“Evolution Has Us in Its Grip”

Abstract

Let us forget scientists again for, as we have just seen, in principle, they are quite normal. Perhaps they have more education or, rather, conceit than the ordinary man in the street, but “the fact that some academics have intellectual flatulence does not mean that all mankind suffers from such flatulence” (Feyerabend 1980, p. 14). We now want to deal with the much more interesting question of how it could possibly come about that Homo sapiens can be defined as that special, but not unnatural primate species in which the cognitive capabilities, namely those which come under the attractive but very controversial description intelligence, have an apparently crucial importance. It is probably beneficial if we recapitulate what we have achieved with our critical considerations of the wonder of nature man and how this new picture can be applied to what we can observe everyday in representatives of Homo sapiens. Undoubtedly, our most important outcome is the concept that human individuals, just like all other multicellular organisms, be they animals or plants, are excluded from any form of real cognitive gain on principle. Each of us learns, i.e., varies and develops his behavior in manifold ways throughout his life but this has nothing to do with real learning which only occurs through evolutionary, that is undirected phylogenetic changes.

Man comes so half-baked into the world that you can do almost anything with him without him becoming anything else, just as it has always been.

Hubert Markl

The thing about progress is that it looks much greater than it really is.

Johann Nestroy

This remark traces back to Peter Engelhorn, the founder of the KONRAD LORENZ INSTITUTE FOR EVOLUTION AND COGNITION RESEARCH in Altenberg, Austria.