Evolution's Boldest Claims

In the final chapter of The Origin of Species, Darwin predicted that someday:

“Psychology will be based on a new foundation, that of the necessary acquirement of each mental power and capacity by gradation.”

That day has come. Modern psychology presumes that every mental power and capacity, even those we think of as uniquely human, special, or God-like, were acquired, bit by bit, over a very long time, through variation and natural selection.

In what has been called “The Astonishing Hypothesis,” Dr. Francis Crick wrote:

“You, your joys and your sorrows, your memories and your ambitions, your sense of personal identity and free will, are in fact no more than the behavior of a vast assembly of nerve cells and their associated molecules. As Lewis Carroll’s Alice might have phrased it: ‘You are nothing but a pack of neurons.’” 

Taken together, The Astonishing Hypothesis and Darwin’s prediction represent bold claims. They represent evolutionary naturalism applied to psychology and taken to their logical conclusions. Evolutionary naturalism cheapens our mental life. It reduces consciousness and free-will, language and song, love and hate, altruism and greed, and more to packs of neurons operating selfishly to assure the survival and perpetuation of our genes. Neuroscientists today peer inside the living brain and “see” its structures and functions and the billions of neurons and the trillions of connections between them.  The most complex structure in the known universe, the human brain, must have evolved by numerous and successive slight modifications. Students should not lose sight of those claims. The Theory of Evolutionary requires that they be true.