Human Evolution. How Does it Fit with the Recent Discovery of the genus, "Homo Naledi?"

Growing up as a conservative evangelical Christian I had been taught to consider the story of human evolution as spurious to the Word of God. Over the decades I have reconsidered all the arguments for special creation and against evolutionary creation and now deem my earlier education misdirected. That I may now rightly hold to progressive creationism (as opposed to immediate creationism) and consider it "divinely supernatural and special."

That the Creator God of the universe had supernaturally decreed creation's possibility using the operands of randomness and chaos and be ruled by the teleological principle of life as "always tilting towards biologic struggle and survival" regardless of the (toxic) eco-environments this struggle might occur within. As example, oxygen was a deadly toxin to evolutionary life at one time. As such, at all times the equation of "life" will be tilted towards the principles of creative "freedom" within a weak entropic system (which posits ultimate chaos) against a strong entropic system (which posits ultimate determinism) thus allowing for an evolutionary progression whereby the Sovereign Creator may have fellowship of a kind with His creation.

This then is the scientific teleology of evolution by the decree of its Creator God as proceeding from His very being and essence of love. A chaotic system always tilted towards life of some form. To the Christian, this teleology might take its ultimate form in a chaotic cosmic/natural system driving towards biotic enrichment, thriving biotas, and creative imagining. This may also be known as the Christian hope, which is a kind of theological eschatalogy coupled with Jesus' rule (I prefer the idea of divine participation) of love and goodwill with mankind and creation itself. Thus, evoloution's teleology can unfold toward the Christian hope of loving fellowship between, within, without, and everywhere about, all things (what the process theologian might know as panentheism's complex of driving relationships).

Once realizing this, I have lately, in recent years, worked towards describing how this progressive evolutionary creation may exist both on a doctrinal level as well as on a scientific one without going beyond the bounds of modern science (excepting, of course, that I write of it from a theologic and not an agnostic, or a/theistic, viewpoint).

And so, in today's posting, I wish to further explore the idea of human evolution through its taxonomical graphs and charts of recent discoveries of the 2.8 million year old homo naledi (star) species. A remarkable discovery found in an ancient graveyard deep underground by a nimble anthropological team of spelunking women who made this phenomenal discovery happen.

Question 1. Why is the chimpanzee closer to the homo genus than the gorilla? And where do orangutans fit in to this zoological chart?

The homo genus has been characterised exclusively as a genus of "bipedal apes" commonly known as "homo erectus" from which the word "humans" derive but differing from the chimpanzee (pan group) which half walks using both legs and all four limbs to travel. The larger family of apes from which humans have descended, such as the gorilla, or orangutan, primarily use all four limbs to travel while occassionally utilizing bi-pedal motion much less of the time than the chimpanzee genus.

Though all come from the superfamily of hominoidea - as can be seen from the taxonomical charts pictured above - as the species continued to evolve it became separated by zoological classifications from tree dwelling apes (gibbons), to partially tree-dwelling apes (orangutans), to ground/tree dwelling apes (gorillas), to ground/tree dwelling semi-bipedal apes (bonobos, chimpanzees), to exclusively ground dwelling bipedal apes (man).

The chart consequently shows how the chimpanzee genus is further removed from the gorilla genus and is more closely linked to the human genus. This is also supported by evolutionary genetic studies. As a result, the common chimpanzee and the bonobo (pygmy or dwarf chimp) of the genus Pan are the closest living evolutionary relatives to humans, sharing a common ancestry with humans from about four to seven million years ago."

At the perspective of a time-scale, this elapsed period of time also evidences the divergence of humans from chimpanzees. More specifically, the final separation of the Homo genus from the Pan genus is approxiamately 2.8 million years old thus showing us of the importance of the recent "Homo Naledi" cave discovery in August of 2015 in South Africa's Star Cave system.

What does this mean theologically?

In evolutionary terms it is pretty plain how human creation evolved from anthropological studies of the ape. And in theological terms, the passages in Genesis provide an ancient (Hebrew) tribal explanation to creation in non-evolutionary terms as this anthropology was unknown then. However, many well-meaning, Christians have attempted to show a 1:1 correlation between Genesis 1 with either progressive or immediate "theistic evolution" which would be an interpretive error both from a cultural standpoint as well as from a scientific one. At this time ancient man, such as the Semetic and Hebraic tribes, had no knowledge of either science or evolution. Moreover, the implication by theologians of insinuating human guidance by divine authorship supra-intending over a culture's era-specific ignorance is also a conjectural error to the surmise of textual formation.

The take away? Rather than getting hung up on a literal reading or correlation of the Genesis creation stories we may be confident that creation derives from a Creator who crafted an unusually complex method of creation by using all the ingredients of evolution to obtain the current results we are biologically familiar with. And that its testimony in Genesis is simply a literary account by the ancients using mythological description to describe this very same event in their own lay terms and knowledge of their day.

What does this mean? That God is neither denied nor mocked. That He is still Creator-Redeemer and shown to be intimately involved with His creation from whatever direction it came. Similarly, the bible is brought back down to reality, it is no longer made a mystical nor irrelevant collection of ancient manuscripts, and that we might rightly "divide / interpret" it more attuned or appropriately to its times and cultures. Which also means that this same Creator-Redeemer God then is active in our societies and cosmos today as much as He was beforetimes. We have lost nothing except our mistaken impulses to defend or mock our Creator. He needs no defense because He is. And any mockery but shows our deep shallowness to the everyday realities about us.

Too, we must now come to understand that evolution is always occurring - both in our present day as well as in the future beyond us. That it is a process which never stops. That underneath life itself is the continuing titanic struggle of biologic life to always exist despite the (toxic) eco-environments now present or occurring in the future.

This is the marvel of God's creation and the cosmic/biologic equation He has set in place so that at any present moment we, as homo sapiens (human beings), might have fellowship with our Creator-Redeemer, or any derivations of ourselves in ages future. But as humans, we cannot assume we are in exclusive communication with our Creator alone. Even the Psalmists and Prophets have written of the mountains and valleys, seas and skies, trees and fields, and all the living things on earth, as having a "form of communication" with its Creator. That it "delights" in His fellowship, "dances," "sings for joy," and "claps its hands" in response to His Almighty voice. Nay, we are not alone in our praise and dependence upon our Creator God who loves His creation and draws us toward Him into divine fellowship with one-and-all.

