. (Do Haldane et al. discuss this more?)

    One point that I could wish you had steered away from is Rothman's point about reproduction conferring no survival advantage. An evolutionary biologist would brush that point away -- correctly, in my view -- my simply observing that while, in popular and / or early accounts of evolution, "survival of the fittest" was used, it is really reproduction and *not* survival that drives the logic of natural selection. Traits are useful (evolutionarily) if they confer a survival advantage *up to the point of reproduction* (or allow more reproduction); but actual extending of life post-reproduction is of no obvious evolutionary value, a point that actually causes other paradoxes for evolutionary theory (why do humans survive long after reproductive age?). So Rothman's point seems a little irrelevant.

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    1. AnonymousMarch 12, 2025 at 1:49 PM

      Survival after reproduction is useful because parents help their children to survive long enough to be able to reproduce themselves.

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    2. David T.March 13, 2025 at 9:46 AM

      Don't many organisms reproduce more than once?

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    3. WOLF BRONSKYMarch 13, 2025 at 6:03 PM

      It leads to teleology because if natural selection presupposes reproduction rather than explaining it, then something else must account for why organisms reproduce. It has to be teleological because reproduction is an inherently goal-directed process. It exists to generate new life.

      It isn’t just a byproduct of survival. It actively aims at producing another organism.

      Darwinism tries to explain biological features in mechanistic terms, without reference to inherent goals or purposes. But since reproduction can’t be explained through natural selection, it has to be explained in a way that acknowledges its goal-directed nature (teleology).

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    4. WOLF BRONSKYMarch 13, 2025 at 6:20 PM

      Also, I think you’re misunderstanding Rothman’s argument. The issue isn’t whether reproduction, rather than survival, is what drives evolution. The problem is that natural selection presupposes reproduction, so it can’t explain how reproduction itself got started.

      Reproduction isn’t just another evolved trait like antlers or camouflage. Those traits can be selected for because reproduction is already happening. But reproduction itself is the starting point for evolution, which means it needs a different kind of explanation.

      It’s relevant because natural selection favors traits that help individuals pass on their genes, but reproduction often comes at a cost to the individual. The idea that survival only matters up to reproduction doesn’t really explain why natural selection would favor a process that often shortens lifespan.

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    5. Edward FeserMarch 18, 2025 at 6:28 PM

      Hello SMack,

      Without addressing whether or not a plausible argument can be made of that particular point of Rothman's, as I say in the paper, it is not ultimately relevant to the main point at issue, which is why I did not pursue it. I include a brief reference to it only for completeness' sake, since it is part of the broader case that Rothman sets out at book-length.

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    6. AnonymousMarch 19, 2025 at 2:58 PM

      Wolf, what do you mean reproduction isn’t mechanistic? Sexual intercourse and the development of an embryo into something with limbs and organs are physical phenomena obedient to Newton’s Laws of Motion.

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    7. The DeuceMarch 26, 2025 at 9:28 AM

      I'm going to have to meditate longer on just why the admitted deficiency in explanation of natural selection for reproduction leads to *teleology* specifically.

      It doesn't lead to teleology so much as it starts there.

      Every feature of life is defined in terms of function, or telos, what it's for, how it works and so on. This includes reproduction. When we're trying to explain life, that's the phenomenon we trying to account for specifically. Hence the default assumption is that the purpose and teleology we see simply is what it appears to be.

      That's why even Darwin defined natural selection in terms of a pseudo-teleological pseudo-designer that "selects for" things, using analogies to human design. It has to be defined that way to even seem to give an explanation for biological phenomena at all, even though it (supposedly) reduces them to blind mechanism.

      Hence, if that attempted reduction fails, either because it's incoherent in general, or because it can't be applied to some example of biological function like reproduction in the first place, then the default stance that the purpose and teleology we observe is real, and simply is what it is rather than reducing to blind mechanism, stands.

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  5. Tim the WhiteMarch 12, 2025 at 6:39 PM

    It seems that this argument pushes any evolution back into the pre-biotic realm. An organism that comes to life from non-living matter would have to have the ability to reproduce as one of it's original abilities or it would simply die, and another life form would then have to evolve.
    It puts the burden of evolution on chemistry instead of biology.

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    1. Michael FMarch 19, 2025 at 2:56 PM

      Read about the success of the muller Urey experiments. The first life on earth was not a single celled organism or any celled organism!

