Another Dilemma for Evolution: Altruistic "Genes" — The “Evolutionary Psychology” Error

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Mothers make sacrifices for their children not, as evolutionists would have us believe, to protect their genes, but out of feelings of love, affection and protectiveness.

According to the theory of evolution, in nature there is a struggle to death in which only the strong survive. However, it can be observed that living things generally help one another, make sacrifices for each other, and even risk their lives for the benefit of others. To account for this fact, which is totally at odds with the theory of evolution's basic claim, Wilson proposed a number of groundless hypotheses which statements went on to form the basis of sociobiology. Wilson based his explanations on another deception: W. D. Hamilton's "kin selection," according to which a living thing protecting its young or another member of the group is not engaging in altruistic behavior, but is actually protecting its own "selfish genes." Since the objective is to pass on its genes to subsequent generations, and since a mother's genes exist in her offspring, then a mother defending her offspring at the cost of her own life is effectively defending her own genes. In other words, selfishness actually underpins her self-sacrifice!

This is a most nonsensical claim! First and foremost, no animal in nature possesses awareness of its own genes, and therefore can't feel motivated to protect them. In addition, it can't know that its genes are also present in its offspring or cousins, and so it has no reason to sacrifice its life for them. It is impossible for genes—unconscious chains of molecules—to direct a living thing in this way.

Moreover, there are many instances in nature of animals assisting not just those of their own species that bear their own genes, but others as well. Evolutionists cannot explain this, because the idea that a creature engaging in altruistic behavior is actually protecting its own genes is totally nonsensical.

Neither is the evolutionists' quandary resolved by claiming that the urge to protect its young is encoded in the genetic structure of living things, because then the question arises of how such complex behavior was encoded in the genes in the first place. The theory of evolution can't explain how even a single gene might have come into existence through coincidences, so it's impossible for it to explain how information encoded in the genes could have come into being by chance. Every piece of information encoded in the genes is the creation of God, the Lord of infinite knowledge and wisdom.

Sociobiologists seek to apply the same claim about animals' altruistic behavior to human beings. In other words, when a mother protects her child from danger without a moment's hesitation, she is actually concerned over protecting her genes. Evolutionists' rejection of attributes belonging to the human soul and their attempts to account for such phenomena in terms of evolution are based on no scientific evidence whatsoever. With their illogical claims, evolutionists disregard the human consciousness and conscience. The fact remains that a human being is possessed of a soul and the capacities for reasoned thought and judgment, and can distinguish between right and wrong. When a mother makes a sacrifice for her child, she does so because she loves that child, feels affection and compassion for him, and makes that sacrifice because she sees him as weak and assumes the responsibility of protecting him. When her child is in pain, for instance, she puts herself in the child's position and will be prepared to make any sacrifice to relieve his pain. These are attributes that a robot or "gene bearing machine," so beloved of evolutionists, can never possess.

In fact, evolutionists are well aware that evolution can never account for attributes belonging to the human soul. For example, the evolutionist Robert Wallace says the following in his book The Genesis Factor:

I do not believe that man is simply a clever egotist, genetically driven to look after his own reproduction. He is that. But he is at least that. He is obviously much more. The evidence for this is simple and abundant. One need only hear the Canon in D Major by Johann Pachelbel to know that there are immeasurable depths to the human spirit...¹⁸⁷

Wallace stresses a point of the greatest importance. According to evolutionists' unrealistic definition, a human being is merely a machine bearing genes. It's thus impossible for such an entity to take pleasure from music, enjoy watching a film or even to produce one, to read or write books, to learn what has been read, or to exchange ideas. Human beings are clearly very different from how evolutionists portray them, and everyone can see the proof of this in themselves. Evolutionists' unscientific claims can never answer the questions of how a human being, with a capacity for deep thought and feeling emotions and enjoyment, came into being, and what was the origin of those characteristics.