And though I do not encourage any form of "supernatural mystical communication" with the trees and mountains, birds and bees, still we find in the poetry and essays of human journals the deep realization that all things are connected and in communication with itself and its Creator God. What I might describe as a form of (process) panpsychism; but again, without getting all crazy and mystical about this observation. As we walk creation's fields and meadows, swim its streams and dive below its waters, we sense God's almighty hand of authorship in its templed majesties and shrouded veils of glory. The godfathers of ecology, John Muir, Henry David Thoreau, and Aldo Leopold, each in their own way reveled in this divine communion connecting humanity's existence even to the original American Indians who sensed the same in their animistic Spirit stories of creational connectedness and sacred fellowship.

Conclusion

To read Genesis then is to read it NOT in an evolutionary context but as (i) an ancient composition set within a paleo-creational understanding of a Creator-God named for His creational activity and perceived by the ancient's supernaturally curious wonder of life's many complex spheres of divine / human / creational interactions; (ii) that into creation's holy charters came creational indeterminacy and sentient freewill struggling between goodness and evil, order and disorder, each redefining the other in terms of fellowship and holiness; (iii) an immediate communion and fellowship with the Creator God and what it may mean for creation and mankind; (iv) that within this communion of struggle, of obedience, and willfulness, both creation and humanity came to be pitted against its God, each other, and themselves; (v) which is then described in terms of "life and death, light and darkness" within the hallowed altars of holy communion; (vi) that with death came the promise of God to be not only "Creator" but "Redeemer" - not only to mankind but to His holy creation as well; and finally, (vii) this holy redemption would come by grace and mercy, forgiveness and resurrection. This then is the fuller story of Genesis when read apart from its more popular classical or literal understanding rejecting evolution. It was what the ancients saw then of God's promise and what we need to see now in our dilemma between science, anthropology, and faith.

To this marvel of God's complex creation we may only bow our heads and utter, "Thank you O blessed Redeemer for your promise of life in the midst of death. Praise you for your wisdom and goodness and grace. For the majesty of your name and the councils of your justice when all things will be made new, and good, and holy, once more. Amen."

R.E. Slater

September 13, 2015
edited September 26, 2015; March 17, 2020

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Hominini

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hominini

Not to be confused with Hominoidea, Hominidae, Homininae, or Hominina.

The Hominini is a tribe of the subfamily Homininae; it comprises three subtribes: Hominina, with its one genus Homo; Australopithecina, comprising several extinct genera (see taxobox); and Panina, with its one genus Pan, the chimpanzees (see the evolutionary tree below).[3][4] Members of the human clade, that is, the Hominini, including Homo and those species of theaustralopithecines that arose after the split from the chimpanzees, are called hominins; cf. Hominidae; terms "hominids" and hominins).

The subtribe Hominina is the "human" branch; that is, it contains the genus Homo exclusively. Researchers proposed the taxon Hominini on the basis that the least similar species of atrichotomy should be separated from the other two. The common chimpanzee and the bonobo of the genus Pan are the closest living evolutionary relatives to humans, sharing a common ancestor with humans about four to seven million years ago.[5] Research by Mary-Claire King in 1973 found 99% identical DNA between human beings and chimpanzees;[6] later research modified that finding to about 94% commonality, with some of the difference occurring in noncoding DNA.[7]

Sahelanthropus tchadensis is an extinct hominid species that lived 7 million years ago, very close to the time of the chimpanzee–human divergence. It is unclear whether or not it may be classed as hominin—that is, whether it rose after the split from the chimpanzees, or not.

A source of confusion in determining the exact age of the Pan–Homo split is evidence of a complex speciation process rather than a clean split between the two lineages. Different chromosomes appear to have split at different times, possibly over as much as a 4-million-year period, indicating a long and drawn out speciation process with large-scale hybridization events between the two emerging lineages as late as 6.3 to 5.4 million years ago according to Patterson et al. (2006).[8] The assumption of late hybridization was in particular based on the similarity of the X chromosome in humans and chimpanzees, suggesting a divergence as late as some 4 million years ago. This conclusion was rejected as unwarranted by Wakeley (2008), who suggested alternative explanations, including selection pressure on the X chromosome in the populations ancestral to the chimpanzee–human last common ancestor (CHLCA).[9]

All the extinct genera listed in the taxobox are ancestral to, or offshoots of, Homo. Few fossil specimens on the Pan side of the split have been found—the first discovery of a fossil chimpanzee was published in 2005;[10] it was from Kenya's East African Rift Valley and dated to between 545 thousand years, radiometric, (kyr) and 284 kyr (via argon–argon dating). However, both Orrorin and Sahelanthropus existed around the time of the split, and so may be ancestral to both Pan and Homo.

In the proposal of Mann and Weiss (1996),[11] the tribe Hominini includes Pan as well as Homo, but within separate subtribes. Homo and (by inference) all bipedal apes are referred to the subtribe Hominina, while Pan is assigned to the subtribe Panina. Wood (2010) discusses the different views of this taxonomy.[12]

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Lee R. Berger, a professor of human evolution studies at the University of

the Witwatersrand  in Johannesburg, unveiled a previously unidentified species

of the early human lineage — Homo naledi. By REUTERS on Publish Date

Homo Naledi, New Species in Human Lineage, Is Found in South African Cave

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/09/11/science/south-africa-fossils-new-species-human-ancestor-homo-naledi.html?_r=0

by John Noble Wildord

September 10, 2015

Acting on a tip from spelunkers two years ago, scientists in South Africadiscovered what the cavers had only dimly glimpsed through a crack in a limestone wall deep in the Rising Star Cave: lots and lots of old bones.

The remains covered the earthen floor beyond the narrow opening. This was, the scientists concluded, a large, dark chamber for the dead of a previously unidentified species of the early human lineage — Homo naledi.

The new hominin species was announced on Thursday by an international team of more than 60 scientists led by Lee R. Berger, an American paleoanthropologist who is a professor of human evolution studies at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg. The species name, H. naledi, refers to the cave where the bones lay undisturbed for so long; “naledi” means “star” in the local Sesotho language.

In two papers published this week in the open-access journal eLife, the researchers said that the more than 1,550 fossil elements documenting the discovery constituted the largest sample for any hominin species in a single African site, and one of the largest anywhere in the world. Further, the scientists said, that sample is probably a small fraction of the fossils yet to be recovered from the chamber. So far the team has recovered parts of at least 15 individuals.

