https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=v24CY0BHhiA
Hello there. So I was asked in the comments to do a critique of Dawkins. So I’m not going to exactly do a critique of Dawkins because I can’t be bothered to read most of his stuff. And I think there’s a bigger critique here that needs to be talked about. And that is the critique of the quote theory of evolution. And so what I’d like to do is break this down, let you know what I think people are talking about. I’m gonna make a bunch of claims. Hopefully they’re correct. And then we’ll see how you feel about Dawkins and some of the things that he talks about. I have read most of The Blind Watchmaker and it’s a fascinating book, although it’s very long and very tedious. And of course there’s some excellent points in there. But I think the real key to what’s happening, and I’ve talked about this before, although I don’t think I’ve talked about my videos yet, the overreach of science. So science makes a lot of claims to a lot of things, or at least people make claims and say, oh, science did this and science didn’t do any of those things, like zero of them. So we get confused, right? Well, science gave us electricity. You know, science did not give us electricity. Science gave us the engineering to refine electricity and use it and control it better, but it didn’t give us electricity. And uneducated inventor did that. And that’s part of the problem. A lot of these breakthroughs were done by uneducated people, not all of them. And education certainly helps. And I totally get that, big fan of some forms of education, but a lot of it’s not science. So when Dawkins talks about evolution, what’s he really talking about? Because evolution isn’t a science and it isn’t a theory. So there is no theory of evolution. That doesn’t exist. That is a misuse of the language. There are theories that are part of evolutionary framework, we’ll call it. There are also hypotheses that are part of that framework. There are a bunch of crazy ideas that are part of that framework, some of which are untestable and therefore can never become a science, right? Or can never be tested scientifically using the scientific method. And then there’s a bunch of inferences. And usually when people are talking about evolution or evolutionary theory or Darwinism, they’re talking about all four of these types of things. And you may say, well, what’s the difference between a hypothesis and a theory? And Brett Weinstein does a great breakdown of this. He’s done it many times. Look, a theory is your best hypothesis. It’s the one that’s held up the longest and seems to be the winner in the evolutionary game of hypothesis versus theory. A hypothesis is a crazy idea with a falsifiable test, right? And therefore you can test it and you may have one theory and 10 hypotheses all about the same thing and you don’t know which one’s right. The theory could be right, theory could be wrong. Oh, so far almost all the theories ever have been wrong and they’ve been usurped by newer theories. That’s how science is supposed to work. Science isn’t supposed to give you absolute certainty, it’s supposed to give you a degree of certainty. But usually it falls very short of degree of certainty and just gives you, well, this is the best bet. And fair enough, we need the best bet. Can’t do without any of this stuff. So not trying to denigrate science, but it doesn’t give us what we think it gives us. It doesn’t give us what people claim and those claims are overblown. So what are the crazy ideas? Well, crazy ideas are things that they don’t have a way to be tested, right? They’re non falsifiable. And there’s lots of ideas, like most ideas have that quality. In other words, most of the ideas and many of which may be dead on are untestable. They’re not able to be subject to science. I’m not saying they’re not scientific. I’m saying they can never be scientific. I’m making a much stronger claim here. And it’s weird because this is how I learned about science. Like these are the things I learned about science when I was young. So I don’t know when we forgot all this or what happened or why people don’t know this, why it’s not obvious. I don’t know. I can’t trace it back in my history as to when and where I read all this stuff and who made this clear and who didn’t. I do see it from time to time. People point out science isn’t certainty. Almost all the theories we’ve ever had have been wrong and needed major refinement. This stuff, this is normal. This is the way science is supposed to be. So it doesn’t represent absolute certainty. And so evolution, a lot of it is unscientific. A lot of it is inference. And the inferences may or may not be correct. Some of them are testable and some of them are not. Some of the inferences could be developed into hypotheses, testable, right? But some of them can’t be and some of them don’t need to be and some of them won’t be. So when you’re talking about like the science of evolution, ooh, you know, maybe there is a science that talks about the components of evolution and validates or invalidates some of them, I suppose. But there isn’t really a science of evolution. It’s not like a sub branch of science, right? That’s not how it works. Evolution is just natural science, roughly speaking, if you wanna go with the ancient Greek tradition, which I suggest you do, cause they were right and everybody else has been getting crazy trying to avoid them being right. So I think a lot of this stuff, it just sort of