After considering the language and order that lay at the foundation of our universe, the theory of evolution takes on a renewed significance. For it did not happen in a wholly chaotic and senseless universe, but in one that is consummately ordered, intricate, and sensible. The naturalist position is that the intelligibility of the universe brought forth intelligence, and emphatically not the other way around. The road from an intelligible universe without intelligent life to one with it is mapped out by the theory of evolution.

The beautiful thing about the theory of evolution is how stunningly simple it is. The mechanism by which simple things become complex things is easily understood at the high school or junior high level. While the origin of life is still mysterious and widely debated, the process of evolution is ready at hand to take the story from there.

The biological history of earth is a sort of catalogue of successful self-replicators. Every specimen that was unable or unfit to reproduce lost out to the posterity of those specimens whose genetic makeup offered a survival advantage.  As species developed different advantageous characteristics, they gradually found their place in their ecosystem. Some became strong predators with sharp teeth, others became very good at hiding, others became poisonous, others became very difficult for predators to catch. The characteristics of all life developed over countless millennia as generations continued to pass on their successful genes to their offspring.

This is the source of all the apparent design in living organisms. Everything about us developed because we would die without it. The evolutionary process exerts a pressure on life that forces it to reproduce only those characteristics that are necessary for survival. Those chance genetic aberration that do not enhance survivability of the species do not develop into species-wide attributes. Thus, it is evolutionary pressure, the dying of the weak and survival of the fittest, that explains why species exhibit the characteristics that they do.

As a simple illustration of this evolutionary pressure, let’s take a predator and prey pair, such as a wolf and a deer. Deer are very fast, making them difficult for the wolves to hunt them. So, only those wolves that are fast, strong, and wily enough to catch a deer will be able to successfully hunt them to survive. Thus there is evolutionary pressure for wolves to become fast, strong, and wily. This in turn creates evolutionary pressure on the deer. Only those that can escape the wolves will successfully procreate, so deer over time become fast, cautious, alert, etc. The evolutionary pressure on both sides creates a tension that balances the populations of the wolves and deer. That balance, along with the dozens of other related balances in that food chain, form a sustainable ecosystem. The stability of this outcome exhibits the elegance of the evolutionary theory.

It is a compelling narrative, as far as it goes. But when we take a harder look at ourselves and our humanity, it becomes more difficult to imagine ourselves as a result of this process. The defining characteristic of the evolutionary narrative is that diversity in life arises out of necessity. Species take shape and change shape as the weak die off. It is this dying off that creates the “pressure,” so to speak, needed for the form and function of the species to change.

The crucial implication is that a species should never be able to evolve further than evolutionary pressure requires. For instance, once the wolf and deer populations attain an ecological balance, the deer will not continue to become faster and faster over time.  It could not be possible for the deer population to “over evolve” to such a degree that no wolf could ever catch them. This would fly in the face of the evolutionary process. Rather, the wolf population will continue to prey on the slowest and weakest deer, while average and above average deer continue to procreate just above the survival threshold.

The problem with humans is that we have extremely developed characteristics that have no apparent bearing on our survival threshold. We seem to have “over-evolved” in some respects, and that’s not supposed to be possible. It is doubtful that the evolutionary pressure of necessity for survival could have pushed us to our current state.

Our over-evolved characteristics can be generalized in two categories: intellect and creativity. In both cases, evolution can readily explain the origin of these faculties. Intellect is required to solve the countless problems presented to any life form that is trying to survive with limited resources in a hostile environment. Creativity goes hand in hand with intellect toward the goal of survival. Seeing problems with a new perspective or thinking of new solutions would clearly be advantageous to survival. We can thus understand the rise of intellect and creativity in evolved organisms.

The difficulty comes in tracing that line to the present day. Very often a reasonable evolutionary explanation can be offered to get us from A to B, and we are meant to take it on that authority that the explanation will indeed take us from A all the way to Z. But in the realm of human intellect and creativity, this seems an unqualified leap.

We are not simply a species that solves problems for survival. We are a species that yearns for the deepest truth. Through our intellect we have laid bare the laws of nature, the structure of space and time, the secrets of our minds themselves. Our reason has pierced the depths of time, back to the first moments of existence itself. Evolution could conceivably make us as smart as it made the other apes, but what survival need has pushed us so much further? It is strange to think that evolution created in us the capacity for theoretical physics millennia before we ever used it—that while our ancestors were still hunting and gathering, they were evolving the intellectual hardware to delve into the mysteries of the universe. At what point were those incapable of our present intellectual brilliance dying off?

The same problem arises when we consider our artists. Imagery or structured sound as a means of communication would facilitate our social cohesion and provide an advantage over our duller foes. But our art extends beyond mere survival. As some of us yearn for mathematical or scientific truth, others are impelled to expression—not for practical ends but for its own sake. Grunting and cave-wall etchings may have sufficed us to communicate, collude, and survive, but today we compose symphonies, epic poems, and countless paintings. We are reduced to tears at concert halls. We create incessantly. The question becomes glaring: what evolutionary pressure produced this infinite expression?

