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Members of and sympathizers with the Temple of Set, including TOS priests of the highest rank, like Michael Aquino, show a complete failure to understand Darwin's Theory of Evolution. This is very significant because it is something they have in common with Fundamentalist Christians, Creationists of all kinds, and others.

The Theory of Evolution has been and still is the biggest thorn in the side of Christian belief, more so than the heliocentric system of Copernicus, which is the theory that the Earth revolves around the sun, not vice-versa. Copernicus' theory only damages one very literal interpretation of the Holy Bible, but the Theory of Evolution strikes directly and fatally at ideas of Divine Providence, including Mr. Aquino's notions of an "ordering force" (sic) in Nature, of a "binding principle of organization" (sic) he claims he exhumed from a dead religion of ancient Egypt, a principal he calls neteru which is, he says, a manifestation of Set. (Neteru merely means "gods"; neter means "a god.") What is also different about the Darwin's Theory of Evolution vs. Copernicus' heliocentric theory is that Christians, Creationists, Setians and others never have any permanent trouble understanding what the heliocentric theory says. After all, what could be so hard to understand about the Earth revolving around the sun and not vice-versa, or how both of these situations would look much alike to a puny human standing on the Earth's surface watching the progress of the Sun during the course of the day as it seems to inch its way from the Eastern horizon to the Western? Not too hard to fathom. It is not too hard to explain to someone how the entire Earth could be moving instead of the sun even though everyone feels like they are "standing still" once you give someone the example of a quiet, steady ride pouring drinks in a limousine. But the history of the dispute between Evolutionists and Christian types has shown that the latter have enormous difficulty even understanding what Darwin's threatening theory is actually saying to begin with. For over two centuries Christian advocates and other disputers of Darwin have made - and continue to make - the same mistakes of interpretation and understanding of evolution over and over again, as if these errors, logical fallacies, and/or learning or cognitive disabilities are deeply and permanently ingrained in them. The mistakes they repeatedly make are identical to ones Mr. Aquino, for example, makes today - and he claims he is not an adherent of the Christian religion and lives well after the discovery of genes, the DNA double helix, etc.

A Satanist I know showed me some of the things Mr. Aquino recently said about evolution on the Internet in response to remarks by Tani Jantsang equating Anton LaVey's "dark hidden force in nature" or "Satan" with entropy. When I read it, I was struck by the fact that, if you ignore that Mr. Aquino is talking about Set and neteru, you could have told me that William Paley was still alive after 250 years because every error Mr. Aquino makes on the Theory of Evolution, and everything he says about Set-neteru, an Anglican Priest and theologian named Paley made and said almost two hundred years ago when talking about his Christian God and the role of Divine Providence in Nature. This was before Darwin, but there were good theories of evolution already in existence in Paley's time, such as a good theory proposed by Charles Darwin's own grandfather Erasmus. In fact, Charles Darwin strongly relied on many examples of animal and plant life and behavior that Paley wrote about. Paley was not ignorant, any more than is Mr. Aquino. He just could not understand anything more complicated or subtle than "the existence of a watch implies the existence of a watchmaker," which was his main argument for what he believed every good Christian should believe: that God made and controls the natural realm, just as Mr. Aquino believes that Set-neteru is "that force" that "holds things together in organized, regular patterns" (sic), like all biological species from mice to men. Though little known, Paley was not an unimportant guy in his day: before the Twentieth Century, Paley's A View of the Evidence of Christianity (1794) was required reading for entrance into Cambridge University! Paley lectured on moral philosophy at Christ's College, Cambridge, a position to which, from what I have seen of Mr. Aquino's objections to rival "Satanic" organizations' leaders and spokespeople, Mr. Aquino would have been himself eminently suited and probably occupied had he lived in that time. But the main point here is that Paley was, and Aquino is, afflicted by the same failures of logic, by the same simple-minded errors, and more: that one finds these same errors and misunderstandings in all disputers of the Theory of Evolution, like in the arguments presented in an historically famous debate in 1860 in which Bishop Samuel Wilberforce was demolished by T. H. Huxley of the celebrated Huxley family that produced so many fine scientific and literary minds in modern times. The same errors, fallacies and misunderstandings can be found still later once again in the famous 1925 "monkey trial" conviction of schoolteacher John T. Scopes, a trial which upheld a Tennessee law that banned teaching evolution in schools. When I first semi-retired to Florida about a decade ago, to a region of wondrous beauty and salubrious year-round climate, I audited an identical debate programmed one evening at a church on a nearby fishing island. There were the very same misunderstandings of the theory all over again! And there they are once again in Mr. Aquino's discussions of Set and the insufficiency of random events and the principle of natural selection to account for the emergence of higher life forms on Earth. Mr. Aquino has made these errors in print before, like in his Black Magic in Theory and Practice (1983). This is all the more remarkable because in the "Introduction" to this publication he states that "every effort is made to ... avoid ... logical fallacies ..." and "we emphasize this to a degree unmatched ... by most of the academic philosophical community"! All of the TOS people agree with him, though what he says in Black Magic in Theory and Practice is laughable. Those who see through these errors and fallacies, which occupy almost every single line of parts of this essay, leave the TOS.

