University of Padua philosopher and evolutionist Telmo Pievani has written an article at Nautilus, the Templeton Foundation’s mag, that makes me wonder if the materialist project is just out of gas.
Against Our Best Interests
His basic premise is that evolution has wired us to act against our own best interests:
We are descended from animals that had to make fast decisions — about food, threats, and reproduction. There was no time for deliberation; quick but flawed judgment meant survival. Thus, irrationality, or at least a limited and pragmatic rationality, has made it possible for us to survive (which does not implicitly mean that it is justified today). This compromise between speed and accuracy generates a cascade of imperfections and snap judgments.
As psychologist Gerd Gigerenzer argues, from our evolutionary past, we have inherited an adaptive, contextual form of reasoning that is neither logical nor probabilistic, but good enough to keep us alive. We’re wired to scan for threats, anticipate others’ behavior, and infer meaning, even when none exists. This explains why we tend to attribute cause-and-effect relationships between totally unrelated phenomena, such as stepping under a ladder and failing an exam, and draw broad conclusions from anecdotes. A great deal of the data from developmental psychology, anthropology, and neuroscience confirms that, for adaptive reasons that no longer exist, our minds have evolved a strong tendency to distinguish between inert entities, such as physical objects, and entities of a psychological nature, like animate agents.
We thus are dualists and animists by nature. As a result, we attribute purposes and intentions to things, even when none exist, and imagine hidden motives and conspiracies where there are none. For us, stories always have a purpose, which can be evident or hidden.
“Flat Earthers on a Cruise ,” August 13, 2025
This approach reverses the conventional evolutionary concept of survival of the fittest — and therein lies a problem: Survival of the fittest can be envisioned as a deterministic process in which the faster rabbit lives to breed and the slower one feeds the coyote’s pups. Another type of process would require “evolution” to have some sort of foresight, and Pievani isn’t arguing for that.
Failing the Tests of Elementary Logic
No doubt this sort of cross between a fairy tale and pop psychology helps pop science readers pass the time while listening to the latest announcement of a flight delay. But it fails tests of elementary logic:
Irrationality … has made it possible for us to survive.
There can be no irrationality without rationality. No unreason without reason. Does Pievani think that reason underlies the universe, as many philosophers tell us? If not, what does he think is the origin of human rationality in a world where all other life forms manage without it?
If we have reason, free choice allows us to sometimes act irrationally anyway. But without reason (and free will) — which are not addressed here — irrationality is actually a meaningless concept.
Stampeding cattle, for example, are not irrational; they are simply non-rational. Cattle have never been given the gift of reason. Sometimes that fact becomes starkly apparent to humans — who must then try to make rational decisions to head off the stampede.
We thus are dualists and animists by nature. As a result, we attribute purposes and intentions to things, even when none exist, and imagine hidden motives and conspiracies where there are none.
One consequence of reason, which we exercise via consciousness of our surroundings, is that we are aware of the purposes and intentions of other rational entities. Because we can be right about purposes, intentions, motives, and conspiracies, we can also be wrong about them. An analysis like Pievani’s, which provides no account of the origin and nature of the capacity to be right, can provide little insight about the origin and nature of being wrong.
The rest of the essay continues in much the same vein.
Pievani is the author of a number of books, including Imperfection: A Natural History (2022) and Serendipity (2024).
The basic premise of Imperfection, according to the publisher, is that “In the beginning, there was imperfection, which became the source of all things. Anomalies and asymmetries caused planets to take shape from the bubbling void and sent light into darkness. Life on earth is a catalog of accidents, alternatives, and errors that turned out to work quite well.”
The book’s thesis prompts the same question as the essay’s: How can there be imperfection without perfection? And how can imperfection — which can have no existence apart from perfection — possibly be “the source of all things.” Perhaps it is better not to ask…
And Serendipity? Again, from the publisher:
How many times have we looked for something and found something else? A partner, a job, an object? The same thing often happens to scientists: they design an experiment and discover the unexpected, which usually turns out to be very important. This fascinating phenomenon is called serendipity… From Zadig to Sherlock Holmes, Pievani shows that such great discoveries are not just the product of luck. Instead, serendipity comes from a mix of cunning, curiosity, sagacity, imagination, and accidents caught on the fly. Serendipity illuminates how much we don’t know and how much we don’t even know we don’t know.
It sounds like an interesting book. But the observation that “great discoveries are not just the product of luck” is hardly forging new ground. So there must be something else here.
Oh yes, here it is: The publisher adds, “Above all, Pievani reminds us that the human brain is of a piece with the world it is investigating — a world so much bigger than our knowledge — and it has also evolved within that world, adapting as it has to.”
That is a hint, perhaps, that the history of science can be fitted into a tight capsule: “The mind is simply what the brain does.” Wonder at the depth of some insights remains permissible provided that we do not inquire further into the origin of the human mind. Otherwise, we may need yet another dose of “evolution has wired us to… ”
The Whole Approach Is Beginning to Have a Tired Look
Nautilus and similar publications can keep churning this stuff out if they want to. Profs who need the street cred will thank them. But they can’t make it sound fresh any more. And at this point, they can’t indefinitely refuse to tackle the fundamental logic problems without ceding the arena to others.
Life would be so much easier for them if the mind were simply what the brain does. Then this stuff could churn out endlessly and no one would notice problems in logic. But wait. No one would produce thinkmags either.
It is only the immaterial human mind that creates the existential problems of human life that require thinkmags. There is no existential problem of fish life or mosquito life. Slowly that kind of truth is becoming harder to ignore.
Cross-posted at Mind Matters News.