Baby Killings: A Barbarity Supported By Evolutionary Psychology

In 1996-1997 the newspapers reported two shocking cases of baby killings. In the first, two 18-year-old college students brought a child into the world in a hotel room, killed it, and threw the body into a dumpster. In the other, an 18-year-old girl left her school prom and gave birth in a bathroom stall, left the dead child in a garbage can and returned to the dance hall. Both cases resulted in murder charges.

While most people ascribed these events to moral collapse or mental disturbance, Steven Pinker, a professor of psychology from Massachusetts Institute of Technology, offered a terrifying explanation: genetic compulsion. In his article published in the New York Times, Pinker claimed that killing a baby on the day it was born did not represent a mental illness because this had been an accepted practice in many cultures throughout history:

Killing a baby is an immoral act, and we often express our outrage at the immoral by calling it a sickness. But normal human motives are not always moral, and neonaticide does not have to be a product of malfunctioning neural circuitry or a dysfunctional upbringing.¹

The most striking part of Pinker's quotation is the expression "but normal human motives are not always moral." This reveals an abnormality in his way of looking at things. In other words, even if some behavior is immoral, it can still be regarded as legitimate because it is part of "normal" motives particular to human beings. According to Pinker, the killing of a newborn baby when circumstances make that necessary is allegedly "normal" behavior. According to evolutionists' fictitious claims, mothers under primitive conditions need to make a difficult choice between caring for their already existing offspring and feeding newborn ones. Therefore, if a baby is born sick or is unlikely to survive, then she may prefer to try again by eliminating that individual. This assumption is neither scientific nor true, of course. Nevertheless, a Darwinist mindset propels Pinker to endorse this savagery.

This claim proposed by Pinker and others like him will do obvious damage to society. When the concept of genetic compulsion is advanced in moral choices, then someone who commits murder can say, "I had to do it—my genes made me." In such a case, since genes cannot be punished, there is no crime and no criminal. In his claims, Pinker is discounting human reason and conscience, imagining that everything can be explained in terms of genes. Encountering a reaction from society, he makes a few changes to his terminology, but this time finds himself in an internal inconsistency.
One of those to criticize Pinker was Andrew Ferguson, who wrote in The Weekly Standard:

They make us see it not as a moral horror, but as a genetically encoded evolutionary adaptation...²

Pinker is able to defend the claims in question despite their resting on absolutely no scientific evidence. One of the criticisms of Pinker's claims is that they consist of nothing more than conjecture based on evolutionists' illusory world views. Ferguson, for example, criticized Pinker's logic and stated that he offered no evidence for his claims. The fact is, all of evolutionary psychology is based on proofless conjecture and the power of the imagination. In his book The Wedge of Truth, Phillip Johnson says:

Basically, evolutionary psychology proceeds by erecting a mountain of speculation on the basis of fragmentary evidence about primitive cultures.³

Ferguson makes this diagnosis on the subject in his criticism:

Conjecture solidifies into fact; the fact then becomes a basis for further conjecture, which evolves into another factual premise, and so on.⁴

1. Steven Pinker, "Why They Kill Their Newborns," New York Times, 2 November 1997.

2. Andrew Ferguson, "How Steven Pinker's Mind Works", The Weekly Standard, January 12, 1998, p. 16.

3. Philip Johnson, The Wedge of Truth, Intervarsity Press, Illinois, 2000, p. 113.

4. Andrew Ferguson, "How Steven Pinker's Mind Works," The Weekly Standard, p. 16.

References

Steven Pinker, "Why They Kill Their Newborns," New York Times, 2 November 1997. ↩
Andrew Ferguson, "How Steven Pinker's Mind Works", The Weekly Standard, January 12, 1998, p. 16. ↩
Philip Johnson, The Wedge of Truth, Intervarsity Press, Illinois, 2000, p. 113. ↩
Andrew Ferguson, "How Steven Pinker's Mind Works," The Weekly Standard, p. 16. ↩
Robert Wallace, The Genesis Factor, New York: William Morrow and Co.,1979, pp. 217-218. ↩