Brief Peeks Beyond by Bernardo Kastrup

Author:Bernardo Kastrup [Kastrup, Bernardo]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781785350184
Publisher: John Hunt (NBN)
Published: 2015-05-29T04:00:00+00:00

4.6. Darwinian evolution: an open door to purposefulness

Rather simply put, the key idea behind Darwinian evolution is that species evolve from other species by the accrual of genetic mutations that provide a survival advantage. This has become known as evolution by natural selection and the evidence for it is overwhelming: it comes not only from the fossil record, but also from comparative genetics and comparative anatomy of living species. Laboratory experiments have also confirmed the phenomenon on a small scale.127

The problem, however, is that Neo-Darwinists conflate the established fact of evolution by natural selection with another hypothesis that is anything but established: that the genetic mutations at the root of the entire process are themselves random or blind.128 I believe such failure to separate belief from known fact is motivated by the Neo-Darwinist program to drive purpose and meaning out of nature.129

Indeed, the notion of ‘random mutations’ is hardly questioned today, hitching an easy ride with evolution by natural selection as if all the evidence for the latter were also evidence for the former. Many people uncritically take these two ideas to be intimately associated, but little could be further from the truth. In this essay, I will make the case that there is no convincing evidence that the mutations at the root of evolution are random, which opens up the possibility that evolution is a purposeful natural process.

Each segment of an organism’s DNA is either associated with a functional characteristic – an aspect of anatomy or physiology – or consists of non-coding DNA with no known phenotypical role.130 This non-coding DNA accumulates over time through evolution due to certain genetic amplification processes.131 For now, let’s consider only the functionally active part of the DNA. It is mutations in this part that lead to speciation, or the creation of new species. To say that the genetic mutations at the root of evolution are random implies this: if we simply looked at the functional changes caused by each raw genetic mutation before natural selection either fixed or deleted it, we should not be able to identify any phenotypical pattern or trend. There should be no preferential direction or gradient in the kinds of functional changes caused by the raw mutations over time. Only after natural selection should this be the case. This way, all the obvious patterns we can identify in the fossil record – as well as all over nature today – are allegedly the result of natural selection alone, the underlying mutations themselves being random.

There are formal randomness tests in information theory.132 Given a data set, we can run one of these tests and verify whether or not the data in it has discernible patterns. For this to be feasible, however, the data set has to be either complete or very densely sampled, since patterns can be easily lost if pieces of information are missing. Let us illustrate this with a simple example. Consider the number sequence below:

1 –2 –3 –4 –3 –2 –1 –2 –3 –4 –3 –2

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