Scientific study of the brain’s evolution: it is supremely ironic that Dawkins relies on his brain to deny the implications of its unified complexity

The Half-Truths of Materialist Evolution

BY DONALD DEMARCO


“The thing from which the world suffers just now more than any other evil,” wrote author and Catholic convert G.K. Chesterton, “is not the assertion of falsehood, but the endless and irrepressible repetition of half-truths.”

Jean-Paul Sartre emphasized freedom, but denied morality. Sigmund Freud stressed instinct, but suppressed the spiritual. Friedrich Nietzsche glorified the individual, but disdained the community. Karl Marx celebrated the community, but rejected the individual. Charles Darwin was enamored of empirical science, but excluded metaphysics.

It is an all-too common theme. Chesterton, himself, I am happy to note, was not speaking in half-truths.

More contemporaneously, Richard Dawkins has joined the throng of those who pitch half-truths to a naive public by separating blind chance from intelligent design. Two sentences from his bestselling book The Blind Watchmaker (1986) capture the author’s view about cosmic evolution, one he has consistently maintained throughout his career:

“In a universe of electrons and selfish genes, blind physical forces and genetic replication, some people are going to get hurt, other people are going to get lucky, and you won’t find any rhyme or reason in it, nor any justice. The universe that we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil, no good, nothing but pitiless indifference.”

There are many holes in this position, but I would like to direct attention to the unsupportable notion that the human brain, to focus on a single phenomenon, could possibly have evolved by sheer chance. One of the great stumbling blocks for Darwin and other chance evolutionists is explaining how a multitude of factors simultaneously coalesce to form a unified, functioning system. The human brain could not have evolved as a result of the addition of one factor at a time. Its unity and phantasmagorical complexity defies any explanation that relies on pure chance. It would be an underestimation of the first magnitude to say that today’s neurophysiologists know more about the structure and workings of the brain than did Darwin and his associates.

Scientists in the field of brain research now inform us that a single human brain contains more molecular-scale switches than all the computers, routers and Internet connections on the entire planet! According to Stephen Smith, a professor of molecular and cellular physiology at the Stanford University School of Medicine, the brain’s complexity is staggering, beyond anything his team of researchers had ever imagined, almost to the point of being beyond belief. In the cerebral cortex alone, each neuron has between 1,000 to 10,000 synapses that result, roughly, in a total of 125 trillion synapses, which is about how many stars fill 1,500 Milky Way galaxies!

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