I will not try to explain Darwin's Theory of Evolution here. I would urge anyone really unfamiliar with it to avail themselves of some good explanations of the theory, which are available in many libraries from many sources written on many levels, including good encyclopedias. To others I say: "You should have listened in school!" Instead I will dwell here on the perennial errors I have been referring to which a certain kind of thinker of the Paley-Aquino type makes naturally and automatically, and is unable to do otherwise, no matter in what century he lives, no matter how hard he strains to avoid these errors, no matter how much he knows about the natural world (Paley), or how many new discoveries have been added to his education in modern times (Aquino). I will leave it to the reader to speculate as to how there could be such a deeply ingrained and persistent cognitive disability, and what this might mean. Are the people who repeat these errors from century to century just "simple-minded," as the Romans thought of the Christians, or is there food here for psychology and neurology? It is one thing to disagree with a theory, but there is something else going on when most people who disagree with a theory show they are making the same cognitive errors. There must be something there that is "really hard" for them to understand. Readers may logically conclude that if what I am saying is true, reading some "primer" literature on evolution, as I have suggested for some, will do a "Christian" or "Setian" type little good, so it is not for them I recommend this. Also, in what follows, there will be some scientific and philosophical arguments that I will make that I admit to be subtle, but this is (and will be) necessary only when doctrinal ideas (like those of the Temple of Set) are at issue. Doctrinal disputes are necessarily subtle, so some readers may just want to skip them. Just as subtle is talking about someone's cognitive errors or "ingrained logical fallacies," that is, their "fallacies of thought," which are harder to identify to begin with than doctrinal points, which are usually clearly and painstakingly stated by advocates of any particular doctrine for the benefit of others. No one goes about clearly identifying his "thinking defects" or "logic bloopers" and then says, "Hey, let's indulge in a subtle discussion about this."

To avoid confusion, it should be pointed out that Darwin's Theory of Evolution has two separate and separable parts. The first part is the theory of evolution, which maintains that all or almost all the different forms of life we see on Earth today developed gradually from common ancestors or even from - as the Nobel Prize-winning modern day cellular biologist and author of Vital Dust de Duve says - a single ancestor he calls the "Ancestor of All Life." This part of Darwin's theory was not new with Darwin and is subscribed to by just about everyone today, even many Creationists and most Christians, Setians, and Mr. Aquino himself. This part of Darwin's theory does not challenge the existence of a Divine Plan in nature, nor does it run counter to, say, Mr. Aquino's concept of Set's role in human evolution. This part of Darwin's theory seems to be easy for all to understand.

It is the second part of Darwin's theory that is chronically misunderstood by Christians, Setians, and others with the same cognitive disabilities. This is the part wherein Darwin believes he has found the cause of evolution: his theory of natural selection, often termed (correctly) the "struggle for existence," and incorrectly "survival of the fittest" (which is inaccurate and yet almost sounds tautological or true and self-evident just from the form of the statement). When you learn what Darwin says is the cause of evolution - which will be touched on in what follows - it is easy to see why those who want God or Set to be the cause of evolution or involved in the evolution of particular animals (such as Homo sapiens) should object to this part of Darwin's theory and regard it as a "rival" to theirs. It is my thesis here, however, that it is not just this understandable hostility to this theory that makes these opponents of it say the mistaken things they say about it: it is my thesis that there is a real, sincere, cognitive disability here, a failure to "get it," due to some sort of difficulty they have in understanding this "sort" of thing.

