Goofs and Futile Rhetoric of an Evolutionary Biologist

In a previous post I quoted an evolutionary biologist who recently gushed, "But what I aspire to be, more than anything, is an intellectual child of Charles Darwin." Statements such as that may have given you the impression that evolutionary biologists are people fixated on the teachings of one idolized hero, people who fail to properly study many deep topics that should be studied before anyone boasts of understanding human origins -- kind of like the fellow schematically depicted below. 

The 2025 paper "Complexity myths and the misappropriation of evolutionary theory" by evolutionary biologist Michael Lynch is a paper that may tend to corroborate negative ideas you may have about evolutionary biologists. It is a paper full of hubris and crowing, combined with the clumsiest attempts to sweep under the rug or rhetorically minimize the ocean-sized reality of fine-tuned biological complexity. Along the way, the author makes some confessions that help discredit the central claims that dogmatists of his type like to make. 

After its abstract the paper starts out by stating, "Enormous strides have been made in the biological sciences over the past century, and no subdiscipline has experienced greater advancements on the theory side than evolutionary biology." To the contrary, evolutionary biology is still chained to the clueless armchair-reasoning ideas of the nineteenth century biologist Charles Darwin. Evolutionary biologists have made very little progress beyond such erring ideas, and we should not count it as progress when such biologists strayed into the giant deception of making the false claim that DNA or its genes are a recipe, blueprint or program for making an organism or its cells. 

Lynch takes the briefest of lame slaps at something called the Extended Evolutionary Synthesis or EES. The term is an umbrella term for a grab bag of ideas by not-very-contrarian scientists who have noticed how miserably bad today's evolutionary biologists are at explaining the vast complexity and organization in living organisms. Lynch's rebuttal consists only of the name calling of referring to the supporter of this EES as "a small but vocal group of proselytizers," combined with the claim that "virtually every point identified as ignored has been thoroughly evaluated in prior research."  This is almost as lame as saying "you can't say I fail to explain biological complexity, because I mentioned biological complexity." 

Lynch offers a criticism of a recent theory called assembly theory. Some of his points about the weaknesses of that theory are valid. I criticized the same theory in my post here. 

Along the way, Lynch makes some confessions damaging to his cherished dogmas. He states that "there is no evidence that natural selection is in relentless pursuit of more complex molecules, cells, or organisms." But has not so-called "natural selection" been offered for roughly 179 years as the primary explanation for biological complexity, by evolutionary biologists such as Lynch? It almost sounds like Lynch is now hinting that such an explanation was incorrect. 

In the very next sentence, Lynch offers what sounds like the lamest explanation ever for biological complexity, a "only one direction to go in" explanation. He states this: "Of course, today’s organisms are more complex than prior to the Last Universal Common Ancestor (LUCA), but there was only one direction to go four-billion years ago at the first dawn of cells." Similar reasoning might claim that well-built tall moon rockets can be built by tornadoes passing through junk yards, and claim that we should not be surprised by this on the grounds that "there was only one direction to go," the direction leading up towards the sky.  

The claim of "only one direction to go" is false. Once organisms arise with a dependency on a huge library of chemical information in genes, there are two directions that can be traversed, one leading to greater functional complexity, greater organization and more impressive biological functionality, and the other leading to less functional complexity, less organization and worse biological functionality. Random mutations occur all the time, and a large fraction of such mutations tend to cause illness and dysfunction. 

We then have this paragraph by Lynch:

"Microbes have been around for this entire period [4 billion years], and yet have not expanded in complexity. Given their enormous population sizes and short generation times, there were clearly adequate opportunities for the emergence of genomic, molecular, and cellular complexity should it have been at a selective premium. Yet, the origin of morphologically complex cells leading to eukaryotes was a singular event, and the vast majority of the Tree of Life remains prokaryotic. There are roughly 10³⁰ prokaryotic individuals on Earth, three orders of magnitude more than unicellular eukaryotes, and ten orders of magnitude more than the total number of metazoan individuals (reviewed in ref. 19), hardly an observation in support of a determined march toward complexity."

