No, AI Is Not a "Darwin Moment," and Darwinism Flunked the Software Test

 Yesterday I read an opinion piece in the Washington Post entitled "The Next Darwin Moment Has Arrived." Although the article by John MacCormick was part of some newsletter called Superintelligent, the essay did not sound superintelligent, but sounded rather the opposite of superintelligent.  Containing many misstatements, the article attempted to convince us that advances in so-called "artificial intelligence" constitute a "Darwin moment" doing something to bolster the claims of Charles Darwin about an origin of species by blind, unguided processes. 

John MacCormick is a professor of computer science at the small little-known Dickinson College in Lehigh, Pennsylvania, a professor who has written four books, none of them on topics outside of the field of computer science. Looking at his papers on Google Scholar, I fail to find any evidence of scholarship by MacCormick on topics such as biological origins, biology, neuroscience, physics, biochemistry, philosophy or psychology; and you can get a PhD in computer science without studying any of the topics I just mentioned. So when I cite below enormous errors that MacCormick makes when making the most sweeping statements on these topics, we can charitably attribute his huge blunders to ignorance rather than deliberate deception. 

MacCormick starts out with this false claim: 

"Can computer programs emulate the entire range of human thought, including creativity and intuition? There are good reasons to believe the answer is yes, especially given the recent progress in artificial intelligence."

No, there are not any good reasons to believe any such thing, and so-called artificial intelligence does not actually have any such thing as intuition or intelligence. Human minds do many things that so-called artificial intelligence completely fails to do, such as understand things. No computer understands anything. If you got the impression that a computer understands anything, it is because so much of human-written words have been collected by computers doing web-crawling activity in which online text written by humans is gobbled up by computers, and put in computer databases, databases that are queried to get the smart-sounding answers given in things such as "AI overviews."

The Cambridge Dictionary defines intelligence as "the ability to learn, understand, and make judgments or have opinions that are based on reason." Because computers do not actually understand anything, they do not have any real intelligence. The term "artificial intelligence" is a misnomer not correctly describing what is going on is so-called AI systems. 

MacCormick boasts about "PhD level performance in physics and chemistry." Nowadays the corruption of scientific literature by AI slop is actually a very bad problem. More and more scientific papers contain AI-generated paragraphs that often contain false statements. Here is what an "AI overview" tells us about this problem:

"The proliferation of 'AI slop'  in scientific papers is recognized as a major crisis in academic publishing. It refers to LLM-generated text, fake datasets, and fabricated citations flooding peer-reviewed journals and preprint servers. The issue is largely driven by a 'publish-or-perish' culture and content mills." 

A recent article by Ross Andersen in The Atlantic is entitled, "Science Is Drowning in AI Slop." 

A Google Gemini infographic on AI slop

MacCormick makes this incorrect claim:

"Computer scientists have known since the 1950s that computer programs can, in principle, emulate any aspect of human thought. This is because the digital calculations inside a computer can emulate the inputs and outputs of the neurons in a human brain."

No, computer scientists have never known any such thing.  There is no robust evidence that the understanding and thought that human minds display are produced by brains. The claim that thoughts and understanding are produced by brains is simply a groundless old speech custom of professors such as MacCormick, similar to the groundless old speech custom of claiming that Charles Darwin explained the origin of species. No biologist has any understanding of how a brain could produce thought or understanding.  There are actually very many good reasons for believing that the brain cannot possibly be the source of the human mind. They include these and very many others:

• the fact that there are many dramatic cases in the medical literature of people who had more or less normal minds even though large fractions of the brain (or most of their brains) were destroyed due to injury or disease, including super-dramatic cases of people with good minds but less than 15 percent of their brains;
• the fact that human brains (all very severely handicapped by a lack of any addresses and indexes, cumulative synaptic delays and unreliable synaptic transmission) are way too slow and way too noisy to explain the wonders of human best mental performances, which include endless wonders of blazing fast calculation, blazing fast precise recall, blazing fast memorization,  and the recitation with perfect accuracy of very long bodies of text consisting of hundreds of pages;  
• the fact that there is no understanding of how brains could achieve the instantaneous recall of distant, obscure memories that humans routinely show, given the lack of any coordinate system or addressing or indexing in a brain that might allow some exact position of a stored memory to be very quickly found;
• the fact that there is no understanding whatsoever of how concepts, visual information, long series of words, and episodic memories could ever be physically stored by a brain in any way that would translate all these diverse types of information into synapse states or neuron states;
• the fact that the microscopic examination of very many thousands of brains of recently deceased people (and the microscopic examination of endless samples of brain tissue extracted from living people) has never produced the slightest trace of learned information, something that would have been discovered in brains 50 years ago if brains stored memories and brains are the source of the human mind;
• the fact that for more than 50 years numerous people have reported vivid near-death experiences and out-of-body experiences occurring after their hearts stopped and their brains were inactive, during times when their brains had flatlined, and they should have had no consciousness at all (under "brains make minds" assumptions), with many of the observation details they reported seeing during such brain-inexplicable should-have-been-utterly-unconscious experiences being independently verified (as described here).

MacCormick's  reasoning is something along the lines that artificial intelligence will be so brilliant that it will make us think that we are nothing very special, and therefore make us more likely to believe in Darwinism, the idea that humans and all other life forms arose because of unguided natural processes. This is all very bad sophistry, a case of utterly fallacious reasoning. Artificial intelligence is the result of deliberate purposeful engineering by humans. Getting an impressive result from deliberate purposeful engineering by humans does nothing to show the credibility of claims that stunning results in biology all occur from accidental unguided processes that do not involve deliberate purposeful engineering.

MacCormick is using fallacious reasoning similar to the appeals to artificial selection long made by Darwinists.  An example of such an appeal is documented in my post here. I describe how Neil deGrasse Tyson described an artificial selection by which human dogs arose from wolves, due to the purposeful intervention of humans over many thousands of years, humans interested in getting domesticated dogs. Tyson used this as evidence of the power of natural evolution, saying it helped show that natural evolution can produce "all the beauty and diversity of life." The reasoning was fallacious. The domestication of dogs was an example of purposeful, deliberately directed artificial selection. You do not do anything to show the power of unguided, undirected natural evolution by showing something that occurred by  purposeful, deliberately directed artificial selection. 

Similarly, you do not do anything at all to substantiate Darwinism (a theory that biological organisms all arose from unguided natural events) by referring to some impressive results coming from so-called artificial intelligence (the result of purposeful engineering by humans). Impressive results coming from AI server farms manufactured by humans do not do anything to show the power of unguided Darwinian evolution to produce impressive results in biology. 

In his article MacCormick makes some of the false claims that occur so commonly in the articles of Darwinists. He states this:

"First, life itself was once thought to have a unique quality that distinguishes it from inanimate matter. This theory, known as vitalism, died out in the early 20th century and today has no scientific credibility. Modern biochemistry has revealed that all life can be explained in terms of physics and chemistry." 

The claim about life having no "unique quality that distinguishes it from inanimate matter" is very false. Life has many qualities that distinguish it from from inanimate matter. The claim that vitalism "died out in the early 20th century" is equally false. Vitalism survived, and still has many adherents.  The claim that "modern biochemistry has revealed that all life can be explained in terms of physics and chemistry" is enormously false. To the contrary, there are endless mysteries of life that physics and chemistry utterly fail to explain. 