The first "broken record" error is the easiest to sort out and dispose of, and leads to the deeper and more difficult ones. One frequently hears opponents of the theory of natural selection make arguments like, "Chance and random events cannot account for something as complex as the human eye." This argument, if valid, would apply a fortiori, that is, would have even stronger force, against the evolution of something even more complicated than the human eye, like the human brain. In fact, Mr. Aquino drifts into this argument in Black Magic in Theory and Practice (p. 12) in the course of attempting to refute the theory of natural selection when he says, "But there is no explanation for the human brain in the laws of natural selection. The biophysical factors of a sophisticated brain are far too intricate." This argument against natural selection is either made due to the chronic cognitive disability I mentioned above, or it is sometimes made rhetorically and in a dishonest manner, appealing to the ignorance of listeners as to what the theory of natural selection actually says about this. It is stated as if Darwinists are saying that you can take all the parts of the human eye - the cornea, the lens, the ligaments supporting the lens, the retina, lots of jelly-like "eye-juice," etc., dump them all into a clean trash bin, shake it all up like a milk-shake and, after a couple of quadrillion of quadrillion of googolplex of tries, you might open the lid of the can to find an eye fully assembled and ready for transplant. Or worse, this argument is often stated in a way that depicts even more unlikely events: as if Darwinists are saying that you can put iron, carbon, phosphorus, sulfur, oxygen, hydrogen, and other elements into the can, heat it all up just right and send a few lightning bolts through the can and again, after a googolplex of googolplex of attempts now, you might open the lid and find that eye - unless you are a really lucky guy on a really lucky planet and do it on the first try! The error here lies in the false idea that the eye has no antecedents, or that its only antecedents are eye parts or the raw chemicals which constitute the eye. But the first part of Darwin's theory, the theory of evolution or common ancestry, shows that the complex human eye was not produced out of nothing, but rather is a variant built on the simpler eyes of man's ancestor animals. Though there are more complex and better eyes than man's in the animal kingdom, humans have very good vision as far as the animal kingdom goes and, by and large, most of the ancestor animals in man's own lineage had simpler eyes. Single-celled animals have light-sensitive, fundamentally simple "light spots." In school many of you learned that there is more than one system of sight embedded in the retina of the human eye: the "rods" and the "cones." The "rods" help form images of large objects in dim light, and the "cones" enable us to see color and sharp detail. But even between these two highly complex and sophisticated visual systems which work together to enable us to see, the "cone" system of color vision - which provides us with so much beauty to behold and contemplate - developed by degrees out of the other ("rod") system as an adaptive improvement of sight conferring survival advantages. The system of color vision developed as an improvement on the accuracy of sight and sight at low thresholds of light.

The human eye will be a useful example in what follows, and it is interesting to note that while Christian opponents of Darwin and forerunners of Mr. Aquino have used the human eye in specious arguments like this against evolution, Mr. Aquino does not do so. Believing in the evolution part of Darwin's theory himself, Mr. Aquino is too modern and sophisticated to make an error as bad as "the eye has no antecedents." He is not that dishonest either. Instead he makes the same error and uses the same specious argument in regard to a more complex organ to which he attaches a mystical anomalousness - the human brain. This argument of his will be dealt with presently, and why he thinks the old argument about the eye, which he eschews, is still good as regards the human brain.

Many Christian apologists have also disdained the "eye is to complex" argument, knowing about the eye's antecedents, as did Paley, and instead use the entire series of evolving life forms that seem to lead up to humans to attempt to prove that natural selection is not the cause of evolution, but that the "Hand of God" is responsible for this marvelous series of evolving life forms (Christians), or that genetic "tinkering" (sic) by a "Mysterious Stranger" who "has not been located" but "whose most ancient name is Set" (sic) is responsible for the last stages in the series in which the human brain appears (Aquino). This argument disregards whether or not chance or random events could produce the human eye. Instead, it says that chance or random events could not possibly produce this amazing, intricate, developing series of life forms of ever increasing complexity leading up to human beings. This series is itself the most marvelous proof of God and God's (or Set's) involvement because "a watch implies the existence of a watchmaker."

This idea that evolution is guided in whole or in part by a Creator (Paley) or a "tinkerer" (Aquino) is called "finalism." Like Paley, Mr. Aquino believes the adaptions we see, especially the one called the human brain, are evidence of a design, and that the existence of one or more of the later products of evolution (like humans) is proof of the fulfillment of a design, one which, if Mr. Aquino is right, is still in progress (he calls it a "high intelligence experiment" initiated by Set).

One fallacy of this argument will be isolated here, and it has ramifications about the whole Theory of Evolution and every aspect of Christian belief and ways of thinking, as well of Setian belief, which Mr. Aquino unabashedly calls a "religion" in Black Magic in Theory and Practice. One fallacy or error will have to be dealt with at a time. Sorting out is needed, because to believe what Christians or Setians mistakenly think Darwin's theory is saying actually requires making a lot more than just one error or one misinterpretation of the theory.

The first error here is not recognizing that something may have a purpose without implying it came into existence to serve that purpose. The great French writer, wit, free-thinker and philosopher of the Enlightenment, Voltaire (1694-1778), made deadly ridicule of this error when he quipped that noses were obviously designed to hold spectacles. This clearly highlights and exposes this error. Some things can be made by a creator or artificer to serve a purpose, like making a cup to drink water from. The maker or creator has information as to the purpose and outcome before he sets out to make the cup. He uses this information to "inform" the process of making the cup at various times during its manufacture. The cup is then used for that purpose, which was the purpose of the designer who made the object. The object came into existence for that purpose, was formed and "informed" by the designer for that purpose. One can identify the cup's "design features," which are things about it that make it useful for the purpose for which it was intended. No one would say any of this applies to the bridges of noses, though, believe it or not, there have been Christians who said that God made the tails of rabbits white so they may be easier targets for hunters! Lunacy permeates this area of thought, and we shall see this lunacy again in the case of Mr. Aquino's theories. But aside from these extreme types, all would agree that noses were not designed to hold spectacles, have no design features in that regard, but are obviously pretty good for this purpose, and can be used for this. Academic philosophers, whom, as I mentioned above, Mr. Aquino falsely claims in Black Magic in Theory and Practice to have exceeded in scrupulousness in the avoidance of logical fallacies, have names for these two kinds of purpose. When something is brought into existence by a designer for a purpose and used for that purpose, this is called teleology (or "teleologic purpose," "teleological acting," etc.) or "final purpose," which is what Aristotle called this. On the other hand, when something exists for some other reason, whatever it may be, but is used for a purpose, as the nose is to hold spectacles, they call this teleonomy or "teleonomic purpose." Fancy words for something simple and clear, but somehow certain people can't seem to help mixing this up when it comes to understanding Darwin and what he called "adaptions."