The first statement is false, according to the standard account of biologists. According to their account, there first existed prokaryotic calls much more simple than the vastly more complex type of cells in human bodies, called eukaryotic cells. So, according to the standard account, there was an enormous leap in the complexity of microbes. So why is Lynch claiming "microbes...have not expanded in complexity"? Later in the same paragraph, he contradicts his earlier assertion by referring to the origin of eukaryotic cells. He has no Darwinian or gradualist explanation for this event, referring to it as "a singular event." The standard story among biologists is that this vast leap in organization occurred as a "once in the planet's history" event due to some fantastically improbable accident.  

Ponder how ridiculous the last sentence is in the italicized quote above. Lynch states, "There are roughly 10³⁰ prokaryotic individuals on Earth, three orders of magnitude more than unicellular eukaryotes, and ten orders of magnitude more than the total number of metazoan individuals (reviewed in ref. 19), hardly an observation in support of a determined march toward complexity." This is cover-up-the-complexity talk along the lines of "the microbes vastly outnumber the mammals, so we should not think life is so complex."  Similar nonsense would claim that failed writers vastly outnumber writers such as Shakespeare, so we should not be too impressed by the works of Shakespeare.

The next paragraph is more cover-up-the-complexity nonsense. In one sentence Lynch makes the lame suggestion that we should not be too impressed by bursts of gene innovation in large animals, on the grounds that microbes had bigger bursts of gene innovation. Lynch also makes the false claim that large organisms only required "one new gene per 100,000" years. The claim is utterly unbelievable. Animal life is divided into about 30 phyla. Almost all of these phyla arose around the same relatively short era, during the Cambrian Explosion about 540 million years ago. The origin of such phyla must have required the origin of new genes at a rate many times greater than "one new gene per 100,000" years. The graph below shows the narrative of today's biologists about the origin of phyla during the past billion years, and how many arose during each part of that time. It's a narrative that is inconsistent with Darwinian gradualist explanations.

There follows more "coverup-the-complexity" nonsense from Lynch, such as these sentences below:

"For example, despite their added complexity for DNA replication and repair pathways, metazoans and land plants have substantially higher deleterious mutation rates than do prokaryotes. Despite their substantially more complex ribosomes and mechanisms for assembling them, eukaryotes do not have elevated rates or improved accuracies of translation, and if anything, catalytic rates and degrees of enzyme accuracy are reduced relative to those in prokaryotes (with simpler homomeric enzymes). Eukaryotes have diminished bioenergetic capacities (i.e., growth rates) relative to prokaryotes (21, 22), and this reduction is particularly pronounced in multicellular species (23)."

What is the motive of an evolutionary biologist such as Lynch in making these kind of "mammals are not so impressive" statements? The motive is a complexity coverup. Evolutionary biologists are profoundly embarrassed by the endless stupendous wonders of fine-tuned biological innovation and staggering heights of organization everywhere in the biosphere, which Darwinism does such a very crappy job of explaining. The greater the organization and functional complexity of an organism, the less credible it is to claim that the organism arose from unguided processes like those imagined by evolutionary biologists. So we see in the writing of evolutionary biologists and Darwinists a continual failure to properly describe the vast levels of organization, component interdependence,  information richness and fine-tuned functional complexity of living organisms. And we may read evolutionary biologists writing a paragraph like the one quoted above, saying something that sounds like "mammals are not much better than  microbes" nonsense. 

A silly microbiologist

Lynch makes this claim: "The peculiar details of life’s structures and functions are legacies of historical contingencies, laid down prior to LUCA, which dictate all aspects of molecular assembly and breakdown." The LUCA he is referring to (Last Universal Common Ancestor) is something evolutionary biologists claim existed a billion years ago or earlier.  So the structures and functions of human beings were "laid down prior to LUCA,"  "laid down" a billion years ago?  That's baloney. You could write a very long book describing only human and mammalian functions and structures unlike anything that existed a billion years ago. 