“With almost every bone in the body represented multiple times, Homo naledi is already practically the best-known fossil member of our lineage,” Dr. Berger said.

The finding, like so many others in science, was the result of pure luck followed by considerable effort.

Two local cavers, Rick Hunter and Steven Tucker, found the narrow entrance to the chamber, measuring no more than seven and a half inches wide. They were skinny enough to squeeze through, and in the light of their headlamps they saw the bones all around them. When they showed the fossil pictures to Pedro Boshoff, a caver who is also a geologist, he alerted Dr. Berger, who organized an investigation.

"Just getting into the chamber and bringing out samples proved to be a huge challenge.

The narrow opening was the only way in." - Lee Burger

Paul Dirks, a geologist at James Cook University in Australia, who was lead author of the journal paper describing the chamber, said the investigators first had a steep climb up a stone block called the Dragon’s Back and then a drop down to the entrance passage — all of this in the total absence of natural light.

For the two extended investigations of the chamber in 2013 and 2014, Dr. Berger rounded up the international team of scientists and then recruited six excavating scientists through notices on social media. One special requirement: They had to be slender enough to crawl through that crack in the wall.

One of the six, who were all women and were called “underground astronauts,” was Marina Elliott of Simon Fraser University in British Columbia. She said the collection and removal of the fossils involved “some of the most difficult and dangerous conditions ever encountered in the search for human origins.”

Photo by the New York Times

Besides introducing a new member of the prehuman family, the discovery suggests that some early hominins intentionally deposited bodies of their dead in a remote and largely inaccessible cave chamber, a behavior previously considered limited to modern humans. Some of the scientists referred to the practice as a ritualized treatment of their dead, but by “ritual” they said they meant a deliberate and repeated practice, not necessarily a kind of religious rite.

Pieces of a skeleton of Homo naledi, a newly discovered human species.

CreditJohn Hawks/University of Wisconsin-Madison, via European Pressphoto Agency

“It’s very, very fascinating,” said Ian Tattersall, an authority on human evolution at the American Museum of Natural History in New York, who was not involved in the research.

“No question there’s at least one new species here,” he added, “but there may be debate over the Homo designation, though the species is quite different from anything else we have seen.”

A colleague of Dr. Tattersall’s at the museum, Eric Delson, who is a professor at Lehman College of the City University of New York, was also impressed, saying, “Berger does it again!”

Dr. Delson was referring to Dr. Berger’s previous headline discovery, published in 2010, also involving cave deposits near Johannesburg. He found many fewer fossils that time, but enough to conclude that he was looking at a new species, which he named Australopithecus sediba. Geologists said the individuals lived 1.78 million to 1.95 million years ago, when australopithecines and early species of Homo were contemporaries.

Lee R. Berger, leader of a research team, in the Rising Star Cave near Johannesburg,

where over 1,550 fossil elements were found. CreditNaashon Zalk for The New York Times

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An expert all-women team of anthropologists dared the suffocating passages
of the South African Star Cave system. Kudos!

A Mighty Girl

https://www.facebook.com/amightygirl/photos/a.360833590619627.72897.316489315054055/901760099860304/?type=1&fref=nf&pnref=story

September 11, 2015

The discovery of a new hominin species is making headlines around the world this week but what many people don't realize is that the excavation team that uncovered this historic find was made up of six daring women scientists! The fossils were found at the bottom of a cave system in South Africa; one of the scientists, Marina Elliott, said that their collection and removal involved "some of the most difficult and dangerous conditions ever encountered in the search for human origins.” Thanks to the dedication of these six women, people everywhere will have the opportunity to gain new insight into the development of our species.

Palaeoanthropologist Lee Berger learned about the fossils in Rising Star Cave in October 2013 -- as well as their location, at the bottom of a 36 foot long shaft that gets as narrow as 7 inches across. He put up an ad on Facebook seeking scientists with a background in archaeology or paleontology, but with a catch: “the person must be skinny and preferably small. They must not be claustrophobic, they must be fit, they should have some caving experience, climbing experience would be a bonus.” He remembers thinking that “maybe there were three or four people in the world who would fit that criteria”, but within days he had 60 qualified applicants from around the world. He narrowed those down to six: Marina Elliott from Canada, Elen Feuerriegel from Australia, and K. Lindsay Eaves, Alia Gurtov, Hannah Morris, and Becca Peixotto from the United States.

Elliott, who was finishing a Ph.D. at Simon Fraser University when she saw the ad, was first on the scene. “I was predisposed to extreme environments,” she says. “Telling me that I’d have to do climbing, that it would be underground, and that it would be strange and potentially dangerous… it appealed.” Even still, she vividly recalls her first sight of the chute: “It’s a long crack, punctuated by shark-teeth protrusions. I remember looking down and thinking: I’m not sure I made the right decision." Given the difficulty and potential danger of the climb, Berger nicknamed the team “underground astronauts.”

During the 21-day excavation of the Rising Star cave, the team had to work carefully: “There was so much material and it was friable and delicate,” Elliott says. “And every day, we realized that we were pulling out another 40 or 60 fragments of this thing that was going to be incredible.” She and her five caving teammates excavated a nearly unheard of collection of hominin fossils: 1,550 fragments from at least 15 skeletons, representing a mix of male and female individuals. In the words of Ed Yong of The Atlantic, “To find one complete skeleton of a new hominin would be hitting the paleoanthropological jackpot. To find 15, and perhaps more, is like nuking the jackpot from orbit.”

Debate about Homo naledi’s age and importance in human prehistory, as well as the intriguing possibility that the bones are in the cave as a form of burial ritual, will be ongoing for years, but no one doubts that it represents an extraordinary find. Elliott has remained on the ground in South Africa where she is now directing the field operation and leading expeditions into other caves, eager to discover what else is out there. As she says, “We’re just scratching the surface."