In the theory of natural selection, adaptions do not come into existence to serve a purpose. In Black Magic in Theory in Practice, Mr. Aquino shows that he thinks that an adaption does come into existence to serve a purpose. He thinks the theory of natural selection is saying that giraffes' necks get longer and longer, and that this fine adaption for feeding on treetop leaves happens for the purpose of survival (this is not what the theory of natural selection says - I shall tell you what it says in a moment, but let us first trace out Mr. Aquino's fallacious line of reasoning from this false premise to see how he gets to where he gets). Once it is incorrectly assumed that adaptions come into existence for the purpose of surviving, then it is easy to excuse Paley, Bishop Wilberforce, Aquino and all the others for making what is only a short jump to bringing in a Divine Purpose, extra-terrestrials, or Set involved in the development of life forms that terminate in human beings. This is only a short jump in logic because teleologic purpose has already been invoked: if the purpose of adaptions is survival, teleologic or final purpose has already been brought into the picture. And now the Darwinists seem to these misguided and misunderstanding thinkers to be saying something ridiculous: that this survival which adaptions (as they think Darwin is saying) serve is the "purpose" of some blind mechanism of chance, something non-cognitive which can - unless we are mystics about Nature - have no purposes or designs. "A blind mechanism cannot be an artificer." (Oh, but it can be! We shall see this in what follows.)

One error here will be apparent to some by now, and when I explain it, it will contradict what Christians and Setian types think Darwin has been saying all along. Adaptions are used for survival in the teleonomic sense, not the teleologic sense. Adaptions do not come into existence for the purpose of survival, as Mr. Aquino and his Christian predecessors think Darwin was saying. What is actually happening is that no two plants and animals born are ever exactly alike (with the rare exception of monozygotic or "identical" twins). There is very great variation even among full brothers. My brother and I have at least 2,000,000 genes that are different. The same is so in the animal kingdom, wherein the numbers of offspring and variation among births is even greater than among humans, though most people do not notice or understand this, except when they see a difference only the obtuse could fail to observe, like how all the kittens in a litter are easily distinguishable from one another by their fur. Most variations are not so obvious, nor are even many small mutations, but they are staggeringly numerous and constantly occurring in reproduction. They serve no purpose and nothing is making them happen other than "forces" many of you are familiar with, especially the recombination of genes and "crossing over" of chromosomes that occur in gender-based systems of reproduction. Variation and mutation are the essence of sexual reproduction. In fact, I would consider it evidence of design, of a Divine Plan, or of tinkering by Set if I discovered that there was no variation in a litter of animals and they were all the "same thing." If all giraffes born were gene-encoded for - and had - the same neck length, and variations from this were rare, that would be much more like what goes on in a tool-and-die shop or on a factory assembly line where things are carefully arranged to make the products come out as much alike as possible. When Christian philosophy was at its peak, this is exactly what "Christian natural philosophers" believed. They believed in what they called a scala naturae or "Great Chain of Being," a "top down" system or organization of types of things from God on down to every species that swam or flew or walked the Earth, which they believed were set in their types and ranked by the Divine Hand. This idea held sway in the biological sciences before the Nineteenth Century. These types or species might exist in great plenitude, but they were thought to be fixed, or "guided" to remain fixed in reproduction. Individual variation was an inconvenience, embarrassment to the theory, or ignored, like a kind of "noise" that some even thought Satan introduced into God's Plan, a disruptive chaos. But Darwin and others brought the chaos of variation to center stage. No longer was this chaos considered a fallibility of "earthly life," but became "real" and not just "noise" or "interference." It became the very underpinning of the Theory of Evolution. Variation and mutation in the breeding of giraffes or hominids or anything else is part of the lack of order in the universe, a manifestation of randomness and chaos. It doesn't happen for any other reason, not even "in order to survive or adapt so life may go on."