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  6. Vini TadeoMarch 13, 2025 at 1:30 AM

    Excellent article, boss. I still can't comprehend how you can make your arguments even more understandable, readable, and accessible to the lay public than it already is. Great job!

    Also, for everyone interested in this topic, I highly recommend reading Aristotle's Revenge (specifically chapter 6). In there, Ed discusses important (and often misunderstood) topics about evolution, reductionism in biology, biological essentialism (and how it is still defensible as it ever was), and a lot of other stuff like the hierarchy of life forms and function and teleology (I can guarantee that any reader can complement his or her knowledge about this important subject even more after reading what Ed has to say about natural selection).

    Btw, AT Metaphysics is the only philosophical position to date that can tell us a satisfying definition of life. Once one really understands the AT view about life it becomes clear how it is particularly destructive against any materialistic position that purports to explain the same phenomena mechanistically -- I think this fact can never be stressed enough.

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  7. Michael CopasMarch 14, 2025 at 5:29 AM

    Very glad you are writing on this. The biggest problem for the theory of evolution is the inability to determine on a principled basis what constitutes a distinct species. I have a good friend who runs a small research department for the game and fish in my home state and who has a Phd in Evolutionary Biology. He focuses on small mouth bass and regularly publishes in academic journals. He published an article proposing a new species of small mouth bass and I asked him what degree of genetic difference constitutes a new species. He wasn't sure. Yet he and others are writing in journals claiming that they have discovered new species. By determining species by genetic difference modern scientists are stating that no one before modern science was able to recognize distinct species (After all, neither Aristotle nor Albert the Great nor even Linneas were analyzing genes to classify). Along with this there is the problem that various scientists are making judgements that a new species exists based on varying degrees of difference. This is a rubber ruler for classification. If the degrees of difference requisite for a new species are made small enough then every *individual* is its own "species" making the term species vacuous. This is the problem with utilizing the genetic standard for classification. Modern scientists don't mean by species what ancients, scholastics, or even early moderns had in mind with that term. They don't even seem to have in mind the same thing as one another. If the classification were done as it was previously, the number of "species" counted by scientist would be reduced to a fraction of how they count them today.

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    1. AnonymousMarch 14, 2025 at 8:46 AM

      The classical criteria for determining if two individuals are of the same species is if they can reproduce, and then it is generalized to all the population of said animals. With other kinds of organisms it might get more complicated (specially as you get into "simpler" or more cellullar level organisms), but that basic criteria is there and is known to biologists.

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    2. TonyMarch 14, 2025 at 12:08 PM

      Modern scientists don't mean by species what ancients, scholastics, or even early moderns had in mind with that term.

      I think you are right about that.

      The biggest problem for the theory of evolution is the inability to determine on a principled basis what constitutes a distinct species.

      I believe that in principle they are committed to the idea that "distinction of species" is a misguided idea altogether: there is no such thing as "species" in any principled sense. There are only various populations with varying degrees of different traits and (at the root level) different gene subsets. In this view, it is merely a matter of scientific utility as to how to arrange subsets, and of popular preference as to which trait collections enjoy most attention - there isn't any principle to it. If you have 5 different populations, with each population having 3 traits (15 traits in total) the others don't share at all and 4 traits that they share with some but not all of the other 4 populations (12 of these traits partly shared), scientists might readily decide there are anywhere between 1 and 5 "species", but by argument they might find it useful to distinguish 20 or 30 different species if some of the shared mixed trait groupings seems especially worthwhile to attend to.

      They probably try to use criteria like stability of a trait (or gene clump) over time, and size of population involved, to rule out too small subset / trait populations to warrant a distinct name, but that's fairly clearly a decision of utility rather than principle.

      There might be a few scientists who don't realize that evolution theory is committed to the proposition that there is no such thing as "species" in the ancient sense of the term, but most probably do. The question is whether they have a new way to define it that bears any weight. Here is one scientist's view:

      It is clear to me, at any rate, that there are many conceptions of species, and that biologists use the one that best suits the organisms they study. I think of this as a "conceptual delicatessen" — when scientists need a species concept to suit the organisms being studied, they will typically assemble a custom "club sandwich" from previous ideas.

      https://ncse.ngo/species-kinds-and-evolution

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    3. Michael CopasMarch 15, 2025 at 10:21 AM

      Anonymous 03/14,

      "The classical criteria for determining if two individuals are of the same species is if they can reproduce"

      The problem with this as a criteria is that scientists are proposing distinct species of small mouth bass when small mouth bass in general can produce offspring with bream. On the criteria of the ability to produce offspring that are themselves productive, small mouth bass and bream are the same species. Along with this, the criteria of being able to produce offspring that can themselves reproduce doesn't require genetic analysis so I am not sure what genetic analysis adds to the determination of species if the ability to reproduce is the criteria.