You can read more about the all-female team of “underground astronauts” and this historic find on The Atlantic at http://theatln.tc/1Fzdsxh

To learn about more trailblazing women of science from around the world, we highly recommend the new book "Headstrong: 52 Women Who Changed Science -- And The World," for teen and adult readers, ages 13 and up, at http://www.amightygirl.com/headstrong-52-women

To introduce children to one of the world’s first paleontologists, Mary Anning, we recommend "Mary Anning and The Sea Dragon" for ages 5 to 8 (http://www.amightygirl.com/mary-anning-and-the-sea-dragon), “Stone Girl, Bone Girl” for ages 4 to 8 (http://www.amightygirl.com/stone-girl) and “The Fossil Girl” for ages 5 to 9 (http://www.amightygirl.com/the-fossil-girl)

For a wonderful book about six remarkable women whose curiosity about nature fueled a passion to steadfastly overcome obstacles to careers in traditionally men-only occupations, we recommend "Girls Who Looked Under Rocks: The Lives of Six Pioneering Naturalists" for ages 10 and up at http://www.amightygirl.com/girls-who-looked-under-rocks

If your kids would like to try an excavation of their own, check out the Crystal Mining Kit for ages 5 to 10 (http://www.amightygirl.com/crystal-mining-kit), the Treasures of the Earth Excavation Set for ages 5 to 9 (http://www.amightygirl.com/treasures-of-the-earth), and Smithsonian’s Diggin’ Up Dinos: T-Rex Kit for ages 7 to 12 (http://www.amightygirl.com/diggin-up-dinos-t-rex).

For more of our favorite science toys for igniting your children's curiosity about the natural world, visit our "Science Toys" section at http://www.amightygirl.com/toys/toys-games/science-math

And, if you have a Mighty Girl in your life who won't let any anyone tell her she can't do something because she's a girl, check out the "Though She Be But Little She Is Fierce" t-shirt -- available in a variety of styles and colors for all ages at http://www.amightygirl.com/fierce-t-shirt.

Evolution and the Separate Problems of Teleology and Human Consciousness

"Nagel believes that (currently unknown) teleological laws of nature

might mean that life and consciousness arise with greater probability than

would result from the known laws of physics, chemistry, and biology."

Thomas Nagel in his newest book, Mind and Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature Is Almost Certainly False, has asserted that neo-Darwinism in its present form is incomplete without its own correspondent metaphysical element called teleology to complete it. By which is meant that without some form of externally imposed guidance, or pre-disposition, Darwinian evolution could not have happened as it has, providing life-and-light within creation's processes. However, as has been shown in our previous discussions of evolution, the process itself is fully capable of obtaining the results we see (and experience) today without any superimposed external processes to the system itself - including that of God Himself (from a scientific standpoint, and not a biblical one). That it is fully self-contained, and self-evolving, to the stage and state that it is presently found to be in, as per the design of our Creator-God. Who cannot be found by science but gives to science its own forms and meaning as it studies His handiwork and creative re-imaging. And, I think, finds God daily should it look with the eyes of faith and not proof. But, strictly speaking, God is unprovable, even scientifically, which is a poor answer to give any who would see God everywhere - but then again, this is the mystery of the unfathomable God of the universe hidden to the eyes of nonbelief. To one, a rock appears as a collection of cosmological debris collected to the earth by gravitational pull and random chance. To another, it bears the imprint of God's holy majesty and wonder. Verily, truth and wonder, meaning and expression, lies in the eyes of the beholder, does it not?

If, however, what is meant by the term "teleology" is that element of God's Sovereignty which guides and directs the ever-evolving majestrarium of nature towards the creation of life and renewal, the Christian Evolutionist would then be in complete agreement. We would, however, statedly observe it to be a divine teleology implicit within the overall plan and direction, guidance, formation, maintenance, and sustenance, of creation by the Creator-God as set within the larger teleological process of divine redemption. A process that utilizes all the elements, and processes, of evolution, but that also supersedes those elements in some mystical fashion heretofore unexplained when observing the biologic, cosmologic, and sentient forms of life. An implacable process bearing the imprint of the Creator in all facets of its birth, being, and future possibilities, when perceived through biblical revelation. But when observed scientifically, can only be seen by the purely physical processes of evolution itself - and not the Creator Himself - as famously observed by Stephen Hawking, a British cosmologist, who searched the vast voids of heaven to prove the absence of God.

As such, God's Sovereignty has been interplayed here at Relevancy22 with the ideas of Relational Theism, free will and sin (please see the appropriate sidebars to the right of this web blog as further reference). We have especially worked through the area of God's divine Sovereignty in the Science sections under cosmology and evolution, human development and consciousness. So that, according to Thomas Nagel, avowed atheist  and naturalist, Darwin's theory of evolution is not without that (theological) element of teleology, which, as a Christian, I take to mean the "directive purpose and imaging of a Sovereign God who places life-and-consciousness within a living, evolving, system (the cosmos) constituting both sentient and non-sentient, living and non-living, matter." Matter void of the imprimatur of God to the scientific researcher, but everywhere bearing that same imprint to the eyes of faith.

On the other hand, though we have already accepted and integrated the concept of God's Sovereignty within the strict definition of evolution itself without relying on the need for some other additive (metaphysical) property (whether it be teleology, or something else) as proposed by Nagel, there is yet another evolutionary element that he has noticed. It is the metaphysical element that Nagel deems as human consciousness. That, in itself, is as much - and more - a difficult process to align with Darwinian reductionism as its metaphysical twin of teleology. To which Nagel finds many interpretive roles but none that satisfies human existence within its dialogue of evolutionary progress by casual chance and destructive circumstance. Any previously posited ideas of evolutionary human development along the lines of conciousness has left Nagel with the nagging feeling that something still is missing. Ideas like conceptual behaviorism, physical identity theory, causal behaviorism, and functionalism, to name a few. Each, in their own way, addresses consciousness, but not in a way that is fundamental in Nagel's view of teleological structure.

As a Christian Evolutionist, part of the solution we have found here seems to be come through Edward O. Wilson's novel studies in eusociality (or, eusocialism) which gives rise to the evolutionary idea of survivalism through super-cooperation and personal sacrifice as determined by group selection. A non-prominent trait that would counter-balance the older, more primal Darwinian idea of individual selection found within all living species. Which then might explain the conscious traits of reason and value, and even objective moral truth (which has been subjectively internalized by a group). And it is to this idea of eusociality that the article below has neglected to take into account, if we were to hold to a stricter account of evolution as its own process set apart from outside interference, when thinking through the quality we know as consciousness. Moreover, it is realised that Wilson's concept of eusociality is a relatively new concept (2012) and as such, may have been overlooked by both Nagel and/or the article's reviewer.