Scientists lack any credible explanation of so simple a thing as how human cells are able to reproduce; they lack any credible explanation of the most basic mental processes such as thinking and memory; scientists lack any convincing explanation of how proteins are able to fold into the 3D shapes needed for their function; scientists are unable to explain how so many useful protein complexes (often called "molecular machines") are able to form; and since DNA is not a specification for making a human, or any organ, cell or organelle, scientists lack any credible explanation for the nine-month progression from a speck-sized zygote to an adult human. For a long and deep discussion of some of these huge mysteries that physics, chemistry and biology have gigantically failed to solve, read my post "Problems a Hundred Miles Over Our Heads" here, and also read my posts here and here. 

Next MacCormick parrots the worst falsehood told by Charles Darwin, the claim that there are no qualitative differences between animal minds and human minds. Darwin told that enormous lie on page 99 of The Descent of Man when he stated, "My object in this chapter is to shew that there is no fundamental difference between man and the higher mammals in their mental faculties."  MacCormick perpetuates this glaring falsehood by stating this:

"Second, humans were once thought to be qualitatively distinct from nonhuman animals. But since the 19th century, Darwinism has gradually eroded that view."

MacCormick makes the false insinuation that scientists are unanimous in their belief in Darwinism, an insinuation as false as his claim that vitalism went extinct.  He senselessly states "humans must relinquish another supposedly special attribute: the notion that our minds are qualitatively different from other information-processing systems."  As it is perfectly obvious that human minds are in very many ways qualitatively different from all other information-processing systems, I need merely ask: why do Darwinism enthusiasts  continue to make so very many statements like this that are so obviously false?

Instead of computer technology doing something to show the validity of Darwinism, the opposite occurred. What actually happened is that Darwinism flunked the software test. 

There is a way of testing Darwinian claims: by trying to create software that makes use of so-called natural selection and random mutations, trying to achieve software engineering effects by "the preservation and accumulation of successive slight favorable variations," which is how Darwin defined natural selection. When computer programmers started to try this decades ago, some of them were very optimistic. There were quite a few people who thought along these lines:

“Why think of how much natural selection and random mutations have produced in the natural world: all the very complex innovations of biology such as eyes, ears, wings and brains! If we only put natural selection and random mutations to work inside the computer, we can unleash vast forces of creativity. It will be a software revolution. Instead of manually creating programs through human design and human labor, we will be able to evolve software in a Darwinian fashion.”

For decades, many programmers have attempted to get natural selection to work inside the computer. How successful have they been? We can find the answer in a paper by Roman V. Yampolskiy entitled 'Why We Do Not Evolve Software? Analysis of Evolutionary Algorithms.”

Yampolskiy examines attempts to create software by using Darwinian methods. He points out that there is a great deal of hype about such attempts that does not match the meager results. Talking about evolutionary algorithms (EA), Yampolskiy states the following:

"It is interesting to do a thought experiments and try to imagine what testable predictions Charles Darwin would have made, had he made his discovery today, with full knowledge of modern bioinformatics and of computer science. His predictions may have included the following: (1) simulations of evolution will produce statistically similar results at least with respect to complexity of artifacts produced and (2) if running EAs for as long as possible continued to produce nontrivial outputs, scientists would run them forever. Likewise, he would be able to make some predictions, which would be able to falsify his theory, such as (1) representative simulations of evolution will not produce similar results to those observed in nature, (2) researchers will not be able to evolve software or other complex or novel artifacts, and (3) there will not be any projects running EAs long term because their outputs would quickly stop improving and stabilize. With respect to the public and general cultural knowledge, it would be reasonable to predict that educated people would know the longest-running EA and the most complex evolved algorithm. Similarly, even schoolchildren would know the most complex digital organism ever evolved."

Later, after reviewing work in this area, Yampolskiy states that both of the predictions that should have proven true if Darwinism is correct have not proven true. He also states that all of the listed events to falsify Darwinism have occurred. Specifically, representative simulations of evolution have not produced similar results to those observed in nature; researchers have not been able to evolve software or other complex or novel artifacts; and there have not been any projects running evolutionary algorithms long term. Moreover, no one can list the name of the longest-running evolutionary algorithm or the most complex evolutionary algorithm; and no one can name any complex digital organism that ever evolved. "Evolved" here does mean going through purposeful improvements directed by a software development team. 