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    4. Michael CopasMarch 15, 2025 at 10:27 AM

      Tony,

      "I believe that in principle they are committed to the idea that "distinction of species" is a misguided idea altogether: there is no such thing as "species" in any principled sense."

      Yes. This is precisely my point and concern. A.C. Crombie was in my view the greatest philosopher of science of the 20th century. He wrote From Augustine to Galileo and also a three volume work on what he called the "styles" of modern science. Volume 2 includes focus on classification. One of the things he notes in a paper summarizing his work in these three volumes is that distinct styles have corresponding metaphysical positions accompanying them. The metaphysical positions that accompanied the development of modern classification was nominalism. That all things are radically individual was not an inference of any scientific study; it was a metaphysical premise imposed on the entire enterprise of classification and this is the reason that they hold that "there is no such thing as "species"". As nominalists holding that all things are ultimately radically individual without a unity of kinds (species), their conclusions all include this metaphysical starting point.

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    5. AnonymousMarch 15, 2025 at 2:55 PM

      Why does evolution actually need to explain what constitutes a species? How do we know that species aren't categories that we humans just made up rather than intrinsically meaningful features of the world?

      I would be inclined to suggest nominalism here.

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    6. The DeuceMarch 16, 2025 at 11:52 AM

      Michael Copas:

      I think the biggest problem for the Darwinian account of evolution is that it can't live with biological function and it can't live without it.

      EVERYTHING in biology is definable only in terms of function, from reproduction itself up to human reason. To deny that biological function is objectively, mind-independently real is implicitly to deny that life itself or any features of living things exist except as psychological projections, which is doubly incoherent because our psychology is itself one of those features.

      This explains why Darwin defined "natural selection" in terms of analogies to human breeding. He wanted to have his cake and eat it too. By having it do "something like" human selectors do, it was supposed to be able to produce real function but also be devoid of intent. But an analogy for function isn't actual function, it's a mental construct. You can draw an analogy between any two things, but you haven't thereby explained anything. All attempts to "cash out" what it means for natural selection to create function by "selecting" it, when examined closely enough, necessarily collapse into biological eliminativism (similarly to how materialist accounts of mind collapse into mental eliminativism). The very concept of "natural selection" as a naturalistic creator of real function is itself incoherent on close enough examination.

      The problem of species that you describe is a second-order problem that immediately follows from trying to redefine reproduction in terms that are not irreducibly functional. For when an organism "reproduces," what actually gets reproduced? In asexual reproduction, the original organism ceases to exist, and neither offshoot is identical to the original. In sexual reproduction, the offspring are even more distinct from the two parents. Rather, to make sense of it, we must say that it is the pattern or form of the original(s) that is reproduced. The children aren't the parents, but they are essentially like them, having essentially the same biological functions and natures. This gets us back to Aristotelean essentialism and a classical concept of species. Without that, we're ultimately stuck saying that reproduction, and life itself, are subjective mental projections, not objective realities, with all the absurdity that entails.

      The various mutually-exclusive materialist definitions of species you mention are a reflection of biologists trying to have their cake and eat it too. They understand, at least on a subconscious level, that a species concept is necessary for biological reproduction to be objectively real and intelligible, and hence for there to be anything for them to study in the first place. But their metaphysical priors don't allow them to have such a concept, so they sort of inchoately cast about for a substitute operational definition that is "close enough" for whatever their needs are at the moment.

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    7. Jonatan BlaisMarch 17, 2025 at 6:14 PM

      The Deuce
      What you said is very true.
      Darwin was a product of the age of scientism (the 19th century). As such he was fully committed to the mechanical philosophy that tried to explain all of reality by material and efficient causes only. He wanted to provide biology with the same kind of mechanical explanations that had been developped for physics by then.

      He thought he could get rid of final causes (teleology) by invoking "natural" selection and that this would also explain the origin of species and thus get rid of formal causes (essences).