Overall, for the Evolutionary Creationist, the concept of God's Sovereignty partnering with a creation He has (and is) forming does not release us from the idea of God's integral involvement with His creation. Quite the contrary. Even as the idea of Natural Theology notices the same (cf. Part IV below). Not only did God decree evolution as the process by which life may come, but so also continues its maintenance and sustenance through actively partnering non-coercively with this same divinely initiated process. So that, in the end, there is a supernatural (as versus natural) teleology that is unfolding. A teleology of redemption to a creation become corrupted by corruptible indeterminacy and free will as originally planned, initiated, and implemented by God within the ancient foreknowledge and wisdom of His holy councils. Full-well knowing that with indeterminacy and free will must also come His respondent decrees of redemption, renewal, rebirth, reclamation, regeneration, revival, reconstruction, and resurrection. This is what would set a Theist apart from a Naturalist - one who would see within nature, nature's God, and not the god of Nature itself. One who would refuse transferring God's ontic being and qualities into the  very essence and activity found resident within God's own creation circumscribed in His divine image. Hence, though nature reflects God, in itself it is not God, no less than we ourselves who are made in our Creator-Redeemer's image.

Amusingly, the confluence of these many ideas seems to mystify the naturalist scientist and philosopher alike. Causing some to deny it, and others to question if there isn't something more to Darwinian evolution's materialistic reductionism (which is a very good question to ask). And while it is best to continually lean towards the evolutionary idea of a creation that is complete in itself, as a theology (and as a teleology) we know that that cannot be the case. For our Creator-God Redeemer is creation's image, identity, sustenance, guide, and ground-of-being. Thus, by small, infinitesimal degrees, this same God nudges creation towards both life and light using the tools He has set in place (evolution), or is setting in place (such as consciousness, group selection, eusociality, redemption, etc). So that, by whatever process we name it, God is there, resident within-and-without the parameters of His creation as its God. Its Creator. Its Redeemer. Whose God is our God in His majesty and wonder.

So that, for the Evolutionary Creationist, the biblical doctrine of Sovereignty is always the implied - and latent - concept behind any evolutionary theory of creation. One in which a theist can sympathize with all natural nontheists questioning the absence of any metaphysical synergies found within an evolutionary concept of creation built primarily upon materialistic processes devoid of its crucial complementary process of teleology. A metaphysical concept that is central to, and gives meaning to, the very process of evolutionary creation itself. An observation that does not go unnoticed by the Christian evolutionist holding a similar view of evolutionary process and construction, but recognizing that this teleological process is supernatural in its natural occurences, and flows under the heading of God's sovereignty.

In conclusion, I am including several previous articles from Relevancy22 that revisits each of the issues I've addressed in my composition above, to help provide a more complete theology behind the topics involved (mostly found in the words and phrases which I have emboldened). They are given as helps towards further discussion and debate. However, to these several articles will be found many, many more (at least 10% of the articles written here have been on the intensely interesting subject of evolution) to which I would encourage further discovery and assessment. Thank you.

R.E. Slater

January 27, 2013

How God Created by Evolution:

A Proposed Theory of Man's Evolutionary Development
http://relevancy22.blogspot.com/2012/01/resolving-genesis-story-between.html





What Do We Mean by God as "Creator-Redeemer"?
http://relevancy22.blogspot.com/2012/11/evolutionary-creationism-what-do-we.html





Can the 5-Point Calvinist Really Say, "Jesus Loves Me This I Know?"

A Discussion on Indeterminacy and Free Will

http://relevancy22.blogspot.com/search/label/Free%20Will

Eusociality and the Bible, Part 2 of 2

Which came first - human consciousness or eusociality?

Or, put another way, which created which?

http://relevancy22.blogspot.com/2012/04/eusociality-and-bible-part-2-of-2.html

John Caputo: Towards a Radical Theology, Not a Radical Atheism:

A Review of Modern Atheism, Atheology and Divine Inexistence

http://relevancy22.blogspot.com/2012/11/towards-radical-theology-not-radical.html

Index to past articles on "Science & Religion"

http://relevancy22.blogspot.com/2013/09/index-science-religion.html

Awaiting a New Darwin
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2013/feb/07/awaiting-new-darwin/?pagination=false

by H. Allen Orr
February 7, 2013

Mind and Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature Is Almost Certainly False

by Thomas Nagel, Oxford University Press, 130 pp., $24.95

Erin Pauwels Collection/Art Archive/Art Resource

‘A Sun of the Nineteenth Century’; cartoon from Puck magazine showing Charles Darwin
as a shining sun, chasing the clouds of religion and superstition from the sky, 1882

1.
[Nagel's Posited Concept of Teleology]

The history of science is partly the history of an idea that is by now so familiar that it no longer astounds: the universe, including our own existence, can be explained by the interactions of little bits of matter. We scientists are in the business of discovering the laws that characterize this matter. We do so, to some extent at least, by a kind of reduction. The stuff of biology, for instance, can be reduced to chemistry and the stuff of chemistry can be reduced to physics.

Thomas Nagel has never been at ease with this view. Nagel, University Professor of Philosophy and Law at New York University, is one of our most distinguished philosophers. He is perhaps best known for his 1974 paper, “What Is It Like to Be a Bat?,” a modern classic in the philosophy of mind. In that paper, Nagel argued that reductionist, materialist accounts of the mind leave some things unexplained. And one of those things is what it would actually feel like to be, say, a bat, a creature that navigates its environment via the odd (to us) sense of echolocation. To Nagel, then, reductionist attempts to ground everything in matter fail partly for a reason that couldn’t be any nearer to us: subjective experience. While not denying that our conscious experiences have everything to do with brains, neurons, and matter, Nagel finds it hard to see how these experiences can be fully reduced with the conceptual tools of physical science.

In Mind and Cosmos, Nagel continues his attacks on reductionism. Though the book is brief its claims are big. Nagel insists that the mind-body problem “is not just a local problem” but “invades our understanding of the entire cosmos and its history.” If what he calls “materialist naturalism” or just “materialism” can’t explain consciousness, then it can’t fully account for life since consciousness is a feature of life. And if it can’t explain life, then it can’t fully account for the chemical and physical universe since life is a feature of that universe. Subjective experience is not, to Nagel, some detail that materialist science can hand-wave away. It’s a deal breaker. Nagel believes that any future science that grapples seriously with the mind-body problem will be one that is radically reconceived.