Instead of understanding any such thing as something that dictates "all aspects of molecular assembly and breakdown," today's scientists have no explanation for how the most complex molecules perform the way they do. Scientists cannot explain how it is that a protein molecule is able to form into the folded three-dimensional shape required for its function (a shape not specified in DNA or its genes). And scientists have no explanation for how proteins form into the protein complexes (teams of proteins) so often required for a protein to be useful. Below are some relevant quotes:

• "In real time how the chaperones fold the newly synthesized polypeptide sequences into a particular three-dimensional shape within a fraction of second is still a mystery for biologists as well as mathematicians."   -- Arun Upadhyay, "Structure of proteins: Evolution with unsolved mysteries," 2019.
• "The problem of protein folding is one of the most important problems of molecular biology. A central problem (the so called Levinthal's paradox) is that the protein is first synthesized as a linear molecule that must reach its native conformation in a short time (on the order of seconds or less). The protein can only perform its functions in this (often single) conformation. The problem, however, is that the number of possible conformational states is exponentially large for a long protein molecule. Despite almost 30 years of attempts to resolve this paradox, a solution has not yet been found." -- Two scientists, "On a generalized Levinthal's paradox," 2018. 
• "How proteins fold remains a central unsolved problem in biology. While the idea of a folding code embedded in the amino acid sequence was introduced more than 6 decades ago, this code remains undefined. While we now have powerful predictive tools to predict the final native structure of proteins, we still lack a predictive framework for how [amino acid] sequences dictate folding pathways....Almost seven decades of experimental and theoretical inquiry have not revealed a 'folding code' at the amino acid level, i.e., rules endowed with the generality and predictive power required to connect amino acid sequence to how the protein attains its structure....Machine learning made it possible to identify weak correlations to generate the structure most likely to correspond to a sequence. This tour-de-force effort has largely solved the problem of predicting protein structure from sequence...but with a key limitation: the algorithm that predicts the structure is a complex black box of pattern recognition that casts little light on the process of folding and that tells us nothing about why only some sequences fold, or how physics and evolution are coupled." -- Five scientists in the year 2025 (link). 
• "The real challenge—that remains unanswered after more than 50 years of research in the structural biology field—is understanding the mechanisms that lead proteins to fold into their native state. The reason for these difficulties is that the central question of the protein folding problem remains unresolved: specifically, how a sequence of amino acids encodes its folding pathways." -- Scientist Jorge A. Vila, 2025 (link). 
•  "The majority of cellular proteins function as subunits in larger protein complexes. However, very little is known about how protein complexes form in vivo." Duncan and Mata, "Widespread Cotranslational Formation of Protein Complexes," 2011.
• "While the occurrence of multiprotein assemblies is ubiquitous, the understanding of pathways that dictate the formation of quaternary structure remains enigmatic." -- Two scientists (link). 
• "A general theoretical framework to understand protein complex formation and usage is still lacking." -- Two scientists, 2019 (link). 
• "Most proteins associate into multimeric complexes with specific architectures, which often have functional properties like cooperative ligand binding or allosteric regulation. No detailed knowledge is available about how any multimer and its functions arose during historical evolution." -- Ten scientists, 2020 (link). 
• "Protein assemblies are at the basis of numerous biological machines by performing actions that none of the individual proteins would be able to do. There are thousands, perhaps millions of different types and states of proteins in a living organism, and the number of possible interactions between them is enormous...The strong synergy within the protein complex makes it irreducible to an incremental process. They are rather to be acknowledged as fine-tuned initial conditions of the constituting protein sequences. These structures are biological examples of nano-engineering that surpass anything human engineers have created. Such systems pose a serious challenge to a Darwinian account of evolution, since irreducibly complex systems have no direct series of selectable intermediates, and in addition, as we saw in Section 4.1, each module (protein) is of low probability by itself." -- Steinar Thorvaldsen and Ola Hössjerm, "Using statistical methods to model the fine-tuning of molecular machines and systems,"  Journal of Theoretical Biology

In his zeal to criticize "assembly theory," Lynch makes this damaging confession: "To sum up, all evidence suggests that expansions in genomic and molecular complexity, largely restricted to just a small number of lineages (one including us humans), are not responses to adaptive processes." What? So we don't get expansions in complexity as part of an adaption storyline? That contradicts endless thousands of previous claims by evolutionary biologists that evolution occurs as an adaption to the environment. As a scientific paper states, "The vast majority of biologists engaged in evolutionary studies

interpret virtually every aspect of biodiversity in adaptive terms." 

Lynch's next statement is pure hogwash: "Instead, the embellishments of cellular complexity that arise in certain lineages are unavoidable consequences of a reduction in the efficiency of selection in organisms experiencing high levels of random genetic drift." There is nothing "inevitable" about cells becoming more complex, and Darwinists don't have any credible explanation as to how cells could have increased so enormously in complexity. 

