Saturday, March 23, 2019

Creation Moment 3/24/2019 - Grandparenting & Evolution

After this lived Job an hundred and forty years,
and saw his sons, and his sons' sons, even four generations.
Job 42:16

"Daniel Dennett called evolution a “universal acid,” but perhaps a better description is a universal toxin.

Take any subject that gives human life beauty and meaning, and Darwinism will corrupt it into a Malthusian battle for ‘fitness’ – a vague term that can mean anything. Now they’re doing it again with grandparents.


Enter Darwin, and the lights go out. The smiles turn to blank stares. Grandparenting has no intrinsic value. It’s just a tool of the fitness machine, that works blindly for no purpose. In fact, in Darwinian theory, grandparenting makes no sense!

Since it makes no sense, Darwinians need to find out why it exists. They’ve tried it before, and now they’re at it again. In Current Biology, Michael A. Cant and Darrin P. Croft take up the challenge anew, trying to explain grandparents by natural selection. Their open-access paper, “Life-History Evolution: Grandmothering in Space and Time,” looks for hope in two new studies about an evolutionary conundrum.
In this, they reduce human beings with all their values and purposes into pawns of natural forces. But does evolutionary theory help? Not at all. Cant and Croft can’t decide what makes sense. ‘On the one hand, this’ but ‘on the other hand, that’ summarizes this exercise in Darwinian futility.
The evolutionary puzzle of the extended post-reproductive life of female humans has been explained by indirect fitness benefits gained by grandmothers helping raise their grandchildren. Two new studies support this ‘grandmother hypothesis’ and explore its limits in space and time.
Grandfathers get even less respect than grandmothers in this amoral battleground between fitness genes. So in Darwinian terms, why don’t grandfathers keel over in their post-reproductive years? That ‘evolutionary puzzle’ is not even addressed. The authors appeal to ‘kin selection’ to explain grandparenting, a controversial idea even among evolutionists, with its counter-intuitive idea of ‘inclusive fitness,’ which brings in non-reproducers to help in the fitness game.

Even so, at the end, nothing is certain in the various approaches to sift grandparents through the Darwin sieve.
Both studies provide important confirmation of the dynamic nature of kin selection as a force shaping human life history. Selection for late-life survival and helping is weaker when there are few grandchildren to help, those grandchildren live far away and grandmothers have become great-grandmothers. To understand how kin selection changes across the lifespan in family groups we need to zoom out to consider which individuals disperse from the family and how far, and how the life stages of family members are overlaid in time and space. These studies are further evidence that fundamental features of our physiology and patterns of aging are explained by our evolutionary history of family life, with all its opportunities for cooperation and conflict.
The stale Darwinian rhetoric, never settled and always subject to new storytelling, adds nothing to “understanding” human nature.

Injecting Darwin toxin into human relationships destroys its subject matter.
... it is self-refuting. The same ‘force’ that destroys grandparents destroys scientists, too. Cant and Croft are pawns of the same blind selective forces that make their only interest survival, not meaning. They can’s get out of their own trap. They couldn’t, and therefore didn’t, mean anything they said in this paper! Everything is irrational in Darwinland."
CEH