As Nagel makes clear in the subtitle of Mind and Cosmos, part of what he thinks must be reconceived is our reigning theory of evolutionary biology, neo-Darwinism. Neo-Darwinism maintains, or at least implies, that the origin and history of life can be explained by materialist means. Once the first life arose on earth, the fate of the resulting evolutionary lineage was, neo-Darwinists argued, shaped by a combination of random mutation and natural selection. Biological types that survive or reproduce better than others will ultimately replace those others. While natural selection ensures that species constantly adapt to the changing environments around them, the process has no foresight: natural selection responds only to the present environment and evolution cannot, therefore, be aiming for any goal. This view, Nagel tells us, is “almost certainly false.”

Before creationists grow too excited, it’s important to see what Nagel is not claiming. He is not claiming that life is six thousand years old, that it did not evolve, or that natural selection played no part in this evolution. He believes that life has a long evolutionary history and that natural selection had a part in it. And while he does believe that intelligent design creationists have asked some incisive questions, Nagel rejects their answers. Indeed he is an atheist. Instead Nagel’s view is that neo-Darwinism, and in fact the whole materialist view elaborated by science since the seventeenth century, is radically incomplete. The materialist laws of nature must, he says, be supplemented by something else if we are to fold ourselves and our minds fully into our science.

His leading contender for this something else is teleology, a tendency of the universe to aim for certain goals as it unfolds through time. Nagel believes that (currently unknown) teleological laws of nature might mean that life and consciousness arise with greater probability than would result from the known laws of physics, chemistry, and biology.

Scientists shouldn’t be shocked by Nagel’s claim that present science might not be up to cracking the mind-brain problem or that a profoundly different science might lie on the horizon. The history of science is filled with such surprising transformations. Nor should we dismiss Nagel’s claims merely because they originate from outside science, from a philosopher. Much the same thing happened when natural theology—the scientific attempt to discern God’s attributes from His biological handiwork—gave way to Darwinism.

It was the philosopher David Hume who began to dismantle important aspects of natural theology. In a devastating set of arguments, Hume identified grievous problems with the argument from design (which claims, roughly, that a designer must exist because organisms show intricate design). Hume was not, however, able to offer an alternative account for the apparent design in organisms. Darwin worked in Hume’s wake and finally provided the required missing theory, natural selection. Nagel, consciously or not, now aspires to play the part of Hume in the demise of neo-Darwinism. He has, he believes, identified serious shortcomings in neo-Darwinism. And while he suspects that teleological laws of nature may exist, he recognizes that he hasn’t provided anything like a full theory. He awaits his Darwin.

Mind and Cosmos is certainly provocative and it reflects the efforts of a fiercely independent mind. In important places, however, I believe that it is wrong. Because Nagel’s book sits at the intersection of philosophy and science it will surely attract the attention of both communities.¹ As a biologist, I will perhaps inevitably focus on Nagel’s more scientific claims. But these are, it appears, the claims that are most responsible for the excitement over the book.

I begin by considering the reasons Nagel believes that materialist science, including neo-Darwinism, is false. I then turn to his alternative theory, teleology.

2.
[Evolutionary Theory's Refutation of Teleology]

Nagel believes that materialism confronts two classes of problems. One, which is new to Nagel’s thought, concerns purported empirical problems with neo-Darwinism. The other, which is more familiar to philosophers, is the alleged failure of materialism to explain consciousness and allied mental phenomena.

Nagel argues that there are purely “empirical reasons” to be skeptical about reductionism in biology and, in particular, about the plausibility of neo-Darwinism. Nagel’s claims here are so surprising that it’s best to quote them at length:

I would like to defend the untutored reaction of incredulity to the reductionist neo-Darwinian account of the origin and evolution of life. It is prima facie highly implausible that life as we know it is the result of a sequence of physical accidents together with the mechanism of natural selection. We are expected to abandon this naïve response, not in favor of a fully worked out physical/chemical explanation but in favor of an alternative that is really a schema for explanation, supported by some examples. What is lacking, to my knowledge, is a credible argument that the story has a nonnegligible probability of being true. There are two questions. First, given what is known about the chemical basis of biology and genetics, what is the likelihood that self-reproducing life forms should have come into existence spontaneously on the early earth, solely through the operation of the laws of physics and chemistry? The second question is about the sources of variation in the evolutionary process that was set in motion once life began: In the available geological time since the first life forms appeared on earth, what is the likelihood that, as a result of physical accident, a sequence of viable genetic mutations should have occurred that was sufficient to permit natural selection to produce the organisms that actually exist?

Nagel claims that both questions concern “highly specific events over a long historical period in the distant past, the available evidence is very indirect, and general assumptions have to play an important part.” He therefore concludes that “the available scientific evidence, in spite of the consensus of scientific opinion, does not in this matter rationally require us to subordinate the incredulity of common sense.”

This conclusion is remarkable in a couple ways. For one thing, there’s not much of an argument here. Instead Nagel’s conclusion rests largely on the strength of his intuition. His intuition recoils from the claimed plausibility of neo-Darwinism and that, it seems, is that. (Richard Dawkins has called this sort of move the argument from personal incredulity.) But plenty of scientific truths are counterintuitive (does anyone find it intuitive that we’re hurtling around the sun at 67,000 miles per hour?) and a scientific education is, to a considerable extent, an exercise in taming the authority of one’s intuition. Nagel never explains why his intuition should count for so much here.

As for his claim that evolutionary theory is somewhat schematic and that it concerns events that happened long ago, leaving indirect evidence, this is partly true of any historical science, including any alternative to neo-Darwinism, e.g., the one that Nagel himself suggests. In any case, a good part of the evidence for neo-Darwinism is not indirect but involves experiments in which evolutionary change is monitored in real time.²

More important, Nagel’s conclusions about evolution are almost certainly wrong. The origin of life is admittedly a hard problem and we don’t know exactly how the first self-replicating system arose. But big progress has been made. The discovery of so-called ribozymes in the 1980s plausibly cracked the main principled problem at the heart of the origin of life. Research on life’s origin had always faced a chicken and egg dilemma: DNA, our hereditary material, can’t replicate without the assistance of proteins, but one can’t get the required proteins unless they’re encoded by DNA. So how could the whole system get off the ground?

Answer: the first genetic material was probably RNA, not DNA. This might sound like a distinction without a difference but it isn’t. The point is that RNA molecules can both act as a hereditary material (as DNA does) and catalyze certain chemical reactions (as some proteins do), possibly including their own replication. (An RNA molecule that can catalyze a reaction is called a ribozyme.) Consequently, many researchers into the origins of life now believe in an “RNA world,” in which early life on earth was RNA-based. “Physical accidents” were likely still required to produce the first RNA molecules, but we can now begin to see how these molecules might then self-replicate.

