What Darwin had to say...

Excerpts from Darwin's The Descent of Man

Darwin's silly idea

In a recent  episode of Tony Robinson's Britians Ancient Tracks: The North Downs Way, he came to Down House, Darwin's family home; and had this to say:

My last stop on the North Downs Way is at the house of someone who knew these downs intimately and drew a conclusion from them that turned religion on its head.
Charles Darwin is one of the greatest thinkers in history. And his theories on nature  made us re-examine our place in the world. In 1842 after his round-the-world trip on HMS Beagle, Darwin moved to Down House, just off the North Downs Way.
[narrative about his study decor]
And it was here that Charles Darwin wrote a book that transformed our understanding of us within the universe and that book was ‘The Origin of Species’. And he wrote it here. I think that’s really exciting. Darwin’s book ‘The Origin of Species’ marked a dramatic turning point in scientific thought, that life on earth was a process of evolution and not an act of God.

Note the emphasised words. Robinson is an 'ordinary bloke'. Not a scientist, not an academic or an expert in the history of science and ideas. He's a 'simple' film maker, so what he says represents what the ordinary everyday understanding is; and here it is, of Darwinian evolution: it doesn't point to God for him or his typical viewer; it obliterates God, it certainly changes our understanding of us within the universe and our place in the world, because by Darwin's theory, basic reality is not personal, not about love and relationships, but about mute, meaningless, randomly interacting buffeting matter. Mindless, loveless and without hope, will or significance, because the only significance-givers: minded beings, are mere arrangements of matter in a cosmos that is basically matter. So nothing 'matters'!

The rhetoric of theistic evolution falls flat for the ordinary person; evolution doesn't turn them to a creator, but inward to their own reference point: themselves and their 'feel good' scale of evaluation. A dead end!

The risible madness of evo-pop

From Inspiring Leadership by Fleming and Delves (p. 60), Matt Nixon's chapter:

We have not evolved nearly as far from the apes as we like to think we have. Indeed, one of the most intriguing quesitons about the human species is why our brains ever needed to get as big as they have. For some people that is a sign that we have not yet fully exploited the potential of our brains, but for others it is a sign that they mainly evolved the way they did to accommodate our tremendoues need for social processing (quoting Lieberman, 2018, Social, Why our Brains are Wired to Connect)

1. the standard theory is that we evolved from 'ape-like' organisms, not apes per se.

2. our brains didn't 'need' to be any particular size; evolution doesn't work on 'need' but on selectable chemical accidents.

3. for some people the 'potential' of the brain is unused; so most of the potential must be selectively neutral but, as a big energy user, will be selected out over time. Evolution does not and cannot anticipate possible future states, it is a 'looking backwards' mechanism.

4. how did the brains evolve to accomodate a 'need' for social processing which is only done by the brain? Something usually 'accommodates' what is previously there!

In short a bunch of question-begging teleological assertions, that import into materialist evolution some kind of perceptive force that 'guides' it to a sought future.

Completely incoherent nonsense, of course and the usual popular mumbo-jumbo mangling of an already improbable hypothesis.