But it seems that Lynch at least has a tiny bit of insight about his own hubris, because he says, "Some readers, probably including the authors of the above-mentioned papers, will argue that there is excessive hubris in the preceding paragraphs," referring to his own claims. Yes, Lynch has indeed been guilty of very bad hubris, groundless boasting, and a very silly attempt to coverup the stratospheric heights of dazzling innovation and information-rich organization in mammals and humans. Such coverups are like a child at the edge of the seashore, trying to push back the ocean by thrusting his palms against  incoming waves.

Lynch's paper has some very bad hubris, particularly at the end when he makes the suggestion that evolutionary biologists may have little more left to do other than "stamp collecting." In an earlier paper he spoke as if the exact opposite was true, confessing that "the mechanisms by which complex cellular features evolve constitute one of the great unsolved problems of evolutionary biology." Two other biologists  in 2006 made a similar confession in the quote below, making a confession that is the exact opposite of the boasts we so often hear from evolutionary biologists:

"Evolutionary biologists assert that variations must be sufficient, though they lack a general explanation for the origin of complex novel structures." -- Biologists  Marc W. Kirschner and John C. Gerhart, "The Plausibility of Life: Resolving Darwin's Dilemma," 2006, page 4 (link).  

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 and dogmatic pontifications on some of 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 discard 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.  There are not even any physics or chemistry factors that can explain the reproduction of any of the more complex cells in a human body, which are so organized and rich in interdependent components that the reproduction of such a cell is a feat as stupendous as a working automobile splitting up to become two working automobiles. 

Beware of AI slop, and beware of narrow-focus didn't-study-enough professors spitting out materialist slop. 

A silly old answer

Exhibit A Hinting That Evolutionary Biologists May Be Worshipful Devotees

At the Undark web site (www.undark.org) we sometimes get first-rate examples of science journalism. But a recent article at that site is just an insight as to how bad is the malfunction in a certain branch of academia. It is an article by an evolutionary biologist (C. Brandon Ogbunu), one entitled "What I Learned From Teaching Darwin." 

Throughout the article Ogbunu makes clear that he is a devotee of his 19th century overlord.  The impression of ardent devotion is created very quickly, as we see a photo of a set of six books on a shelf. Instead of being varied, diverse books that would give us broad knowledge, each one of the books on the shelf is "The Origin of Species" by Darwin. It's kind of like what we might expect to see when visiting a fundamentalist, who had a shelf containing nothing but copies of the Bible. 

A properly thinking biologist might write an essay with a title such as "What I Learned From Studying Organisms" or "What I Learned From Studying Cells" or "What I Learned From Studying Anatomy." But evolutionary biologists instead write articles with worshipful titles such as "What I Learned From Teaching Darwin." 

Ogbunu makes these very laughable speculations about what Darwin would say and do if he were living today:

"He would care about the misinformation crisis, climate science, and have opinions about how to live in a world being upended by artificial intelligence and threats to democracy....His computer desktop would have dozens of folders, some with machine-learning papers, others full of ornithology monographs. And he'd read them all."

This is hilarious. Artificial intelligence and machine learning are examples of engineering, being products of software engineering. Darwin had zero interest in engineering. His complete failure to consider matters of engineering are part of the reason he went so badly wrong in his attempt to explain the wonders of the biological world. What we see in the world of biology is endless examples of purposeful engineering. 

A very important principle is that accidents don't engineer things. But Darwin maintained that all of the stupendous wonders of the biological world were the result of accumulations of accidents (unguided random mutations). His deceptively titled book "On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life" did not actually postulate a theory of selection, because "selection" means conscious choice, and Darwin did not postulate conscious choice as an explanation for the wonders of biology.  If Darwin had honestly titled his main work, he would have given it a title such as "On the Origin of Species by Means of Accident Accumulations." That would have correctly described his theory. "The Origin of Species" used the words "accumulation," "accumulate" or "accumulating" 35 times. 

The problem, of course, is that an accumulation of accidents cannot credibly explain stunning engineering results with a great coordinated wealth of fine-tuned interdependent components, such as we see so very abundantly in the world of living organisms. Darwin swept under the rug this problem by never paying any attention at all to the topic of engineering. So it is  absurd to suggest that Darwin would be interested in today's wonders of technological engineering. 