Nagel’s astonishment that a “sequence of viable genetic mutations” has been available to evolution over billions of years is also unfounded.³ His concern appears to be that evolution requires an unbroken chain of viable genetic variants that connect the first living creature to, say, human beings. How could nature ensure that a viable mutation was always available to evolution? The answer is that it didn’t. That’s why species go extinct. Indeed that’s what extinction is. The world changes and a species can’t find a mutation fast enough to let it live. Extinction is the norm in evolution: the vast majority of all species have gone extinct. Nagel has, I think, been led astray by a big survivorship bias: the evolutionary lineage that led to us always found a viable mutation, ergo one must, it seems, always be available. Tyrannosaurus rex would presumably be less impressed by nature’s munificence.⁴

3.
[The Problem of Consciousness]

While Nagel’s worries about neo-Darwinism are misplaced, he’s on somewhat firmer (or at least more familiar) ground when he turns to mental phenomena like consciousness. These are, after all, separate problems. A science might explain the evolution of life but leave consciousness—the subjective experience of the saltiness of popcorn, the shock of cold water, or the sting of pain—unaccounted for. Consciousness is Nagel’s big problem:

Consciousness is the most conspicuous obstacle to a comprehensive naturalism that relies only on the resources of physical science. The existence of consciousness seems to imply that the physical description of the universe, in spite of its richness and explanatory power, is only part of the truth, and that the natural order is far less austere than it would be if physics and chemistry accounted for everything.

Nagel’s story here starts, as it must, with Descartes. As Nagel writes, Descartes posited that matter and mind are “both fully real and irreducibly distinct, though they interact.” Given this, science was, from the outset, concerned solely with matter; mind belonged to a different domain. While scientists happily toiled under Cartesian dualism, giving rise to a recognizably modern science, philosophers often demurred. Instead, thinkers like Berkeley favored various forms of idealism, which maintains that nature is at bottom mind. Under idealism, then, any reductionist program would be in the business of collapsing matter to mind.

Nagel argues that as a result of a rapid shift whose causes are unclear, these idealist philosophies were “largely displaced in later twentieth-century analytic philosophy by attempts at unification in the opposite direction, starting from the physical.” This approach likely seems natural to most of us. But we live with a tension. Though the materialist program of reducing mind to matter would appear the properly “scientific” approach, we haven’t the slightest idea how it would work. And it’s not for lack of trying. Philosophers have, Nagel reminds us, attempted many ways of tying mind to matter: conceptual behaviorism, physical identity theory, causal behaviorism, and functionalism, to name a few. To Nagel all these approaches have failed “for the same old reason”:

Even with the brain added to the picture, they clearly leave out something essential, without which there would be no mind. And what they leave out is just what was deliberately left out of the physical world by Descartes and Galileo in order to form the modern concept of the physical, namely, subjective appearances.

Nagel is deeply skeptical that any species of materialist reductionism can work. Instead, he concludes, progress on consciousness will require an intellectual revolution at least as radical as Einstein’s theory of relativity.

Nagel’s chapter on consciousness is a concise and critical survey of a literature that is both vast and fascinating. He further extends his survey to other mental phenomena, including reason and value, that he also finds recalcitrant to materialism. (Nagel concludes that the existence of objective moral truths is incompatible with materialist evolutionary theory; because he is sure that moral truths exist, he again concludes that evolutionary theory is incomplete.)

Nagel concedes that many philosophers do not share his skepticism about the plausibility of reducing mind to matter. And I can assure readers that most scientists don’t. I, however, share Nagel’s sense of mystery here. Brains and neurons obviously have everything to do with consciousness but how such mere objects can give rise to the eerily different phenomenon of subjective experience seems utterly incomprehensible.

Despite this, I can’t go so far as to conclude that mind poses some insurmountable barrier to materialism. There are two reasons. The first is, frankly, more a sociological observation than an actual argument. Science has, since the seventeenth century, proved remarkably adept at incorporating initially alien ideas (like electromagnetic fields) into its thinking. Yet most people, apparently including Nagel, find the resulting science sufficiently materialist. The unusual way in which physicists understand the weirdness of quantum mechanics might be especially instructive as a crude template for how the consciousness story could play out. Physicists describe quantum mechanics by writing equations. The fact that no one, including them, can quite intuit the meaning of these equations is often deemed beside the point. The solution is the equation. One can imagine a similar course for consciousness research: the solution is X, whether you can intuit X or not. Indeed the fact that you can’t intuit X might say more about you than it does about consciousness.

And this brings me to the second reason. For there might be perfectly good reasons why you can’t imagine a solution to the problem of consciousness. As the philosopher Colin McGinn has emphasized, your very inability to imagine a solution might reflect your cognitive limitations as an evolved creature. The point is that we have no reason to believe that we, as organisms whose brains are evolved and finite, can fathom the answer to every question that we can ask. All other species have cognitive limitations, why not us? So even if matter does give rise to mind, we might not be able to understand how.

To McGinn, then, the mysteriousness of consciousness may not be so much a challenge to neo-Darwinism as a result of it. Nagel obviously draws the opposite conclusion. But the availability of both conclusions gives pause.

4.
[Nagel Proposes a Natural Theology to that of Supernatural]

Given the problems that Nagel has with materialism, the obvious question is, What’s the alternative? In the most provocative part of Mind and Cosmos, he suggests one, teleology. While we often associate teleology with a God-like mind—events occur because an agent wills them as means to an end—Nagel finds theism unattractive. But he insists that materialism and theism do not exhaust the possibilities.

Instead he proposes a special species of teleology that he calls natural teleology. Natural teleology doesn’t depend on any agent’s intentions; it’s just the way the world is. There are teleological laws of nature that we don’t yet know about and they bias the unfolding of the universe in certain desirable directions, including the formation of complex organisms and consciousness. The existence of teleological laws means that certain physical outcomes “have a significantly higher probability than is entailed by the laws of physics alone—simply because they are on the path toward a certain outcome.”

Nagel intends natural teleology to be, among other things, a biological theory. It would explain not only the “appearance of physical organisms” but the “development of consciousness and ultimately of reason in those organisms.” Teleology would also provide an “account of the existence of the biological possibilities on which natural selection can operate.”