      However, this never worked out. "Natural" selection is an empty tautological idea that is completely devoid of any explanatory content unless "fitness" is defined in terms of function, which is irreducibly teleological (Jerry Fodor was the latest to point that out). And as he himself realized, despite the title of his seminal book ("On the origin of species"), according to his ideas, species shouldn't exist, only individual variations. So he never in fact succeeded in eliminating neither teleology nor forms (essences).

      This failure is still largely ignored/denied by biologists and philosophers of biology, although as you mentionned, consciously or subconsciously, they are aware of the problem.

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    8. The DeuceMarch 20, 2025 at 10:20 AM

      Jonatan Blais:
      Darwin was a product of the age of scientism (the 19th century). As such he was fully committed to the mechanical philosophy that tried to explain all of reality by material and efficient causes only. He wanted to provide biology with the same kind of mechanical explanations that had been developped for physics by then.

      Indeed. It's often claimed that Darwin provided the physical "mechanism" for generating biological function in the same way that Newton provided physical mechanisms of thermodynamics, but this demonstrably isn't so.

      Newton provided highly precise, repeatable, mathematically quantifiable means of predicting and generating observable physical phenomena.

      What Darwin provided was something very different, as can be easily seen upon a bit of reflection. Take two very different examples of biological function, such as genetic error correction and the human eye. We have no way of knowing what the exact series of events that led up to the origin of these two things were, but we can be quite certain that whatever they were, any physical mechanisms involved must have been quite different. No identical physical mechanisms could possibly be responsible for such vastly different examples of biological function.

      What Darwin actually provided was not a physical mechanism for accounting for biological function, but rather a psychological mechanism or philosophical framework for explaining biological function away. What the "theory" of evolution by natural selection actually states is that whatever the actual details of the physical causes of genetic error correction and the human eye, both happened via "natural selection." But when you attempt to cash out what that actually means in purely physical terms, without analogies to real intentional design, it turns out not to mean anything in particular, aside from a metaphysical assertion that it happened mechanistically and unintentionally.

      And as he himself realized, despite the title of his seminal book ("On the origin of species"), according to his ideas, species shouldn't exist, only individual variations.

      Correct. As Darwin himself realized on some level, his explanatory framework implies that biological function doesn't objectively exist, and therefore species don't objectively exist. But if that's the case, there's nothing for his theory to explain in the first place. There's no need for natural selection to explain the origin of the species if there are no species. In biology as in philosophy of mind, materialist reductionist theories are implicitly eliminativist theories, denying the existence of the very thing they were supposed to explain.

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    9. The DeuceMarch 20, 2025 at 2:35 PM

      Jonatan Blais:

      As such he was fully committed to the mechanical philosophy that tried to explain all of reality by material and efficient causes only.

      I agree that Darwin intended to only refer to material and efficient causes, but he failed in that regard. In Ed's paper we're discussing he gave an example of a Darwinian account of a trait:

      For example, suppose we say that hearts first arose by way of a random mutation, that they pumped blood in those organisms which had them, that because they did so those organisms tended to survive and reproduce in greater numbers than those who lacked hearts, and that this in turn resulted in all their current descendants having hearts. This will be an explanation of the heart that makes reference only to what Aristotelians call efficient causes, without any need for final causes or teleology. Even if we still spoke of the heart as having the function of pumping blood, it is often claimed that such a description can be analyzed in terms of this causal story, so that it has no irreducible teleological component.

      However, even accounts of the sort Ed described go beyond material and efficient causes.

      For what does it mean to say that hearts survived because organisms that have them tended to survive and reproduce in greater numbers than those that didn't?

      It can't mean that this was a reason or rationale that "natural selection" had for choosing them, as in the sentence, "I walked to the refrigerator because I wanted a beer," unless we're redefining natural selection as a literal conscious, rational agent.

      However, it ALSO cannot be cashed out in terms of causal chains of efficient causes like phenomena in physics and chemistry can.

      That is to say, not having a heart does not literally cause organisms that don't normally have hearts to die in any direct causal manner, the way the earth's gravity causes a thrown ball to fall to the ground. On the contrary, they survive and reproduce quite well, so much so that the claim that organisms with hearts survive and reproduce better than those without is provably false if it's meant in any general sense, because organisms without hearts outnumber those with hearts by orders of magnitude.

      To say that organisms with hearts survived better than those without "because" they had hearts is actually an implicit appeal to a counterfactual or hypothetical. What's actually being asserted is that the first organisms with hearts gained an advantage that resulted in them surviving and reproducing in the environment at the time better than they would have if they had not had hearts.

