Epistemology vs. Darwin.

Evolution May Obscure Reality, Says a Cognitive Scientist and Evolutionist

Sarah Chaffee

Writing here last month, I explained why Darwinian theory directly undermines UC Berkeley psychologist Tania Lombrozo's argument that our reasoning may be getting better because science is getting better. In truth, naturalistic evolution erodes confidence in human reasoning -- the basis of science.

But it's not only evolution skeptics who realize this. For an article in The Atlantic, Amanda Gefter interviewed UC Irvine cognitive scientist Donald D. Hoffman ("The Case Against Reality"):

Gefter: People often use Darwinian evolution as an argument that our perceptions accurately reflect reality. They say, "Obviously we must be latching onto reality in some way because otherwise we would have been wiped out a long time ago. If I think I'm seeing a palm tree but it's really a tiger, I'm in trouble."

Hoffman: Right. The classic argument is that those of our ancestors who saw more accurately had a competitive advantage over those who saw less accurately and thus were more likely to pass on their genes that coded for those more accurate perceptions, so after thousands of generations we can be quite confident that we're the offspring of those who saw accurately, and so we see accurately. That sounds very plausible. But I think it is utterly false. It misunderstands the fundamental fact about evolution, which is that it's about fitness functions -- mathematical functions that describe how well a given strategy achieves the goals of survival and reproduction. The mathematical physicist Chetan Prakash proved a theorem that I devised that says: According to evolution by natural selection, an organism that sees reality as it is will never be more fit than an organism of equal complexity that sees none of reality but is just tuned to fitness. Never.

Gefter: You've done computer simulations to show this. Can you give an example?

Hoffman: Suppose in reality there's a resource, like water, and you can quantify how much of it there is in an objective order -- very little water, medium amount of water, a lot of water. Now suppose your fitness function is linear, so a little water gives you a little fitness, medium water gives you medium fitness, and lots of water gives you lots of fitness -- in that case, the organism that sees the truth about the water in the world can win, but only because the fitness function happens to align with the true structure in reality. Generically, in the real world, that will never be the case. Something much more natural is a bell curve -- say, too little water you die of thirst, but too much water you drown, and only somewhere in between is good for survival. Now the fitness function doesn't match the structure in the real world. And that's enough to send truth to extinction. For example, an organism tuned to fitness might see small and large quantities of some resource as, say, red, to indicate low fitness, whereas they might see intermediate quantities as green, to indicate high fitness. Its perceptions will be tuned to fitness, but not to truth. It won't see any distinction between small and large -- it only sees red -- even though such a distinction exists in reality.

Gefter: But how can seeing a false reality be beneficial to an organism's survival?

Hoffman: There's a metaphor that's only been available to us in the past 30 or 40 years, and that's the desktop interface. Suppose there's a blue rectangular icon on the lower right corner of your computer's desktop -- does that mean that the file itself is blue and rectangular and lives in the lower right corner of your computer? Of course not. But those are the only things that can be asserted about anything on the desktop -- it has color, position, and shape. Those are the only categories available to you, and yet none of them are true about the file itself or anything in the computer. They couldn't possibly be true. That's an interesting thing. You could not form a true description of the innards of the computer if your entire view of reality was confined to the desktop. And yet the desktop is useful. That blue rectangular icon guides my behavior, and it hides a complex reality that I don't need to know. That's the key idea. Evolution has shaped us with perceptions that allow us to survive. They guide adaptive behaviors. But part of that involves hiding from us the stuff we don't need to know. And that's pretty much all of reality, whatever reality might be. If you had to spend all that time figuring it out, the tiger would eat you.

We cannot depend on evolution to give us the ability to grasp truth. Darwinism doesn't necessarily reveal reality to us; it can hide it. Here is research Hoffman published in the Journal of Theoretical Biology making the same argument. The idea that evolution doesn't necessarily generate an ability to grasp truth doesn't just come from advocates of intelligent design. And it has many serious implications.

In her recent book, Finding Truth: 5 Principles for Unmasking Atheism, Secularism, and Other God Substitutes, Nancy Pearcey highlights logical inconsistencies in holding to evolution. She notes: 

An especially damaging form of contradiction is self-referential absurdity -- which means a theory sets up a definition of truth that it itself fails to meet....An example of self-referential absurdity is a theory called evolutionary epistemology, a naturalistic approach that applies evolution to the process of knowing. The theory proposes that the human mind is a product of natural selection. The implication is that the ideas in our minds were selected for their survival value, not for their truth-value. 

But what if we apply that theory to itself? Then it, too, was selected for survival, not truth -- which discredits its own claim to truth. Evolutionary epistemology commits suicide.

Philosopher Thomas Nagel takes this in a slightly different direction in The View from Nowhere, noting how evolution can't produce our modern science:

In themselves, the advanced intellectual capacities of human beings, unlike many of their anatomical, physiological, perceptual, and more basic cognitive features, are extremely poor candidates for evolutionary explanation, and would in fact be rendered highly suspect by such an explanation. I am not suggesting, as Kant once did..., that reason has negative survival value and could from that point of view be replaced by instinct. But the capacity to form cosmological and subatomic theories takes us so far from the circumstances in which our ability to think would have had to pass its evolutionary tests that there would be no reason whatever, stemming from the theory of evolution, to rely on it in extension to those subjects. In fact if, per impossibile, we came to believe that our capacity for objective theory were the product of natural selection, that would warrant serious skepticism about its results beyond a very limited and familiar range. 

Purely naturalistic neo-Darwinism is self-defeating in its illogic. The consequences of this truth are far-reaching. Those consequences should include, at the very least, treating evolution as an ordinary idea, not as sacred dogma, while being open to considering other possibilities.