What happens is this: variation provides the underpinning or basis or foundation for change in types or species. Among the dizzying number and variety of unpredictable variants born to any mother, no matter how much their outer appearances may resemble one another, natural selection acts through the environment to select those individuals whose variations are "better" for that environment. In this realm, even what seems to be visibly insignificant can make a big difference. It is, to me, wondrous and remarkable that in mammals that give birth to litters, it matters whether or not a male offspring gestates in the uterus of the mother positioned between two female fetuses in the same litter or not. If he is, he turns out different even from another fetus genetically identical but not so positioned; even his rabbit-behavior is different from that of the other rabbit. (This kind of variation, however, is not inheritable - only genetic ones are - and Darwin's theory relies only on the latter.) These multitudes of variants are not "adaptions" to begin with - that would be evidence of design somewhere. They are just variants. Nature is ruthlessly and relentlessly and continuously spewing these out and then killing off all but the "best" variants, and the variant that wins this real and true "struggle for survival" by out-reproducing the others is seen to be the best adapted to that particular environment - though it is not guaranteed that any will survive at all! (The willful and foolish actions of humans who are opposed to this Natural mechanism can put a halt to this process and thereby endanger an entire species, including their own.) It is only on hindsight that a variant appears to be an "adaption." Population selection among these variants occurs due to environmental pressures. Thus one might say the correct view of what Darwin was saying is going on in Nature is "spew and skew." Nature spews out dizzying profusions of mutants and variants, no two alike, without any rhyme or reason, and then ruthlessly and relentlessly skews the population toward all but a few lucky ones whose variations falls within a very narrow range. The Christians, Setians and others whose thinking is apparently riveted to the idea of "design," and who narrowly and anthropomorphically see everything occurring in Nature as being "done" the way humans do things, see the variants as being brought into existence in order to serve the purpose of survival. They see the system of natural selection as outcome-oriented. This is not what the theory says. There is no "information" of any kind beforehand as to outcome - that would be real evidence of design, just as a cup manufacturer has information before he embarks on making the cup as to the outcome he wants to attain. The system of natural selection is not informed as to outcome. It is truly "blind." What seems to horrify Christians is the idea of multitudes upon multitudes of random and chaotic variations in births, and the ruthless and relentless death of all but the very few lucky enough to have one particular physical characteristic which has no merit or worth whatsoever in itself, no "righteousness," other than that it fits the environment at that time and place the best. In one of his lectures, William Paley admitted that ideas like this horrified him and that he could not reconcile them with the idea of an intelligent and beneficent creator. Darwin's theory relies on chaotic variation and holocaust. If there is a "god" who operates this way, it would have to be one who is not just uncaring, as Paley feared, but blind, chaotic, and idiotic, like Howard Phillips Lovecraft's "Azathoth" - or perhaps a Joker!

Return now to Voltaire's quip. The correct interpretation of Darwin, so difficult for Christians, Creationists and Setians, is that variants use characteristics they are lucky to get - that is, get for no reason other than the "reason" involved in the fact that if I throw a pair of dice right now I might get, say, a "five" - to their advantage in the same way the bridge of the nose is used to advantage to hold spectacles. The variations and/or small (or even infrequently great) mutations of the characteristic have nothing to do with survival. They are merely "handy" for it in the teleonomic sense. This handiness is the conferred advantage, like the advantage of having a nose-bridge. Having such a bridge would mean nothing if no one ever needed spectacles, eye-glasses or goggles. Then, if some folks had nose bridges, and if there were genes identified for this type, this variant and the genetic code sequence that produced it would just be one more of Nature's superfluous and meaningless profusion of variant productions, not an "adaption."

Darwin himself did not fully know how chaotic and "meaningless" Nature is. And he knew he did not fully understand the way the dizzying multitude of variants on which his theory relied could come about. The answer to this was only supplied recently by genetics. Genetics has added much to the "meaninglessness" and utter randomness idea in the theory. For example, it is now known (as it was not to Darwin) that the system of dominant and recessive genes (which he didn't know about either) allows us to "keep" genes for diseases as much as possible. We keep deleterious or damaging genes in recessive form. A statistician named Sir Ronald Fisher observed how genes are recessive only because they are deleterious, having once been intermediate between dominant and recessive. These recessive-deleterious genes are kept in control by other genes which form what is called a "gene complex." This complex, like all other genes, gets reshuffled at random before every fertilization, so that if the deleterious gene or some other deleterious mutation appears, the gene complex may "silence" it, conferring survival advantage on those having the gene complex. Why does Nature "do" something so complicated? Why can't we just evolve in such a way, through some sort of selection, so that we keep only good, dominant genes, get rid of most of the bad ones, and keep bad fertilization reshufflings and mutations to a minimum while allowing leeway for necessary change when needed? Why doesn't Nature "devise" such a system (and this is apparently how some misinterpreters of Darwin think Nature is or should be working)? If Nature did this, I would be the first to admit design or "tinkering."

