Evolutionary Jeopardy

A Field Report from Peterson Academy’s “Evolution Inference”

Ever wonder if the Discovery Institute authors and other Darwin critics are knocking down a “straw man,” or a weak, tired, obsolete version of neo-Darwinian theory (NDT)? Or if some cutting-edge version of NDT overcomes the ID challenge? To find out, I enrolled in Peterson Academy’s 2024 online course, “Evolution Inference.”

What a fascinating eight-hour presentation! Taught by nationally known evolutionary biologists Drs. Heather Heying and Bret Weinstein, the course promised to “explore the fundamentals of the biology of evolution, providing tools to interpret the natural world through the lens of evolutionary inference.” I enjoyed learning about animals and plants from all over the world that are uniquely tailored to prosper in their environments. But does “Evolution Inference” present a new or improved NDT that sprints ahead of its critics?

An Awkward Incoherence

NDT typically says that all species of life-forms on Earth exist as products of evolution from earlier common ancestors. Evolution proceeds in four basic phases:

1. An organism’s genetic material is modified—“mutated”—by an undirected process;

2. The mutation gives the organism an advantage so that it survives and reproduces more readily in the environment than the non-mutated ones;

3. The mutation is “heritable,” i.e., it is passed to the organism’s offspring; and

4. The process of “natural selection” occurs as the mutated organisms increase in greater numbers compared to their non-mutated cousins because they have greater “fitness.”

The course scarcely mentions NDT in this way, however. Instead of relying on the so-called “blind, pitiless, indifference” of material processes, it says that:

Every single creature that has ever lived, and presumably every creature that has evolved on any other planet that might have them, has the same purpose.

What is that common purpose? Quoting Dr. Weinstein:

The actual purpose is to lodge one’s genes as deeply into the future as you can get them.… the goal of all evolved creatures is to lodge their genes as deeply into the future as they can.

A couple of times the speakers deny they are “trying to ascribe consciousness or forward-thinking to evolution,” but in teaching that all biological organisms have a “purpose,” they are not holding to a “mindless-random-mutation-plus-natural-selection” vision of evolution. So as it turns out, the course awkwardly holds to the usual materialist worldview—that lifeforms are just matter and energy—while also saying all lifeforms have a purpose, which isn’t consistent with materialism.

“It Just Happens”

The course advises that biological evolution really should be called “adaptation,” which is “a combination of two things”: (1) “selection,” i.e., “a filter that lets certain things through,” and (2) “heredity,” i.e., the means by which new or modified “traits” will “come together” to “successfully allow creatures to lodge their genes into the future.”

New and modified traits are crucial to NDT, but the course never explains how traits are encoded or modified. The standard terms “mutate” and “mutation” only appear a total of three times (combined) in the course’s more than 80,000 spoken words. The lesson discussing macroevolution (large-scale changes) condenses the entire NDT engine to:

Mutations happen, and then selection hits, and we end up with, often, a process by which complexity evolves.

I heard this statement and wondered, Is that all they’re going to say about the evolution inference? Alas, indeed, little more was said.

The course teaches that natural selection “filters” out traits that aren’t helpful to the organism’s “purpose” of deep-future gene transmission. Yet a plan to preserve genes into the future is only coherent within a theory that presupposes some form of intelligence behind the goal.

A Game of Begging the Question

The speakers taught the course using their coined term, “evolutionary jeopardy.” Like the TV game show, they give the answer first. The “answer” is a description of a certain animal’s specialized feature or function. The students are then to formulate the “ecological question” that the adaptation “answers.” Here’s one example based on a behavior exhibited by leafcutter ants:

Leafcutter ants cut leaves. What is the question to that answer? That is an evolutionary answer to some ecological question [leafcutter ants] are presented with. What might they be answering?

For background, leafcutter ants haul leaves into the colony, where fungus grows on them; the ants then feast on the fungus. Before I share what the right “question” is, consider this teaching method. The given “answer” is a fully formed and operational hardware and software system that exists now and which serves the animal’s survival and reproduction. Evolutionary jeopardy starts by observing the animal’s functions and then the students are to figure out why or how these functions benefit the animal.

In this game, the right “question” won’t be, “How did evolution produce this system?” or, “How did a series of random genetic mutations over the course of thousands or millions of generations lead to this fully functioning system?” No, in this game the teachers say the “right question” is, “How does this animal’s special feature effectively solve the challenge of its environment?”

Notice that neither the question nor the answer in this game shows how NDT works to build new body plans, organs, limbs, or the fully functional subsystems within systems we observe today. The “question” that the ants’ leaf-cutting operation “answers” is: “How might a beneficial farming system feed the colony?” In this way, the leaf-cutting behavior is implicitly put forth as “proof” that evolution solved the problem of feeding the colony.

Behavior Is Software

The course concedes what I and others have been writing about for years: animal behaviors are software. The speakers themselves presume pre-engineered software exists when they describe baby sea otters, for example:

A software program is built for the offspring after they are born. And that software package allows it to be tailored to the specific piece of environment where that offspring is going to live.

But the course never describes how an animal’s behavior software is coded, stored, retrieved, decoded, or executed, let alone modified to carry out new functions in changing situations. Referring to how some bats build residential tents, one speaker admitted:

I suspect we will never know how much of the [behavioral] program is being handed off genetically. Do these animals have an impulse to make these tents that they then fulfill through trial and error as they tear at leaves and they collapse not quite? [sic] Don’t know. Or is it entirely cultural?¹

Evolution Inference left that necessary-behavior part of animal evolution entirely unaddressed.

Still Unexplained

In this course, I loved learning about plants and animals with ingeniously designed features and behaviors. As of 2024, however, it appears that evolutionary biologists cling to a materialist worldview and still cannot explain how neo-Darwinian evolution produced, modified, or refined ancient hardware and software to produce the species we see today.

Note
1. Some bats build a home by strategically chewing the underside of a large leaf until it partially collapses over them, creating a tent. The instructors contend the behavior evolved, but they do not explain anything about how.