Ogbunu errs in his attempt to persuade us (in the quote above) that Darwin was an eager scholar of everything relevant to his claims. Darwin seemed to spend zero time studying probability mathematics (so relevant to the credibility of his claims). And he also seemed to pay zero attention to all of the very many reports of paranormal or supernatural  phenomena happening in England while he lived, reports also very relevant to the credibility of his claims. The British scientists of his time who paid attention to such reports included Alfred Russel Wallace and Sir William Crookes, both asserting the authenticity of some of these phenomena. 

Near the end of the article, Ogbunu says, "What I aspire to be, more than anything, is an intellectual child of Charles Darwin."  What an unhealthy-sounding statement that is. You can compare it to healthy-sounding statements a person might make, statements such as these: 

• "What I aspire to be, more than anything, is someone who correctly describes reality and someone who speaks the truth and advises wisely."
• "What I aspire to be, more than anything, is a good person who helps others." 
• "What I aspire to be, more than anything, is someone who teaches the facts of nature correctly, and someone who informs people about the most important facts scientists have learned." 

Guys like Ogbunu think they are walking in the path of Darwin, but they are not really doing that. Darwin was no parroting devotee of any authority. Darwin made conclusions based solely on what he had learned about nature and his own analysis and reasoning, instead of appealing to the authority of any previous thinker.  Those who keep  parroting Darwin's outdated conclusions are not following such a path of independent analysis of nature, but are instead following the "devotion to an old authority" path that is antithetical to the true spirit of science. 

Well-functioning science ends whenever fervent Darwinism begins. 

Postscript: I see that Ogbunu has a series of posts at the Undark.org site. The posts are mostly essays that are better work than the post of his I criticized above. 

Coverups of the Unfitness of Biology Theories Resemble Coverups of Presidential Unfitness

 The American publication "The Atlantic" has long seemed to have been a supporter of the Democratic party in the United States. For many years the publication has published articles that tend to tell us about the failures of the Republican party in America, and gloss over failures of the Democratic party in America. So I was rather surprised to read the shocking story below:

The article was entitled "An Autopsy Report on Biden's In-Office Decline." It is about cognitive problems experienced by Joe Biden while he was US president from the year 2020 to the year 2024. 

The lines below the title read this:

“ 'Five people were running the country,'  a political insider told the authors of the new book Original Sin. 'And Joe Biden was at best a senior member of the board.' "

We read this in the article:

"[The book] Original Sin suggests...Biden may have been losing his grip before he took his oath of office [in early 2020].  If this is true, Americans unwittingly voted for and were led by a president who was not up to the job, a state of affairs that certain among the Biden faithful seemed committing to concealing."

We read about various cognitive and memory problems that Biden displayed while US president from the year 2020 to 2024. We read about how a certain shadowy group of people seemed to be dedicated to covering up this reality. Biden won enough delegates to secure the Democratic party nomination in the year 2024, without being challenged by any major figure in the party. No governor of a US state challenged him for the nomination, and no US senator challenged him for the nomination. The only governor, senator or congressman challenging Biden for the Democratic party nomination was a little-known US congressman.  The biggest figures in the Democratic party kept telling a story in the first half of 2024 that Joe Biden was fit to be president for another four years. That story was apparently not true. 

But after a disastrous debate performance against Donald Trump, Biden dropped out of the presidential race. His vice-president Kamala Harris then received the Democratic party nomination, and lost in the year 2024 election, losing to Donald Trump. 

You can summarize what went on like this: things were terribly wrong with the story line the Democratic party leaders were telling; but those party leaders kept telling that misleading story line. The thing that was terribly wrong was that Joe Biden was not fit to be running for re-election in the year 2024. But the leaders of the Democratic party kept their mouths shut about this unfitness, until Biden dropped out of the race. Such leaders misled us by telling us an "all is well" narrative that was not at all true. 

There is strong reason to suspect that many members of the other major US political party (the Republican party) are massively guilty of the same type of deception. These days the strange actions and strange speech of the current US president (Donald Trump) cause very many to worry that the current US president is unfit for his job. 