      At the very least, formal causes are being invoked here. This sort of explanation is not appealing to efficient chains of causal events the way explanations in physics or chemistry do. Rather, the form of organisms with hearts is being invoked in a broader sense as the decisive factor in why they tended towards the outcome they had over another outcome they hypothetically could have had.

      But implicitly, such explanations invoke final causes as well. Invocation of counterfactual scenarios that could've happened but didn't as causal explanations really only makes sense when you're talking about something that was designed on purpose. When we as agents with intellect and will set out to implement some goal, we typically consider several hypothetical courses of action we could take before choosing one and actually implementing it. Thus, in the sorts of Darwinian explanations Ed described, natural selection is implicitly being thought of as a rational agent choosing among different hypothetical scenarios, in an attempt to ground the biological function of hearts and other traits. But a genuinely naturalistic account must reject this, which means you lose any grounding for real biological function. Once again, Darwinism collapses into biological eliminativism.

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  8. SteveKMarch 14, 2025 at 9:13 AM

    What I like about the line of argument presented in the paper is that is accepts at face value everything that the Darwinian evolutions says is true about evolution. There's no need to fight them over what is true about evolution. Essentially this is what's being said: "If what you're telling me is true, then it logically follows that evolution doesn't explain what you think it does", which is basically what Jerry Fodor said.

    But wait, there's more! The hard science of mathematics comes to the same conclusion as the philosophical arguments that Dr. Feser presented here. If we accept all of the numbers that all of science tells us are facts - being as generous as possible - the math doesn't work. Natural selection isn't enough.

    CHLCA (chimpanzee–human last common ancestor)
    - Years: 9,000,000
    - Years per generation: 27.5
    - Generations per fixed mutation: 64
    - Years per fixed mutation: 1,760
    - Maximum fixed mutations: 5,114
    - Mutations required: 120,000,000
    - % attributable to evolution by natural selection: 0.00004 or four-thousandths of one percent.

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    1. TonyMarch 15, 2025 at 10:24 AM

      Good start on numbers. But more than one gene can be in the process of being fixed at one time. The number of mutations that are possible is related to population size, so the above numbers need to be fleshed out with population sizes. Perhaps in addition to noting the total number of mutations needed, we can determine mutation sequences that must occur one after another in series, not in parallel with others. Then come up with an average length of such series, and do something with that.

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    2. SteveKMarch 16, 2025 at 8:52 AM

      Tony
      The math association with the average time to fixation includes all fixation speeds and all population sizes that scientists have observed. One can imagine a situation where the math supports what the evolutionists believe but imagination isn’t science.

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    3. SteveKMarch 16, 2025 at 9:36 AM

      It’s so bad that even if one were to cut all of the numbers in half the math still isn’t close.

      Evolutionists believe a force of nature exists with powers that have never been observed, and then they have the gall to say their belief is grounded in scientific fact. It’s like believing that there exists a force of nature with powers that can cause a mammal to run a mile in 16 seconds. That isn’t scientific - at all.

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    4. The DeuceMarch 16, 2025 at 12:10 PM

      SteveK:

      Yep, it's fascinating that the math doesn't work even when simply looking at the sheer quantity of observed fixations of genetic variation without bothering to consider the quality of them - that is to say, in total isolation from the biological function associated with those genetic changes.

      But of course in real life those things aren't isolated from each other. We don't need merely to account for the quantity of genetic fixations since CHLCA. We also must account for all of the biological functions that humans have and chimps don't, and vice-versa. This includes the ultimate example of irreducible function in biological organisms: human reason itself, which cannot even be accounted for in materialistic terms in principle. This takes an already intractable problem and multiplies it by infinity.

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    5. TonyMarch 16, 2025 at 12:42 PM

      The math association with the average time to fixation includes all fixation speeds and all population sizes that scientists have observed.

      Steve, maybe I am misunderstanding what is meant by "gene fixation", but your comment here does not (it seems to me) address my point. Suppose Gene A needs to undergo 500 mutations in sequence to get from where it was in chimps to where it is in humans, and Gene Z needs 500 mutations for the same. But A and Z are on entirely different chromosomes and have no significant functions that interlace with each other. Nothing prevents the two mutation sequences from going on at the same, so that they are both completed in the SAME 880,000 year period. Then the time required for the "1,000 needed mutations" (to account for both sequences) isn't 1000 times 64 generations, but 500 times 64 generations.