The best way to see how chaos can give the appearance of order and even of design or "tinkering" is to look at a completely different system which seems to show evidence of design, purpose, order, information as to outcome, and even of cognition and memory, but is really the sum total of random events and population selection again, of "spew and skew." This is the recently discovered and (since AIDS) obsessively studied mammalian immune system. This example will illustrate how a statistical effect which is actually an effect of selection of a certain population from among a chaotic group of very large numbers of variants can appear as if something is "instructing" or "informing" the system, as if there is a guiding hand, or a design, or, at the very least, as if there is some orderly information being passed from the "top down," which is what Creationists and others think they are seeing in evolution or parts of it. The evolutionary system of "spew and skew" works over eons of time, so it is hard to pin down or even really see something happening, hard to see the changes going on and the sortings out, so slow are they when measured in terms of the shortness of human life. Perhaps this is one of the difficulties the more innocent opponents of Darwin's theory have. The advantage of looking at how this same process of selection and classification on profuse novelty works in the mammalian immune system is that this all happens in what physiologists call "somatic time," that is, not over eons, but within the lifetime of a single organism. This makes it easier to study and to see how a statistical effect can account for and appear like a design or "outcome oriented" system having design features.

The mammalian immune system is represented in the blood by molecules capable of telling "self" from "not-self" at a molecular level. It is exquisitely precise: the immune system can recognize the difference of one carbon atom tilted only a few degrees on two otherwise identical very large molecules composed of densely compacted multitudes of arrayed carbon and other atoms. The immune system can tell these two molecules apart and apart from all other molecules, and retain the ability to do so once it has developed it. Given all the toxins and hostile parasites that can enter the human body, some invented by man, how is it that someone's body can distinguish self from not-self in such a refined way and even "remember" that invader (called an "antigen") to later on present it to "warrior" cells in the blood for destruction? Until very recently, a theory was accepted that parallels, but in a scientific way, the old Christian idea of evident design. Biologists thought that a molecule foreign to the body was somehow transferring information about its own three-dimensional structure to some site or place on an antibody molecule, then removing itself, like a cookie cutter works on dough. The place or site on the antibody where the invader had been can later be "read" by the rest of the immune system, which could recognize all identical invaders thereafter. Before I give you the correct theory which replaced this simple and elegant one, it is important to see that this way of thinking is "instructionist" or "informing," like the Creationist or Setian ideas of evolution. The invading molecule, toxin, or antigen was believed to convey information to the immune system by an instructive transfer from antigen to antibody, as if the antigen "informed" the immune system and helped redesign it, albeit about a very limited thing: the antigen's own three-dimensional structure - nothing so grandiose as what Paley imagined God is doing in evolution for the creation by design of species structures "top down," or what Mr. Aquino imagines Set in doing in forming the human brain. Now compare the correct theory, which will show you how this seemingly ordered system is actually one founded on chaos, randomness, disorder, and a population skewing or classification upon novel variants.

What really happens is this: prior to the confrontation of one's immune system with any foreign body, one's body already has a huge repertoire of different variants of antibody molecules, and the capability of making more and more variants, which it is constantly doing, chaotically, like multitudes of dice with multitudes of sides being thrown over and over again, making a new antibody variant each time according to how the dice fall. The body is constantly "spewing" these out, in unheard of types, at random. It is done with no rhyme or reason other than chance, and most of what is spewed never has any meaning nor serves any purpose. But when a foreign body enters the bloodstream, it "polls" cells called lymphocytes, each of which carries one of these variant antibodies. In other words, the antigen is like a little pollster that bumps randomly into various lymphocytes as if surveying them and feeling their surfaces. Sooner or later it bumps into one with an antibody on it that has a sufficiently close complimentary three-dimensional shape, like two jig-saw puzzle pieces. When and if this happens, they "lock" together according to the principles of chemistry and this triggers the lymphocyte to clone itself rapidly, that is, produce progeny of this single cell, daughter cells identical to it. This is called "clonal selection" (like "natural selection") because the population of variants of lymphocytes in the immune system is now skewed, with this particular lymphocyte's clones gaining in number over others. This happened in response to contact with the antigen or invader, which could have been anything composed of anything, just as natural selection, in Darwin's theory, happens in response to contact with the environment, which could be any situation, climate, etc. This new population of clone lymphocytes can last inside the body for the life of an organism, so that the immune system retains the ability to recognize antigens like the original invader long into the future for fast action in identifying them and unleashing the rest of the immune system's "attack warriors" against them. Note that the so-called "antibody" is not an antibody for anything to begin with, any more than a variant of some life form that is born is an adaption. Both were merely variants to begin with. The clones become antibodies only on hindsight because a certain antigen has polled the cell, that is, visited it, locked in causing rapid cloning, and thereby skewed the population numbers, just as a certain variant becomes an adaption in natural selection because it is handy in a certain environment in which it finds itself and then outbreeds all others. In both the case of Darwin's natural selection and the immune system, a form of classification upon novelty occurs, a "sieving," a statistical effect, an alteration so refined, however, that the initial idea used to explain it (instructionist, outcome oriented, goal-oriented, designing, informing, guiding, etc.), whether used to explain species and their structures designed by a supposed Creator, or the supposed instructive transfer of information from foreign molecules to antibodies as they are built (which does not occur) - turned out to be wrong, though it is easier to see it is wrong and disprove there are "design features" in the case of the immune system as opposed to the evolutionary system because of the shorter time spans involved in the study of an organism's immune system - nobody lives long enough to make the same kinds of observations about the process of natural selection. In fact, up until scientists began forcing mutations to occur, there were only a few mutations and evolutions that had actually been observed and documented, so short and spotty is human memory and recorded civilization. In 1849, a wild grape vine was observed to mutate to produce a bigger, juicier grape, since called the Concord grape. Also around that time a black mutant of the British peppered moth appeared in manufacturing areas of England where air was heavily polluted by carbon dust and soot. These examples are not offered to prove Darwin was right. They are offered here only to show that the time spans involved in natural selection can separate isolated events of mutation, variation, and selection by many generations, making this harder to observe than the same processes in the immune system, and that humans, contrary to what Christians and Setians believe, don't really live long enough to see much of what is really going on around them, even when they are the cause of it (like the black mutant peppered moth). (Tani Jantsang, who worked in epidemiology, mentioned to me that I have been talking about only one of the body's many immune systems. Some of these systems do not work this way: the antibodies are already "in place" at an individual's birth.)