The Naturalistic Explanation

It is often argued that both intellect and creative expression are advantageous, not only in their own right, but also because they are means of seeking meaning (e.g. of ourselves, of society, of existence). As the argument goes, humans evolved to be meaning-seeking creatures because the identity found in agreement of meaning creates stable and flourishing societies. So, religion, which is in many ways a culture’s culmination of intellect and art, is tightly bound to our evolutionary story, as it is a far-reaching means of social organization. Groups that are tightly-knit around a common identity will fare better against any survival challenges that appear.

At first glance, it is difficult to understand how this helps explain the heights of human capability. While social organization could require a measure of intellect and creativity, our present genius transcends the banality of mere social belonging. It is the nature of childish minds to form cliques and tribes to insulate themselves from outsiders, but again we seem to have over-evolved beyond this childish state. We know that we need only be as clever or expressive as the other great apes in order to survive. They are living proof of that. Yet there is a colossal and inexplicable gap between their intelligence and ours. Evolutionary theory requires some survival need that pushed us—and us alone—to constantly evolve. What kept killing off the dullest among us?

There is only one viable answer: ourselves. Our ancestors, already at the top of the food chain, began to clash with other tribal groups of humans (or pre-humans). These clashes were not the mere exhibition of dominance as we may see between competing males of other species; rather they were clashes that resulted in killing those of the rival population on a large scale. We are the only predator that can kill off the dull and weak of generations that is necessary to explain our evolutionary journey high above the rest of our ecosystem to our present genius. If it were a predator of another species, we would have attained an ecological balance like that of the wolf and the deer. Thus, warfare is ingrained in the human psyche.

If we take seriously the idea that humans evolved to our current state through generations of intra-species warfare, this should drastically change our view of warfare today. While it is uncouth to invoke social darwinism as a cause for warfare, it is difficult to deny that this is in fact what is at work in the world, if we accept the evolutionary narrative. The reason that humans rose above the rest of the great apes is the generational recurrence of warfare in which stronger, smarter groups defeated weaker ones. There is no reason to think that this process has ever stopped. Warfare is embedded deep within our nature, and weaker groups will continue to fall as they have for countless millennia. There should be no expectation of being free of it. This is a glum picture of humanity, and today we like to reject that picture in favor of our liberal and cosmopolitan hopes. Yet it is unclear how to avoid the reality and inevitability of evolution-by-warfare if the naturalistic account of the universe is in fact true.

Rebuttal

While we should not reject the theory on grounds of its glumness, yet there are points where this narrative does not seem to fit easily if at all into our actual present world. Even with intra-species warfare, it is difficult to conceive how generations of brutish warfare between apes produce the cognitive sophistication necessary to achieve the understanding of mathematics and physics that we have today. We didn’t turn our minds to truly investigating the workings of nature until only a few centuries ago, yet we somehow found ourselves already in possession of the necessary cognitive equipment to split the atom and map the human genome. Ascribing this capability to a social need to form group identity around a common understanding of truth is puzzling at best. Surely we can form social identity around simpler truths. We did for millions of years. So again, what pushed us this far?

Secondly, The implication of the “truth as social organization tool” is that, in all our art and theorizing, the objective is not truth. We may come to actual truth as a reliable means of getting everyone to agree, yet it is not the truth that matters, from the evolutionary standpoint. If a group were to arise that valued industrialism and ethnicity above all else and cared nothing for truth itself, they would not necessarily be in a disadvantageous position in terms of survival. The only thing that matters in terms of evolution is their strength relative to their foes.

The further implication for us today is that, while we may think we value truth for its own sake, our love of truth is merely due to its survival advantage. If we accept the evolutionary narrative, we must reject the idea that, in all our theorizing and artistic expression, we are indeed earnestly pursuing truth itself and for its own sake. It was only ever valuable because it was useful. In the end it amounts to propaganda. Nature caused us to seek meaning in ourselves and in the world because it is expedient for survival of our group—not because there is actually meaning to be found.

This is the bitterest implication of naturalistic evolution. It is the final word on the sum total of our search for meaning. The quest unites us but has no end. In a universe made only of matter and energy, what meaning could “meaning” hold for us? If we exist by happenstance; there’s nothing to hold on to, really. We can choose our values or “truths” as we like them, but they hold no significance beyond the social structure that develops around it. We defend our “truths” because nature conditioned us to defend them; we believe them because we’re supposed to. But as for the constant yearning question within us to make sense of our lives, the cosmic joke is that there is no real answer.

When faced squarely, sincere belief in naturalistic evolution yields on the one hand a puzzling internal inconsistency whereby we exhibit a genius that survival never demanded. This is not another millionth chance evolutionary unlikelihood, but rather a violation of the evolutionary mechanism itself. On the other hand, if we accept the evolutionary narrative in the face of this anomaly, the products of human genius are stripped of all transcendent and eternal meaning that we ascribe to them. Meaninglessness is not a disproof of naturalism, but it is an implication that must be confronted.

As a scientific theory, evolution is to be judged on its ability to predict results. It is disingenuous and circular to begin with ourselves as we are today and formulate theoretical narratives that explain our seemingly impossible attributes, only to turn back around and point to ourselves as living proof of these narratives. This is not prediction. And when the narratives themselves strain to abide by the rules of evolutionary theory—as they must to explain ourselves in the heights and depths of our humanity—we are justified in our doubts.