Evolutionary propaganda is an attempt to disseminate an unscientific and irrational belief under a scientific guise and using various misleading means. One of these deceptive methods employed by evolutionists is personification, or ascribing human attributes to non-human entities.
Evolutionary propaganda is an attempt to disseminate an unscientific and irrational belief under a scientific guise and using various misleading means. One of these deceptive methods employed by evolutionists is personification, or ascribing human attributes to non-human entities.
A report on the website ntvmsnbc.com, which represents one of the organisations still engaging in Darwinist ideology’s unscientific propaganda in Turkey can be seen to have resorted to just such a deception. The report in question aired evolutionary fantasies dealing with altruism in human beings under the caption “Evolution taught man co-operation."" (27 February 2006)
Evolution is a supposed process that cannot foresee the future, that possesses no knowledge or consciousness, and that continues by way of blind chance. It is totally nonsensical to use a verb such as “to teach,” that presupposes consciousness, in the context of an imaginary evolutionary process based on blind chance and natural phenomena. Random events based on chance cannot feel, know or teach altruism.
Altruism, one of the moral virtues revealed in the Qur’an, clearly refutes the evolutionist world view, and evolutionists openly admit that it is incompatible with the theory of evolution. The continuation of the ntvmsnbc.com report is examined below and a response is given to Darwinist propaganda so full of logical flaws and deceptions.
Evolutionists’ despairing myth: “It provided such and such an advantage, so that is why it evolved”
The report on ntvmsnbc.com dealt with an evolutionist account developed regarding the origin of altruistic behavior. The tale was accompanied by comments from Dr. James Rilling, Dr. Agustin Fuentes and Dr. Robert Sussman from the universities of Emory, Notre Dame and Washington, respectively. The researchers took co-operation between human beings hunted by large predators as the main theme of their evolutionary tale. They suggested that co-operation was the external expression of the instinct for defense and survival that has come down since very early times. According to this view, human beings developed co-operation in order to avoid falling prey to the savage creatures all around them.
However, this tale is a completely hopeless one for evolutionists, because no explanation as to how co-operation “evolved” is provided, with them merely making do with noting a need to which co-operation responded. This is a deceptive method evolutionists frequently resort to. Scientists stating the benefit from any biological structure or behavior rapidly move on to conclusions along the lines of “that means that this characteristic evolved for this advantage.” The fact is, however, that they are clearly not actually providing a scientific response to the question of “how” the evolution claimed to have taken place in this way actually did so.
The palaeontologist Henry Gee, himself an evolutionist, criticizes the blindness of evolutionist biologists on this subject with an analogy:
… "our noses were made to carry spectacles, so we have spectacles." Yet evolutionary biologists do much the same thing when they interpret any structure in terms of adaptation to current utility while failing to acknowledge that current utility need tell us nothing about how a structure evolved, or indeed how the evolutionary history of a structure might itself have influenced the shape and properties of that structure. (In Search of Deep Time, Beyond the Fossil Record to a New History of Life, Henry Gee, The Free Press, a Division of Simon & Schuster Inc., 1999, p. 103)
The ntvmsnbc.com report stated that altruistic behavior is unique to human beings in these words:
By contrast, .... chimpanzees have been shown not to come to the aid of others, even when it would pose no cost to themselves.
In that case how could the imaginary ape-like ancestors of man have turned into altruistic human beings? As we know, evolutionists maintain that human behaviour is a product of genes and molecular interactions in the brain cells. Can it be proposed in the light of this claim that whichever mutations endowed an ape-like being with the ability to speak by whatever stages also gradually enabled it to feel and think in a human manner? Evolutionists have no answer. Indeed, not the slightest scientific explanation on this subject was offered in the ntvmsnbc.com report, and the tale of the evolution of altruism was merely propagated as a dogma.
Of course human beings can engage in co-operation against wild animals, as they do in sending a shuttle into space. Looking at such examples and claiming that ape-like creatures gradually developed a sense of solidarity and turned into human beings is a fantasy no different to a fairy tale, based on the power of the imagination, and one that moreover cannot be tested scientifically.
It needs to be known that these tales so frequently resorted to in evolutionary propaganda are of no scientific value. Even if popular scientific resources such as ntvmsnbc.com report these as scientific theses from the mouths of scientists, the scientists themselves are perfectly well aware that these are nothing more than fairy tales. The late evolutionist Stephen J. Gould has said this on the subject:
Evolutionary biology has been severely hampered by a speculative style of argument that records anatomy and ecology and then tries to construct historical or adaptive explanations for why this bone looked like that or why this creature lived here. These speculations have been charitably called "scenarios"; they are often more contemptuously, and rightly, labelled "stories" (or "just-so stories" if they rely on the fallacious assumption that everything exists for a purpose). Scientists know that these tales are stories; unfortunately, they are presented in the professional literature where they are taken too seriously and literally. Then they become "facts" and enter the popular literature. (Stephen Jay Gould, “Introduction,” in Björn Kurtén, Dance of the Tiger: A Novel of the Ice Age (New York, Random House, 1980) xvii-xviii)
As we have seen, the tale propagandized by ntvmsnbc.com under a scientific guise actually has no scientifically explanatory quality. Evolutionists are unable to offer a single explanation of solidarity and exhibit a dogmatic attitude that goes no further than expressing their blindly held belief in evolution.
“The biological mechanisms behind co-operation” deception
A similar deception by ntvmsnbc.com is the comments made regarding the biological mechanisms of co-operation. In its report ntvmsnbc.com writes: James Rilling, at Emory University in Atlanta, US, has been using brain imaging techniques to investigate the biological mechanisms behind co-operation.
He has imaged the brains of people playing a game under experimental conditions that involved choosing between co-operation and non-co-operation.
This part of the report seeks to give the impression that co-operation is completely biologically based and that this has been proven by means of brain imaging techniques. However, as with all other attributes regarding consciousness, co-operation is a characteristic that cannot be reduced to matter, and there is not the slightest scientific explanation as to how brain cells consisting of atoms such as oxygen, carbon and nitrogen could give rise to a sense of co-operation. (For more information, click HERE and HERE.)
Co-operation represents a major dilemma for evolutionists
ntvmsnbc.com attempts to give the impression that this tale accounts for the claim of the evolution of co-operation. Yet this misleading endeavor is all in vain. Co-operation manifestly conflicts with the theory of evolution. Edward O. Wilson, a leading evolutionist sociobiologist from Harvard University, has described altruistic behaviour as “the central theoretical problem of sociology.” (Edward O. Wilson, Sociobiology, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1975, p. 3)
For example, some people engage in altruistic behavior by adopting orphans and bringing them up alongside their own children. These altruistic individuals reduce the means and characteristics that provide them with an advantage in terms of survival, in other words their own fittedness, and increase the fittedness of others. Therefore, an altruistic person actually reduces his or her own chances of survival. Yet the theory of evolution emphasizes the individual and selfishness in the struggle for survival. It teaches that only those individuals with the most fitted characteristics can survive and that human beings need to strive to make their own attributes more fitted in order to secure an advantage over other individuals. Therefore, according to evolutionist thinking, altruism should not be carried forward, but rather eliminated. However, the existence of altruistic human beings is a known fact.
An article in the Turkish journal Bilim ve Teknik (Science and Technology) expresses this difficulty confronting evolutionists:
The problem is one of why living things help one another. According to Darwin’s theory, every living thing strives to survive and reproduce. Since helping others will reduce that living thing’s own chances of survival, such behavior should be eliminated in evolution over the long term. Yet it has been observed that living things can be altruistic. (Bilim ve Teknik, Vol. 190, p. 4)
It is also impossible to resolve this problem in terms of natural selection. John Maynard Smith, another leading evolutionist, poses the following question with regard to this problem:
Here one of the key questions has to do with altruism: How is it that natural selection can favor patterns of behaviour that apparently do not favor the survival of the individual? (emphasis added) (John Maynard Smith, “The Evolution of Behavior,” Scientific American, December 1978, Vol. 239, No. 3, p. 176)
As we have seen, the idea that “evolution taught man co-operation” is a desperate tale lacking any consistent foundation.
Conclusion:
The claim that “blind chance taught us to co-operate” is a nonsensical idea adopted as an ideology by those who want other people to believe that they live in a random world. Co-operation is behavior inspired in human beings by God. There is no evolutionary explanation for co-operation being morally “right” and selfishness morally “wrong.” Random phenomena cannot impose criteria accepted as laws by just about everybody, no matter where in the world they may be, when it comes to the rightness or wrongness of certain principles. Neither can they teach these to human beings. It is clear that human altruism is inspired in the soul by its Creator, Almighty God. As we are told in verses from the Qur’an:
""And the self and what proportioned it and inspired it with depravity or taqwa."" (Qur’an 91: 7-8)