It is now the year 2026, and the “Darwinian revolution” predicted for software development simply hasn't occurred. Computer programs are still being produced by human design and human labor, and by computer programs that do not use any type of evolutionary algorithm.  There has been some progress in automatic programming by means of code generators, but such code generators don't use anything like so-called natural selection. 

The results of programs running “evolutionary algorithms” are rather trivial things that aren't very complex – things such as character strings. There is no very complex commercially successful computer program that was produced through any type of evolutionary algorithm.  Computer programs using a Darwinian scheme can accomplish some useful things, but it is generally true that such programs could accomplish just as much with fewer lines of code if they were not to use a Darwinian scheme.  Our software engineers have not been able to mine any useful engineering principles from studying the ideas of Darwin, who seems to have had no knowledge of engineering or any interest in it. 

I was a full-time software developer for decades, working for some very large corporations.  I never made use of any Darwinian method while doing software development, and I also never heard of anyone at any company I worked for making use of anything resembling a Darwinian method. I never heard anyone at such companies ever even suggest the possibility of using a Darwinian method.  

A good software developer can probably think rather easily of why a tool such as a random character generator (analogous to Darwinian random mutations) or a random character changer would be worthless in developing useful software products. The reason is that useful software products require very special purposeful arrangements of a huge number of characters, which must be purposefully organized to achieve a useful result.  And it is not true at all that you can do something like accumulate your way to a beneficial result by following methods such as "just save the good characters and discarding the bad characters" or "just save the good words and discard the bad words."   That is because being beneficial in not some early-in-the-game attribute possessed individually by tiny things such as characters or words, but a late-in-the-game quality possessed by purposeful organizations of very many tiny things arranged in just the right way to have a beneficial effect. 

Work in so-called artificial intelligence does not involve any type of evolutionary algorithm anything like so-called natural selection.  The truth is that software engineering applied a major test to Darwinism, and Darwinism flunked that test. Darwinian ideas are worthless in generating useful very complex software inventions.  And Darwinist ideas are worthless in explaining the origin of very complex and enormously organized biological systems containing an abundance of interdependent parts. The  reasons why a Darwinian approach fails to work at creating software inventions are largely the same reasons why Darwinism fails as an explanation for biological organisms that are more complex and more organized and more fine-tuned than any software application ever written. 

I may note the glaring  contradiction involved when MacCormick makes the hugely untrue claim that "all life can be explained in terms of physics and chemistry," while also trying to perpetuate the "Darwin explained the origin of species" myth.  Darwin's ideas were appeals to claimed realities of biology, and were neither physics explanations nor chemistry explanations.  In this regard, MacCormick can't get his story straight. We might ask him: so who was it you think explained life -- was it physicists and chemists, or was it instead a biologist (Darwin) who pretty much never mentioned  physics or chemistry? When making such a claim, guys like MacCormick conveniently fail to mention what these "terms of physics and chemistry" are that they claim explain "all life."  That's because they do not know of any such physics or chemistry explanations.  

There are no physics or chemistry explanations that explain the origin of life from nonlife, which cannot be reproduced in any realistic experiment, with all realistic simulations of the early Earth failing to even "get to first base" in explaining the origin of life. There are no physics or chemistry explanations that explain the nine-month progression from a speck-sized zygote to the full complexity of a newly born human being. People attempting chemistry explanations for such a miracle of organization typically appeal to falsehoods such as the untrue claim that DNA is a blueprint for making a human body (DNA and its genes actually fail to even specify how to make any cell in the body and fail to even specify how to make the organelle components of such cells).  There are no credible physics or chemistry or biology explanations for any of the main phenomena of human minds, such as selfhood, thinking, instant memory creation and instant memory recall. 

A silly old answer