The comparison and analogy of the process of natural selection with clonal selection in the immune system is not original with me. It is a well known instance of a modern idea which explains what appear to be systems having design features or to be "governed by laws of nature" or a "deity" to actually be statistical effects of chaos involving very, very large numbers of events. It might seem over-subtle, but it is actually what is going on here. So well known is this among scientists that the l972 Nobel Prize winner for Physiology or Medicine, Gerald M. Edelman, attempted, in 1988, to apply this theory of "spewing and skewing" to how the brain works. The human brain appears to have design, information transfer, and cognitive features like memory, etc. So maybe, Edelman figured, thinking might be just another example of a refined product of chaos, a Darwinian neuron selection of some kind. His theory was a first attempt, and too little is yet known about the brains of animals and the multitudes and multitudes of neurons in them to assess it. (Actually, the number of neurons is not so great - it is the number of neuron connections that is staggering, just like the number of possible variants and mutants genetic codes can produce, just like the number of kinds of polypetide chains that sit on lymphocytes that antigen polling "converts" into antibodies, as explained above.) So here you see the deepest fallacy modern science has uncovered in the old scala naturae or "Great Chain of Being" medieval style of thinking, to which Mr. Aquino subscribes to this day: the fallacy arises from limiting the number of things or events one thinks one is dealing with in Nature when one attempts to explain a phenomenon, whether it is the orbit of the Earth around the sun, the existence of a particular species, or the body's defenses. It would probably delight a devote of Vishnu or Shiva to know that Western science now not only acknowledges but relies on the kind of spewing they have always taught is occurring all around us at all times, with their 330,000,000 gods and their spewing of worlds upon worlds into the immensity of Brahma from the navel of Vishnu. People like Paley and Aquino want to play with a very small deck of cards, perhaps even only one or two cards, when, to give an honest "explanation" of even the simplest natural phenomenon, big decks are required. This would be a kind of "cognitive disability" itself: the ability to "play" only with a medieval "few card" deck when one is called upon to understand evolution, immunity, the brain, or any complex phenomenon. Teleologic arguments have always been the stock-in-trade of this type. They never think, as occurred to the Jewish Spaniard Spinoza, that these ideas might be considered an affront to a Creator or Great Artificer - if such there actually is - because they attribute to him a tiny workshed with a very small inventory of tools and only a few productions of limited type. In this kind of thinking, whether Christian or Setian, the anthropomorphisms of dull minds reign supreme.

Increasingly, what were once thought to be "physical laws" are also seen as statistical outcomes of the laws of large numbers of events too. This was recognized as far back as 1927 by the philosopher, mathematician, logician and historian Bertrand Russell, and is a cornerstone of modern science. During the Enlightenment, the discoveries of Newton and others only confirmed the idea of Providence and a Divine Plan, which is why Newton was such a "Tory" or reactionary. God may not move planets in the most perfect arcs of circles, as the medievalists thought, but has put together an even more subtle and remarkable kind of clockwork in which planets move in ellipses with the sun at one focus, as Laplace and Newton showed. (Keep in mind that during their time scientists still had to "wear a mask" to avoid Christian persecution.) The idea of "physical law" was more firmly implanted then than ever, reinforced and augmented by a new inkling of Divine subtlety, and this idea still reigns among Christians, Setians and others. In this they have fallen behind once again, because the apparent regularity and permanence of so-called physical "laws" are now explained by Quantum Mechanics, the modern Synthetic Theory of Natural Selection (which I will touch on later), and other new theories by using explanations that are statistical. This should not surprise anyone who has reflected on how coarse and dull human senses and the human mind really are - contrary to what Christians and Setians may think of humans' "awesome" abilities. Where one thinks one sees a single thing or event, like a bird hatching, there are occurring numbers of events so large that the mind reels. I find this wonderful and inspiring, but others reckon it a threat and a refutation of human prescience.