Very many are worried about the possibility of cognitive decline in the 79-year-old US president, including the Governor of California who not long ago said. "He's not all there." About July 16, 2025 President Trump complained about the appointment of Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell, apparently forgetting that Trump himself had given Powell the job of Federal Reserve Chairman. In late July, 2025 President Trump gave us a weird angry rant denouncing wind-power, a rant that some interpreted as a sign of cognitive decline. It included senseless-sounding claims such as the statement, " We will will not allow a windmill to be built in the United States, they’re killing us." Trump has repeatedly been photographed at meetings, looking as if he had fallen asleep. In a recent speech he four times referred to "Iceland" when he actually meant "Greenland." But leaders of the Republican party keep pushing an "all is well" narrative that seems to defy what the public observes. 

An article mentions a letter Trump sent recently:

"Witness his recent unhinged letter to Norway’s prime minister, Jonas Gahr Støre, in which Trump implied that he was entitled to seize Greenland owing to Norway’s failure to award him the Nobel Peace Prize. Where to begin? Norway’s government doesn’t choose the winner of the prize. Nor does it own Greenland."

The same article notes that in a long speech at the Davos forum in Switzerland, Trump repeatedly referred to Greenland using the word "Iceland." Trump recently misidentified his own father's birthplace, saying his father was born in Germany. His father was actually born in New York City. Then there is Trump's recent hasty abandoning of aspirations to win a Nobel Peace Prize, by the reckless launching of an illegal unprovoked war against Iran, causing many who had once supported him to say that this was the opposite of what he had promised voters. The stupidity of the war quickly became apparent as we saw the bombing of the Shajareh Tayyebeh all-girls elementary school, with more than 170 being killed, a large fraction of them young Iranian girls. The launching of the war by Trump was illegal. The US constitution gives the US Congress the power to declare war, and there was not even any congressional vote authorizing the war. 

In April 2026, Trump's language became ever more unhinged. In a televised address to the nation on April 2, 2026, he said of the Iranians, "We're going to bring them back to the Stone Ages, where they belong." Trump then issued  on April 5, 2026 a social media post  threatening to make Iran a "hell," combined with obscene language, and the mocking statement, "Praise be to Allah."  Then on April 7, 2026 Trump said this about Iran in a social media post: "A whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again." Very many were terrified that Trump would launch nuclear weapons on that night. Many in the US Congress responded by demanding that Trump be removed by means of the US Constitution's 25th Amendment, which allows for the removal of the president by a majority vote of his cabinet, whenever the president is unfit for office.  

Today there is an article on how Trump recently posted an AI-generated image depicting himself as a healing Jesus with a ball of light in his right hand. But the carnage he caused in Iran is the opposite of healing. 

There are some aspects of this situation comparable to the situation in biology today. When biologists attempt to explain things, they keep resorting to a very old theory of biology, the theory of Darwinism that was contrived in the middle of the 19th century, when no one understood the gigantically  organized complexity of cells and human biochemistry. It is now clear that such a theory is enormously unfit as a theory to explain the vast heights of biological organization we observe. Advances in biology have revealed the enormous levels of hierarchical organization, fine-tuning, information richness and component interdependence in living organisms. Such advances have shown that Darwin's theory of accidental biological origins is very much unfit to account for the wonders of biology we observe, which everywhere look like accidentally unachievable works of the most brilliant engineering. But our biology professors keep pushing a misleading "all is well" narrative, claiming their moldy old 19th century explanation explains things well. 

Just as the leaders of the Democratic party and the Republican party kept pushing a story line of "the very old guy is fit for the job" despite lots of evidence suggesting that this was not the case, the leaders of biology keep pushing a story line that the very old explanation of so-called natural selection is fit for the job of explaining wonders of biochemistry and cellular biology a billion times more impressive than anything Darwin ever learned about. We are being misled and misinformed by people who we trusted to tell us the truth. 

The leaders of biology also continue to sell us a "brains make minds" theory dating from centuries ago, despite a huge wealth of evidence that such a theory is just plain wrong. That evidence is discussed at the greatest length in the posts of my blog here.  The leaders of biology ignore such evidence, continuing to teach their outdated and discredited old theory of what causes minds, telling us "all is well." 

It seems these days the misleading "all is well" salesmen of very old and unfit biology theories are like this:

And it seems that in recent years the misleading "all is well" salesmen in both US political parties have been like someone who designs a presidential campaign ad like this: