Why Darwinian Evolution is Absurd.

‎ The practical and metaphysical problems with emergence in deterministic systems.

There are many complicated, nuanced reasons to object to evolution on theological and scientific grounds, but there are some basic observations that I have never seen adequately addressed or even discussed. The first question that is almost always overlooked is, “What is the theory of evolution claiming on an essential level?” Of course, as a biological theory, it claims that the genetic lineage of all modern species can be traced back to a universal common ancestor, which in turn originated from non-living material. More abstractly, however, the theory is this: if you start with a disordered state of material affairs, merely through the operation of localized deterministic laws, it is somewhat probable that complex, intelligent systems would emerge as a by-product of that system of laws. Is this more abstract thesis even tenable? Could evolution occur in any hypothetical physics, even putting aside the feasibility of the problem with ours?

Now, there are many oft-cited examples given for how a kind of emergent behavior could emerge, for instance in the cellular automaton Conway’s Game of Life. By simply taking a random assortment of pixels on a screen and applying a certain rule to how they update their color every turn, we are told, spontaneously an order emerges wherein the pixels form extraordinarily complex, sophisticated patterns…

The above image is the product of what is called a “soup,” a random simulation of pixels allowed to evolve according to the rules of Game of Life. When the simulation starts, there is all kind of interesting activity. Little clouds of pixels dance across the screen and it looks something like a chemical reaction, or maybe even life…

At first glance, there does seem to be something emergent here. But given time, the patterns inevitably, every single time, stabilize into lifeless, motionless patterns. The same structures can be seen duplicated across the image which either remain entirely still or endlessly flicker back in forth between two or three shapes.

On closer analysis, anyone who has experimented with these sorts of alternate physics simulations will quickly become disillusioned. What appears at first to be interesting and complex behavior turns out to be mere chaotic noise. All of the genuinely interesting patterns in the Game of Life are intentionally designed by intelligent people who understood how to manipulate the rules for creative ends.

And this seems to be a general rule. Someone will extol the emergent, intelligent behavior of a system, but then showcase something as an example of emergent behavior which they themselves, with their own intentional design, engineered. This is even the case in so called, “origins of life research,” where scientists, who perform carefully designed chemical reactions to produce and filter out amino acids, pretend as though they had stumbled upon these chemicals in high quantities from mixing random ingredients together.

Every example of random soups of cellular automata I have yet to see fall into 3 basic patterns. Either they produce noisy chaos, stagnate into simple, repetitive patterns, or they homogenize over time into vast clumps that grow larger and larger.

Now, maybe I just haven’t found the perfect ruleset, the perfect system that allows chaos to unleash its creative potential, but I doubt it. That’s not the way dynamic systems work. Rather, all systems exist more or less in some state of instability to start with. Over time, they stabilize and find an equilibrium in which they reach an “average” condition that is most likely to continue.

This has a name: entropy. Especially in homogenous, locally deterministic systems, the system “evolves” down a fitness slope towards the most stable arrangement, and the most stable arrangement is 99.99% of the time very, very simple. This makes sense, of course. The more complex the stable equilibrium state at the bottom of the fitness curve, the more complicated the rule-set would have to be that describes it. This is simply a mathematical problem. Simple rules applied homogenously over a space do not describe very complicated structures, actually, even when they are given long periods of time to iterate over themselves.

So, our universe, if it began completely homogenous, would have been at maximum entropy at its inception or not long after its inception. The only explanation for why it was not at maximum entropy from the beginning, we are told, is that the energy was concentrated in the Big Bang and spread out through a vacuum. But this itself begs questions. Why is a concentrated ball of disordered energy somehow more amenable towards complex evolution than a random, maximally entropic soup? Both soups that start out in an empty space and those that start out in a completely filled, toroidal space have the same tendency towards evolving into a simple equilibrium. The same patterns tend to emerge and repeat themselves over and over again. In either case, the unreasonable assumption being made is that relatively simple physical laws implicitly contain an extremely complex equilibrium which is the simplest, most stable, most “fit” state for the system described by them to exist in.

However, the complexity of our world is not derivative from the natural progression of its laws, but rather from the supernatural orderliness and deviation from the norm or “low entropy” that we find all throughout the universe. The idea that chemicals could coagulate into living organisms is as unreasonable and absurd as the idea of objects falling upwards, ashes unburning themselves back into logs, or glass shards bouncing off the floor to form complete windows. Time is asymmetrical not because of anything inherent to the laws of physics, but because it is always moving from a miraculous state of low-entropy to its natural state of chaotic homogeneity. The thoroughly miraculous nature of our world becomes apparent if we imagine the laws of physics running in reverse. Even though the laws of physics are symmetrical and there should be no difference between the past and the future, due to the absurdly improbable orderliness of our world, time running in reverse appears as a series of inexplicable miracles whereby orderly arrangements of things continue to spontaneously emerge out of chaotic conditions in completely unpredictable ways, like some kind of fever dream.

The natural tendency of the world is obviously not large, complex, fragile structures. In the physical world, this is obvious. Globs of chemical mixtures tend invariably towards homogenous globs of chemicals. If energy is added to the system, then it forms hot globs of chemicals. Large objects shatter into smaller ones, shards don’t leap into fully formed windows.

But this is true in the biological realm as well. Complex organisms are clearly not more fit than simple ones. Bacteria are inextinguishable. They inhabit every nook and cranny on the face of the Earth. If any organism is the last to exist in our world, it will be bacteria, and the simplest of them at that. The cockroaches survive nuclear apocalypse. The mammoths and dinosaurs go extinct.

That’s because large, complex animals simply aren’t fit. They are inefficient, resource intensive, and rely on having environments tailor made to be suitable towards their survival. As soon as the environment was rapidly transformed by humans, large mammals were the first to go extinct, while even in the most inhospitable places insects survive, and in yet more places the amoeba lives on.

But the feasibility of evolution gets even worse when we look at the strange exception to this rule. Apparently, there is no surviving intermediary between simple, sterile carbon compounds and the single-celled bacterium, with its fully functional self-replicating DNA, ribosome protein manufacturing factories, and proton pumps which transform ATP into energy to maintain chemical gradients between the inside of the membrane and the outside.

As we established, the simpler the organism, the more fit it tends to be. Therefore, whatever preceded the single-celled organism as “pre-life” must have been simpler than the cell, and, consequently, much more resilient. After all, the universal rule that life on Earth follows is that the simpler an organism is, the more prolific, yet this rule arbitrarily stops at the level of the bacterium. We’re supposed to believe every precursor to these organisms simply went extinct?

But even supposing all of these issues could be ignored, we could imagine a somewhat miraculous, contrived scenario in which the universe just so happened to start out with the perfect rule-set, the perfect procedural generation algorithm for creating complex, organic life that conveniently erases all developmental evidence for its own evolution. There should be some mathematical rule-set sufficiently complicated to produce this, or maybe the perfectly organized initial conditions that lead to it, yet even in this case, what develops still would not be sentient, human life.

Here I have to get into the metaphysical problems of evolution, which I have saved for last because they are by far the most damning.

Nothing in the universe simply exists as a collection of unrelated entities that act independently from each other. In order for there to even be two, separate things, there first must be the union of two, separate things. If there is simply 1 thing and 1 thing, this is not on its own two things (logically, 1 and 1 (1∧1) is not the same as 1+1). Two individuals are only distinguished as separate individuals by contrast and in differentiation to each other. What is it that contrasts and differentiates? There must be a whole of which the two are considered parts. There are no parts without a whole of which they are parts.

Whenever a multiplicity of parts are unified into a whole, there is a principle by which they are unified. Mathematical principles merely deal with the logical relationships of the parts with each other, but there always will remain the implicit principle of unity from whence the parts derive their difference from each other to begin with, which principle is prior to the parts because the parts rely upon the principle for any kind of distinct existence from each other.

The principle of unification does not have a mathematically defined relationship to its parts, otherwise it would simply be a variable whose relations with other variables can be conceptualized as just so many black boxes exchanging meaningless symbols (as in the Chinese Room experiment). It is precisely because the whole is the body of its parts that it is inseparable from them. The parts cannot be merely defined in terms of their relations without the totality of the body parts deriving their existence from the animating principle that permeates the whole arrangement.

Consciousness is this: a unified whole of parts bound together within a single perspective, a single unified picture wherein the elements can subsist as elements, as distinct and distinguishable from each other through the animating, unifying principle of the whole perspective.