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    6. SteveKMarch 17, 2025 at 8:20 AM

      Tony,
      Nothing prevents the two mutation sequences from going on at the same

      No such assumption is being made. We don't need to know how the fixations are occuring, we only need to count them and count how many generations have passed. I believe one of the fastest genetic fixation rates observed was in bacteria - around 1600 generations per fixation.

      But let's be very generous and say the rate is 1 generation per fixation even though that has never been observed - meaning that this is an imaginary situation with no basis in scientific fact. The math still falls way short.

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    7. SteveKMarch 17, 2025 at 8:22 AM

      I believe I made some mistakes in my last comment. I'll have to wait for it to appear.

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    8. SteveKMarch 17, 2025 at 8:39 AM

      My reference to 1600 generations is not correct. Whatever the actual observed number is, it's significantly greater than 1 generation and the resulting math leads us to the same conclusion.

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  9. Paul D. Van PeltMarch 14, 2025 at 11:06 AM

    All good reasoning from Mr. Copas. Something like elephant meat: the longer you chew it, the bigger it gets in your mouth. So, maybe we should not kill elephants or eat their flesh. I think that is right. Evidence suggests they are among, or, are evolving into the higher order consciousness Edelman suggested. Of course, I have no proof of that. Which is part of why we have philosophy.

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  10. Vini TadeoMarch 14, 2025 at 1:48 PM

    Fascinating comment, Michael.

    The idea of genetic difference as a determinant of species is very wacky. As you said, it would make every individual its own species! I think we can *kindly* name this idea nominalist specism, LOL.

    It's also glaring that specialized sciences necessitate (at least a little) background in philosophy before they start making their assumptions. One small step into the wrong ideas and things can go downhill faster than one can say Jack Robinson.

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    1. Michael CopasMarch 18, 2025 at 5:44 AM

      Vini,

      "It's also glaring that specialized sciences necessitate (at least a little) background in philosophy before they start making their assumptions."

      Right. And the problem is that they have no training in philosophy and, thus, little ability to recognize when metaphysical assumptions are baked into their methodology. The consequence is bad philosophy parading as science.

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  11. AnonymousMarch 18, 2025 at 4:15 PM

    I took this sentence basically at random from the article: "Rothman offers several further illustrations of the thesis that reproduction confers no survival advantage. In many species, one or both parents are absent when fertilization occurs, and a process cannot confer an advantage on an organism that is not present when it occurs."

    This is profoundly ignorant and confused. Evolutionary advantage is a matter of differential reproductive success, and it doesn't matter a whit whether an organism is "present", whatever that means. It is not that "reproduction confers survival advantage", its the other way around if anything.

    Honestly I would fail an 8th grader in bio class if they exhibited this level of confusion, and I'm shocked that an academic journal would publish it.

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    1. Edward FeserMarch 18, 2025 at 6:22 PM

      First of all, I was describing Rothman's view, and a journal would publish it because it is in fact an accurate description of his view. Second, Rothman is himself an evolutionary biologist, so you should direct your criticism to him, not to me. Third, his point is that there are cases where having generated offspring is not of benefit to the individual organism itself, and that is clearly right -- whether or not one goes on to agree with him that what is conducive to the survival of the individual is what ultimately matters (though that is something he argues for and does not merely assume). Fourth, in any event, as I go on to note in the paper, all of this is among the secondary claims he makes and is irrelevant to the main issue that is the focus of my paper. Fifth, it would be a good idea for you actually to read a paper in whole so as to understand exactly what is being argued for, rather than picking out bits "basically at random" to try to play stupid gotcha games with.

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    2. Vini TadeoMarch 19, 2025 at 8:50 AM

      Anon,

      You are missing the point.

      "Evolutionary advantage is a matter of differential reproductive success, and it doesn't matter a whit whether an organism is "present", whatever that means."

      Just ask yourself: Is a human mother better or worse without a father to provide for her? Pregnancy has many effects and side effects (especially emotional ones, that may last for life), so it does not benefit the individual organism (the mom) -- it is in this sense that reproduction confers no survival advantage! This also holds for other animals too (for example, a pregnant lioness without a lion may be an easy target for hyenas).

      So, next time, instead of mocking an author without properly reading what he has to say, take a little time to interpret what he really meant. By doing such childish behavior -- as the douch comment you made above -- you are only feeding the long-living stereotype that "science" guys like you don't actually read or understand a damn thing about what your critics have to say.