assumes a telos or a purpose or a drive. And it doesn’t really take into account what that means. So John Vervicki likes to say, you know, I don’t assign a telos a purpose to evolution. And well, look, that’s a fair move. You do not have to assign a telos to evolution. But the problem with that is that you haven’t gotten rid of telos. Because evolution seems to be a process or a set of processes, right, that are playing out over time and going a certain way. Like certain direction seems to be implied here. A certain set of, we’ll say, let’s call them mutually supporting goals seem to be emerging within this evolutionary process. Well, what is the evolutionary process acting on or within? Cause I think both are fair questions. Does that have a telos? Right, that would roughly be creation. And I think creation does have a telos. I think there was a creator and I don’t know of a way around this. Although I see people try to make a way around this and they can’t, which is kind of interesting. They keep saying there’s a way around it, but it’s very unsatisfying. It doesn’t seem to work. So the telos either has to be in the creation, in the processes that we’re calling evolution, or in both, could be both. But it can’t be none of those three conditions. It has to be somewhere. Because otherwise, where are we? How did we come to be? Why are we subject to our birth? To Sam Harris’s excellent point, we were not subject to our birth. It’s as near as we can tell. Where did that come from though? Cause it’s not a random event outside of a telos. It just isn’t. Like you have a purpose in life, you have meaning in life. And the telos is part of the thing that gives you meaning. It’s part of your framing. And I’ve talked about this before in many other places. Words and meaning is one place. I postmodern video that I talked about this in. The context plus the content. You, your body, is part of the content, although it’s not all the content, of you. There’s also a context. What should I do with my life now that I’m plopped on this earth, which is a bunch of context, but a green field doesn’t tell you how to walk through it. That’s interesting, right? That’s interesting. So when you’re talking about evolution, it has to have a telos. There has to be a meaning to evolution. Otherwise, what are you talking about? And that’s the problem. Like it’s that simple. You don’t have to get complicated about it. I love these people who are really, really smart. I do. But they don’t have to get complicated. Some of this stuff is easy. It’s just easy. And I always get worried when people are asked easy questions and they can’t answer them right away. Like if somebody asks you, is being good, and you don’t go yes immediately, and then maybe you justify your yes, but you don’t at least go yes immediately, there’s something wrong with you. Like you haven’t thought about this. Like fair enough. Maybe you haven’t thought about it, but maybe you should have. Like maybe you shouldn’t be thinking about it when you’re asked for the first time. Like maybe you should have worked this out earlier in your life, right? Same with telos and meaning. Like meaning is obviously something we co-create through our interactions, through the relationships that we have. And how do we do that? Well, we need patterns to cooperate, right? And you know, when Dawkins talks about evolution, he’s talking about evolution wants this, right? And most of the evolutionary theorists are doing this. Evolution wants this. Evolution doesn’t want anything. Like unless evolution is God, or a God, or an entity outside of time and space, where’s the want? And if it is, it’s got a consciousness, or something bigger than a consciousness, or something consciousness-like, where is all that? Right? Like this is easy. It’s easy. Your speech betrays you, sir, right? Your speech betrays you. Evolution doesn’t want something. That’s not evolution that you’re talking about at that point. It’s an entity. Entities want things, not processes. Processes unfold. They’re emergent. They just do what they do. Now they may not be merely emergent, but they’re certainly also emergent. That may be necessary, but an insufficient description. And otherwise, if evolution doesn’t have a telos, if there isn’t something behind it, right? Something created that it’s operating within, or on, or both, then it’s all random. It’s a brutish, right? And a lot of the evolutionists interpret human behavior the way Hobbes does, as brutish. And I don’t know where they get that from. If that were true, then history wouldn’t have unfolded and we wouldn’t exist, right? Like we form governments and we cooperate together, and sure, there are wars, but they’re rare, historically speaking. Like if you look at the fullness of time and the number of wars, it’s not zero. That’s terrible, but maybe unavoidable. Again, I think war comes when you don’t express anger. Like, can’t express anger, you’re gonna get war. Eventually it’s gonna build up. So I don’t think that the way that the evolutionists talk about their beloved evolution works at all. Like I think it’s crazy talk. They seem to be assigning at least consciousness and purpose to the process, but that makes no sense that it comes out of nowhere and nothing, like that’s not the way that we think about things. So it must be there. And you know, Peugeot’s point is, look, the story the people who believe in evolution tell is not a very compelling one. And I agree, I think it’s an excellent point. It’s