Everything consists of innumerable spirits, bodies, and principles which organize, structure, and provide meaningful context for everything that exists. Without context there is only the atom, isolated in the void, without any way of being associated to anything besides itself or being contrasted with anything besides itself.

Thus, mere atoms floating in the void make nothing on their own. On the contrary, the soul of something permeates, organizes, and generates it. This is what Aristotle and the Scholastics called the formal cause of a thing. Because materialism and reductionist, deterministic theories have no account of form in explaining the dynamics of the physical world, they must be incomplete. Form is the primary explanation for why the world is organized the way that it is, not efficient cause, which, as Hume showed, seems to be more dispensable.

Therefore, all things do not evolve because of a contrived set of mathematical laws, but rather because of a permeating rational form. This form is not merely a relation between the elements, but a spirit that permeates and creates a meaningfully coherent whole, such that each element implicitly implies all of the others.

Additionally, all things have a guiding telos, or end towards which they grow and develop. The Theory of Evolution has an implicit teleology wherein man is the secret meaning of the laws of physics, its inevitable end as it produces its effects over time. If evolution were true, this telos would be built from the start into the laws of physics. Thus, those laws would contain the potential from the start to produce human intelligence, just as the acorn is designed from the start to produce an oak.

However, this is impossible in the case of the laws of physics, because they are merely mathematical laws, and it is evident that unless there is intelligence, will, and consciousness, from the very start, permeating the matter that is later to evolve into humans, unless this matter is already ensouled, it cannot develop into anything with intelligence, will, and consciousness. The higher principles of intelligence, consciousness, and will provide the meaningful context within which everything else we encounter is even able to exist. This context does not exist within mere mathematical laws. Conversely, mathematical laws exist within this context.

Certain kinds of theistic, animistic evolution suggest that the origin of life is not mere mathematical laws, but indeed some sort of consciousness that has always permeated matter. But such a view conflicts with the very premise of evolutionary theory, namely that fitness is not due to the will of the organism to reach its telos, its final end, but rather simply due to a blind law of survival.

If man and all other organisms evolved from an original bacterium, then that bacterium had implicitly within it from its origin the purpose to become all of the rest of life, like an embryo, and evolved on that trajectory according to its inbuilt purpose. But the progression of man from bacteria and apes would be more of a freakish abomination than a natural stage in our development. The human-ape hybrids pictured in CGI depictions of “our ancestors” don’t contain any hint of being precursors to rational animals. There is no potential for spiritual depth, art, or civilization in these beasts, because the beast does not contain within its nature the potency to be intelligent or to have civilization. The beast is a lower order of nature distinguished by its lack of rationality.

Just as matter is derivative from form, the body from the soul, and the object from the subject, which three formulations mean the same thing, in like manner the purely carnal is derivative of the intelligent. Intelligence direct and makes sense out of mere carnal impulse, but carnal impulse on its own has no tendency towards intelligence, as anyone who has observed the behavior of an addict will note.

Just as the appetitive soul is directed and controlled by the rational soul, likewise the human intellect is a reflection of the Infinite Order from whence all of reality originates. The purpose for which we exist is granted by God, who created us in our forms and developed us. All authority, meaning, and structure comes from God ultimately.

So then, what remains of the theory of evolution? At best, we can say that creatures evolve to obtain their inbuilt potential, but that since beasts are a lower order of creation than man, it is metaphysically absurd that man should originate from the beast. If anything, man originated from something superhuman and devolved into what he is now.

All that is low descends from what is high. Rain falls from clouds and nourishes the plants. The sun shines down on plants to give them their energy to grow upwards. Nothing grows upward without an upward influence from above. Order does not precede out of chaos.

The fallacy of the metaphysical nihilist is to presume that something can originate from nothing. All things, on the contrary, are created by God, who alone necessarily exists. So the transition from the beast to the human could not really have been accomplished by the natural powers of the beast, instead occurring due to the supernatural imposition by God of a new power to the human animal of rationality. But such a miraculous occurrence defeats the whole point of the evolutionary hypothesis. If we must resort to miracles anyways to explain the creation of the human race, than why resort to the grotesque hypothesis that God made man out of human-animal hybrids instead of simply out of dust, as the scriptures say?