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    3. Michael FMarch 19, 2025 at 2:50 PM

      That’s why the rest of the world has paid maternity leave. The U.S. is one of only two countries in the whole world without paid maternity leave.

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    4. AnymouseMarch 20, 2025 at 4:02 PM

      Michael F, the US (and the rest of the world) used to have paid maternity leave, in the form of the breadwinner father of the family. The father's income supplied for the mother to stay home and raise children. Her leave lasted all of her child-rearing years, continuously. The notion that we need a separate, new policy for maternity leave assumes that moms will return to work, and it can't be solved for economically without some specified period of leave before that return. One problem is that it is not certain that her return to work is socially and economically beneficial on the whole.

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    5. CameronMarch 23, 2025 at 11:27 AM

      Anon, it is deeply unwise to accuse some of being dumber than an 8th grader in the very same comment where you admit that your reading strategy consists of looking for sentences to criticize at random. I expect FOURTH graders to have better reading skills.

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  12. AnonymousMarch 18, 2025 at 8:26 PM

    Dr Feser, That was a model verbal takedown done with style, grace and aplomb.

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  13. AnonymousMarch 19, 2025 at 2:50 PM

    You are right, you gave an accurate depiction of Rothman's view, and he is a biologist. Nevertheless, he seems to be completely confused. Here's the passage in his book I assume you were referring to:

    “This point can be made with one simple illustration. In a great many species, vertebrates, invertebrates, and plants alike, one or both parents are not present when fertilization occurs (or during the subsequent reproductive unfolding). How can the mechanisms of reproduction provide an adaptive advantage to absent parents? If we had to fashion a general rule about such an advantage, based on the preponderance of the evidence, we would have to say that the mechanisms of reproduction provide none”

    Properly understood, adaptive advantage does not accrue to individuals, only to genes or systems of genes. The adaptive value of a reproductive mechanism doesn't depend on whether the parents are present or even alive, as long as it ensures propagation of the genes. I don't understand how a biologist could misunderstand something this basic, but he apparently does.

    You are also right that I shouldn't pick on a single sentence. My sense though is that there is something fractally, holographically confused with Rothman, and you can pick just about any passage and find this error is reflected there.

    Here's one that's probably more in your own line:

    “ It turned out that despite our importuning professors, we students found that even if we scrubbed our writing of suggestive verbiage, it was no easy task to avoid teleological thinking in biology. The reason was simple enough. We were naturally drawn to the conclusion that if a structure pumped blood, then in all likelihood this was its purpose. And if this was true, then it must have evolved with this in mind. However faulty our understanding, to imagine that things that appeared to serve particular purposes, even patently obvious ones, served no purpose at all, flew in the face of, if not philosophy or logic, then common sense.”

    His professors, if he is characterizing them correctly, grossly miseducated him. Obviously a heart has a purpose, the only question at issue is whether that purpose was somehow preordained by some external entity (he seems to think this is the case) or if that purpose arose out of the mindless process of natural selection, along with the rest of the heart's properties and structure.

    Now, you might want to argue that the second option couldn't work or doesn't make sense. That at least is a sensible point to dispute. But it isn't sensible to say that the heart has no purpose at all, because that is obviously stupid and nobody really believes that.

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    1. Michael FMarch 20, 2025 at 2:22 PM

      The word "purpose" in and of itself requires intelligent design/conscious planning. Otherwise it's just coincidence.

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    2. TonyApril 2, 2025 at 8:54 AM

      Quoted from Rothman"How can the mechanisms of reproduction provide an adaptive advantage to absent parents? If we had to fashion a general rule about such an advantage, based on the preponderance of the evidence, we would have to say that the mechanisms of reproduction provide none”

      Anonymous replies Properly understood, adaptive advantage does not accrue to individuals, only to genes or systems of genes. The adaptive value of a reproductive mechanism doesn't depend on whether the parents are present or even alive, as long as it ensures propagation of the genes.

      As I understand it, modern evolutionary theory asserts that changes in genes occur by chance not by design or according to a purpose or with a direction. The gene changes that happen to promote survival will, statistically, lead to more of those individuals passing on their genes to their offspring, meaning that populations with those genes will, statistically, do better at survival.

