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By Root 733 0

Nature’s methods of foisting false beliefs on us were so subtle they have only recently begun to be detected. By the sixteenth century, some people were beginning to think about reality the right way. But natural selection had long before structured the brain to make science difficult. As we’ll see in later chapters, the brain was selected for taking all sorts of shortcuts in reasoning. That was adaptive in a hostile world, but it makes valid logical reasoning, and especially statistical inference, difficult. Without the ability to reason from evidence, getting things right is a matter of good luck at best.

Second, there is strong evidence that natural selection produces lots of false but useful beliefs. Just think about religion, any religion. Every one of them is chock full of false beliefs. We won’t shake any of them. There are so many, they are so long-lasting, that false religious beliefs must have conferred lots of adaptive advantages on believers. For example, it’s widely thought that religious beliefs are among the devices that enforce niceness within social groups. The hypothesis that organized religion has adaptive functions for people and groups is backed up by a fair amount of evolutionary human biology. It couldn’t have done so except through the false beliefs it inculcates. Of course, all the religious beliefs that natural selection foisted on people made acquiring scientific truths about the world much more difficult.

There is a third reason to doubt that natural selection arranged for us to acquire the true morality. It is really good at producing and enforcing norms that you and I think are immoral. It often selects for norms that we believe to be morally wrong, incorrect, and false. In fact, a good part of the arguments against many of these “immoral” beliefs rests on the fact that natural selection can explain why people still mistakenly hold them.

There are lots of moral values and ethical norms that enlightened people reject but which Mother Nature has strongly selected for. Racism and xenophobia are optimally adapted to maximize the representation of your genes in the next generation, instead of some stranger’s genes. Consider the almost universal patriarchal norms of female subordination. They are all the result of Darwinian processes. We understand why natural selection makes the males of almost any mammalian species bigger than the females: male competition for access to females selects for the biggest, strongest males and so makes males on average bigger than females. The greater the male-male competition, the greater the male-female size difference. We also know that in general, there will be selection for individuals who are bigger and stronger and therefore impose their will on those who are weaker—especially when it comes to maximizing the representation of their genes in the next generation. But just because the patriarchy is an inevitable outcome of natural selection is no reason to think it is right, correct, or true.

In fact, once we see that sexism is the result of natural selection’s search for solutions to the universal design problem of leaving the most viable and fertile offspring, some of us are on the way to rejecting its norms. We can now explain away sexism as a natural prejudice that enlightened people can see right through. In different environments, natural selection has produced other arrangements; consider, for example, the social insects, where the top of the hierarchy is always a female.

Natural selection sometimes selects for false beliefs and sometimes even selects against the acquisition of true beliefs. It sometimes selects for norms we reject as morally wrong. Therefore, it can’t be a process that’s reliable for providing us with what we consider correct moral beliefs. The fact that our moral core is the result of a long process of natural selection is no reason to think that our moral core is right, true, or correct.

Scientism looks like it faces a worse problem than the one Plato posed for theism. At least the theist can admit that there must be something that