Nagel concedes that his new theory isn’t fully fleshed out. He hopes merely to sketch the outlines of a plausible alternative to materialism. It’s unfortunate, though, that Mind and Cosmos is too brief to allow consideration of problems that attend natural teleology. For it seems to me that there are some, especially where the view confronts biology.

Darwin himself wrestled with attempts to reconcile his theory with teleology and concluded, reluctantly, that it seemed implausible. While Darwin published almost nothing on such philosophical matters they loom large in his correspondence, particularly with Asa Gray, an American champion of evolution and a Christian. Gray, like Nagel, wanted to believe that, while Darwin had identified an important force in the history of life, nature also features teleology. In particular, Gray suggested that the variation provided by nature to natural selection biases the process in desirable directions.

Darwin, though sometimes vacillating, argued that Gray’s reconciliation was implausible. Exercising his uncanny ability to discern deep truths in prosaic facts—in this case the artificial selection of a pigeon breed by a few fanciers—Darwin wrote Gray:

But I grieve to say that I cannot honestly go as far as you do about Design…. You lead me to infer that you believe “that variation has been led along certain beneficial lines”.—I cannot believe this; & I think you would have to believe, that the tail of the Fan-tail was led to vary in the number & direction of its feathers in order to gratify the caprice of a few men.⁵

Here’s another problem. Nagel’s teleological biology is heavily human-centric or at least animal-centric. Organisms, it seems, are in the business of secreting sentience, reason, and values. Real biology looks little like this and, from the outset, must face the staggering facts of organismal diversity. There are millions of species of fungi and bacteria and nearly 300,000 species of flowering plants. None of these groups is sentient and each is spectacularly successful. Indeed mindless species outnumber we sentient ones by any sensible measure (biomass, number of individuals, or number of species; there are only about 5,500 species of mammals). More fundamentally, each of these species is every bit as much the end product of evolution as we are. The point is that, if nature has goals, it certainly seems to have many, and consciousness would appear to be fairly far down on the list.

Similarly, Nagel’s teleological biology is run through with talk about the “higher forms of organization toward which nature tends” and progress toward “more complex systems.” Again, real biology looks little like this. The history of evolutionary lineages is replete with reversals, which often move from greater complexity to less. A lineage will evolve a complex feature (an eye, for example) that later gets dismantled, evolutionarily deconstructed after the species moves into a new environment (dark caves, say). Parasites often begin as “normal” complicated organisms and then lose evolutionarily many of their complex traits after taking up their new parasitic way of life. Such reversals are easily explained under Darwinism but less so under teleology. If nature is trying to get somewhere, why does it keep changing its mind about the destination?⁶

I’ll be the first to admit that these problems may not be fatal. But they represent the sorts of awkward facts that occur immediately to any biologist. Minimally, they pose serious challenges to teleology, challenges that deserve, but do not receive, consideration in Mind and Cosmos.

5.
[Concluding Thoughts]

I will also be the first to admit that we cannot rule out the formal possibility of teleology in nature. It could turn out that teleological laws affect how the universe unfolds through time. While I suspect some might regard such heterodoxy as a crime against science, Nagel is right that there’s nothing intrinsically unscientific about teleology. If that’s the way nature is, that’s the way it is, and we scientists would need to get on with the business of characterizing these surprising laws. Teleological science is, in fact, more than imaginable. It’s actual, at least historically. Aristotelian science, with its concern for final cause, was thoroughly teleological. And the biological tradition that Darwinism displaced - natural theology - also featured a good deal of teleological thinking.

The question, then, is not whether teleology is formally compatible with the practice of science. The question is whether the practice of science leads to taking teleology seriously. Nagel may find this question unfair. He is, he says, engaging in a “philosophical task,” not the “internal pursuit of science.” But it seems clear that he is doing more than this. He’s emphasizing purported “empirical reasons” for finding neo-Darwinism “almost certainly false” and he’s suggesting the existence of new scientific laws. These represent moves, however halting, into science proper. But science, finally, isn’t about defining the space of all formally possible explanations of nature. It’s about inference to the most likely hypothesis. And on these grounds there’s simply no comparison between neo-Darwinism (for which there is overwhelming evidence) and natural teleology (for which there is none). While one might complain that it’s unfair to stack up the empirical successes of neo-Darwinism with those of a new theory, this, again, gets the history wrong. Teleology is the traditional view; neo-Darwinism is the new kid on the block.

None of this is to suggest that evolutionary biology will not, someday, change radically. Of course it might; any science might. Nor is it to suggest that materialism represents some final unassailable view and that teleology or, for that matter, theism will inevitably be spoken of in the past tense by many scientists. It is to say that the way to any such alternative view will have to acknowledge the full powers of present science. I cannot conclude that Mind and Cosmos does this.

5 November 26, 1860; see www.darwinp roject.ac.uk/entry-2998. Historians of science do not all agree that Darwin wholly banished teleology from his thinking; see the exchange between James G. Lennox (1993, 1994) and Michael T. Ghiselin (1994) in Biology and Philosophy. ↩

6 It’s true that organisms are on average more complex now than they were three billion years ago. But as biologists have long recognized, this doesn’t require any inexorable bias toward complexity. If life starts from a floor of zero complexity, it can on average only get more complicated. ↩

1. Nagel’s work has long attracted the attention of both philosophers and scientists. Indeed the careful reader will notice that I’m mentioned in his new book as a scientist-participant in a workshop that he organized on some of the topics covered in the book; many of the other participants were philosophers. ↩
2. The field of “experimental evolution” is concerned with watching evolution as it occurs. Because of their short generation time, microbes are the focus of much of this work. ↩
3. While I’ve heard this concern before, I must admit that I think I only now understand it. ↩
4. This is not to say that adaptation is rare or that natural selection doesn’t modify the DNA sequences of species. Even species that ultimately go extinct have experienced many previous bouts of successful adaptation. ↩
5. November 26, 1860; see www.darwinp roject.ac.uk/entry-2998. Historians of science do not all agree that Darwin wholly banished teleology from his thinking; see the exchange between James G. Lennox (1993, 1994) and Michael T. Ghiselin (1994) in Biology and Philosophy. ↩
6. It’s true that organisms are on average more complex now than they were three billion years ago. But as biologists have long recognized, this doesn’t require any inexorable bias toward complexity. If life starts from a floor of zero complexity, it can on average only get more.

Index to past discussions -

Index to past articles on "Science & Religion"