      Setting aside the issue that survival is only ONE of the factors that controls passing on genes (another is being sexually attractive, in species that reproduce by mating), it is generally true that a gene change that helps an individual survive to the age of reproducing will, all other things being equal, produce a higher probability of individuals that reproduce, than otherwise. In species that only go through the reproductive act ONCE (e.g. some insects), survival after the reproductive act won't conduce to passing on genes to more individuals. In that case, using up vast energy and resources on reproduction activity, resources that now won't be available for after-repro survival, is irrelevant to how many babies the individual produces, so using up those resources and then dying is not detrimental to gene dissemination. In a species that must (on average) mate & birth several times to get even 2 kids to survive to sexual maturity, and several more to increase the population, using up vast resources on the repro process necessarily affects survival to the next round of reproduction. There is, inevitably, for each such species / reproductive model, an equilibrium point for the best balance between allocating resources to producing the children of one reproductive act vs reserving resources for the parent to survive to the next round, with respect to the best NET (statistical) results for spreading your genes.

      All of that simply assumes an organism with a reproductive capacity. In comparing living organisms that DO have such a capacity vs (theoretical) living organisms that do not, it is inevitably true that on average the reproductive faculty (in those that have it) uses up resources that the others (who don't have it) instead put toward self-survival. So, just comparing those individuals side by side, organisms that don't have any power to reproduce will, on average, survive longer than similarly situated individual organisms that do reproduce. However, the genes of non-reproductive organisms, when they die, will be gone entirely, whereas the reproductive-type organisms will (sometimes) survive long enough to reproduce and hand on their genes. So, again, there will be an equilibrium point for organisms that use up resources on reproduction, where their using said resources will in the long run result in their genes lasting longer than the genes of an individual organism of a type that can't reproduce: an equilibrium point where the reproductive capacity uses up the least amount necessary during the growth period before its reproductive phase to minimize that faculty's impact on survival to that age, and then uses up resources on reproduction that is a winning strategy (numbers-wise) over the individual himself just staying alive himself, with respect to gene survival.

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    3. TonyApril 2, 2025 at 8:54 AM

      One problem is that given the complexity for protein folding and such like, it looks (statistically) like a virtually infinitely high wall for non-reproductive structures to EVER get over into forming those particular protein structures that could - in the right complex organism - lead to information transmission. As I understand it, the odds for landing on one successful gene arrangement (much less the complex of them needed for even the most simple organism) is something like 1 in 10^350 - which is vastly more than the number of (particles in the universe times the number of nanoseconds since the universe began) in which interactions might take place.

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  14. The DeuceMarch 25, 2025 at 9:47 PM

    But it isn't sensible to say that the heart has no purpose at all, because that is obviously stupid and nobody really believes that.

    The claim that the heart has no purpose isn't any more obviously stupid or insensible than the claim that the heart really has a purpose that derives from a mindless process. It at least has the virtue of being logically consistent with itself.

    Darwinists who try to have purpose be real are putting their common sense and intuition over the logical implications of their premises which imply that our common sense is radically mistaken about the nature of reality.

    Now the denial of real purpose is indeed an insane view, because everything in biology is ultimately defined in terms of its purpose, so denying that it is real is tantamount to denying that anything in biology is real, including life itself. But as insane as it is, I have seen some Darwinists take it, and I have more respect for these biological eliminativists than I do for those who want to have their cake and eat it too, for the same reason that I have more respect for eliminativists in philosophy of mind than for materialist reductionists who want to try to entertain some sort of realism about propositional attitudes or the self.

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    1. AnonymousMarch 26, 2025 at 10:23 PM

      "I have more respect for these biological eliminativists than I do for those who want to have their cake and eat it too, for the same reason that I have more respect for eliminativists in philosophy of mind than for materialist reductionists who want to try to entertain some sort of realism about propositional attitudes or the self"

      I'm entirely mystified by this sort of position, as I am by eliminativism. Eliminativism is just obviously stupid. Of course minds and purposes and mental constructs are real, we can detect them and talk about them. They are real whether they can be fully or partially explained by a mechanistic process, or not.

      Imagine somebody looking at some computer software (by analogy) and saying, well, none of those images it draws on the screen are real, or the high-level code constructs it is designed with, because its "really" all ones and zeros, or electrical signals.

      It's just dumb, we know there are phenomenon and different levels of description and in the this case, pretty much exactly how one is implemented by another.

      You are not an eliminativist, but you respect them more than the people who sensibly observe that people and organisms also work at multiple levels and try to ascertain how those levels operate together, because the eliminativists are purer or something.

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