not a very compelling story. And it’s not a story that I can live with it, right? It’s not a story I can participate in. And it’s interesting because what the people who talk about evolution do, Brett Weinstein does this, right, they all do it, is how they can be part of that story, how they can participate. Well, we can’t let evolution run amok. Is evolution an egregore now? Like I’m confused, like what do you mean run amok? Like we have to override evolution. Can you? Like isn’t evolution way bigger? Like didn’t evolution precede you and isn’t it everywhere? And isn’t it across species? And you think you can manipulate something that much larger than you? That sounds insane to me, I’m sorry. It just sounds like crazy talk, literal crazy talk. And I think they haven’t given it much thought, right? We now have the power to wipe ourselves out. We always had that power. There’s no point in history where we didn’t have the power to wipe ourselves out as a species. Doesn’t exist, sorry. If you believe that, you just don’t know your history. Honestly, you do not know your history. You need to study more history. And look, populations have wiped themselves out. It’s happened. And you can say now that we’re globally aware and we have nuclear, that was always the case guys. It really was and it still is and it’s not gonna change. And we’re still here. Thank goodness for that. And it is good because being is good and we’re still here and that is good. That’s the way to resolve that by the way. It’s the best way to resolve it, might not be the only way. I, yeah, it’s much ado about nothing. They’re trying to participate with a story that they remove themselves from. Well, there’s evolution out there and it wants something and it’s pushing us towards self-destruction. This is very Rousseauian ultimately. Oh, it’s culture, it’s society pressing down on me. Otherwise I’d be perfect. And therefore we have to take action. Like we, we have to join together and participate to override evolution and steer it the way we want it. What? You’re just playing God at that point. You’re literally just playing God. Like this is just nutty talk at that point. But that’s what they say. They talk like this all the time. And the implications are there, right? They’re usually not so explicit about where that road leads, like where that ends. But look, eugenics is a science. It’s a valid way of applying scientific principles and the scientific method, right? And so I don’t object to it on the grounds of science, but I do object to it on the grounds of ethics. No, I’m a hard no on eugenics. I think it shouldn’t be touched. I don’t even think it should be thought about too much or too heavily or too often, right? I think it’s a thing that we should know about enough to avoid. I think that’s what Hitler taught us. Maybe I’m wrong about that, but I don’t think so. Like I think that was a good lesson. Like don’t try to do eugenics. Don’t try to take over evolution. Don’t try to override evolution. Don’t try to tell evolution where it should be and what it should do. Don’t try to play God effectively because that’s really what Hitler was up to and Stalin too for that matter and Mao and Pol Pot. They were all up to the same thing. It’s an old game. It’s a very old game. You see this in history and people have been wiped out and whole races have been wiped out. That has happened. That will probably continue to happen, unfortunately. But honestly, as an evolutionist, how do you know that’s not what’s supposed to happen? There’s a good question. Like are you smarter than whatever it is that started evolution long before humans existed? Hmm, that’s an interesting question. Or are you one of these people, as many people are, who thinks everything in the past is stupid because we’re smarter? There’s no evidence of that. In fact, there’s negative evidence of that. Our idea of progress, I have a video on the sort of progress virus that you should check out. Do you have it already? Is dangerous. We don’t know what progress is. We don’t know what it represents. Evolution tries a bunch of things and some of them sort of pass and some of them sort of fail. And some of that is based on whether or not a comet hit the earth at a certain time. So the mammals don’t rise until all the super reptiles die as a result of a comet impact as near as we can tell. Well, that’s interesting. So if the comet impact happens sooner, do mammals arise or does something else arise instead? I don’t know. Nobody knows. There’s no way to know, more importantly. That’s not a type of knowledge that can be possessed. And so you can see that their framework is crazy and silly and it doesn’t work. And we wouldn’t be here if the way they talk about evolution were accurate. And so it’s not accurate. Not hard, they’re just wrong. It’s easy. People are wrong about all kinds of things all the time. It’s not a big deal. Like just get over it, move on, learn your lesson, keep going, keep trucking. The world’s a big place. There’s lots of cool stuff to learn. And there’s lots of good to build. And we can build the good. We can move towards the good. And there’s lots of ways to move towards the good. But moving towards the good, it isn’t merely about building stuff because building stuff always has to start from the right place. And the place where you start from to build stuff, to build better things is by utilizing the thing that I value the most and am the most grateful for, which is utilizing your time and attention.