It is interesting to note that ancient pre-Aryan Vedic thought appreciated this. I mentioned before their 330,000,000 gods (and this is a small number, by the way!), and universes upon universes spewing into the immensity of Brahma from the navel of Vishnu. In this system, everything was thought to arise from the power of vast multitudes in disintegration, called tamas, which is like entropy, like Anton LaVey's "dark hidden force in nature," like the "force" Tani Jantsang has attempted to describe as the oldest idea of the "Devil" or "Satan" (not "Set," because we are going farther back to ancient India and Asia here). In ancient Vedic thought, an endless variety of beings, called rajas, from sub-microscopic to macrocosmic, are spewed forth due to the action of tamas, personified in Shiva the destroyer, and in the end dissolving back into it. Multiplicity, bogglingly large numbers, and endless shifting variety dominate the manifest universe. Vedic thought even appreciated the relationship of voidness or zero to multiplicity and infinity in that it understood how the mathematical quantity 1/n approaches zero when the number "n" gets infinitely big and vice-versa: how the mathematical quantity 1/n gets infinitely small and approaches zero or "nothing" as "n" approaches infinity. These ideas, even when explained using quaint and childish personifications in terms of "deities," proved too subtle for the Aryans who invaded India in the historical period. The Aryans, failing to understand them or regarding them as over-subtle, quickly branded them as obscure, perplexing, mystical, or even threatening to their own crude metaphysical ideas, which they summarily declared to be superior (see The Myths and Gods of India, by Alain Danielou, for a good account of this.) This is similar to what Tani Jantsang seems to have encountered when trying to childishly explain entropy by using science to clarify the myths. Once again, the Setian type was wholly unable to grasp it!

Mr. Aquino and other Setians have shown the same crudity of mind in their Internet posts seeking to refute the offering of Tani Jantsang that complexity in the world arises due to entropy, which she showed was LaVey's Satan, the "dark force in Nature." Relying on Webster's dictionary rather than modern scientific accounts of what entropy is and entropy does, Mr. Aquino quickly retaliated to Jantsang that entropy would produce only "soup," that is, a degenerated and disintegrated, disordered morass of simple nebulous energy, thereby saying he does not see how entropy (the Vedic tamas) could do otherwise. He therefore posits - I should say "invents" - a force of "reverse entropy" as necessary to account for complexity in the universe. This echoes his old position in Black Magic in Theory and Practice in which he says that, as he "understands" these principles of science and biology, Nature takes the path of least resistance, so evolution toward more complex forms of life could not occur. Simplification of existing forms, however they arose, should only occur, and evolution could never happen. He is cognitively disabled when it comes to understanding this.

I have already posted and disseminated a refutation of some parts of Mr. Aquino's post on entropy on another occasion. I will address it differently here, in the context of Darwin's Theory of Evolution. Mr. Aquino shows he does not even understand what scientists mean by the "path of least resistance," which Nature indeed always takes, or "energy downhill," as many call it, toward increased entropy. A very simple example from inorganic chemistry will show how this "energy downhill" accounts for complexification. By themselves, or even considered together, a sodium atom and a chlorine atom are simpler than a molecule of sodium chloride, in which the two atoms have combined into one molecule of table salt. And these more complex molecules array themselves into highly ordered crystals. There is clearly more order and complexity in the molecule and the crystal than in the two separate atoms. Yet it is "easier" for this molecule to form than for two atoms of sodium and chlorine to remain side by side and not combine into the more complex, ordered structure. In fact, it takes energy or work to prevent them from sliding "energy downhill" toward forming the salt molecule, which entropy favors! Yet sodium chloride is more complex. Entropy does not favor "soup," simplification, or devolution at any one place or time. Like the pre-Aryan Vedics thought, it accomplishes both creation and dissolution. Over your head, Mr. Aquino? Then get thee back to thy monastery, medieval treatises on angelology, and Egyptian papyruses full of dead religious ideas!

Mr. Aquino's specific attempted refutations of the theory of natural selection will be dealt with now one by one. It is noteworthy that in the past many objections and refutations of the theory have been made - and there are some good ones - but the ones made by Mr. Aquino are identical - often word for word - to the those made by Christian Fundamentalists, and all of his arguments are identical in manner of thinking. One foreign person I know with a strong scientific background who is (fortunately) naive about Christian polemics against scientific theories who read Mr. Aquino's presentation called it "dizzyingly confused," to which I will add (and show) that it is dependent upon an almost monkish ignorance of Nature, zoology, animal behavior, neurology, and brain anatomy, and relies upon the "common sense" of those afflicted with the same sort of ignorance, which a Western Christian upbringing promotes as much as possible. Note that in what follows that Mr. Aquino does not merely attempt to show there are flaws or problems in the theory: he attempts "overkill," that is, if his understanding of the theory and his arguments against it are good (as they are not), then one must not merely say Darwin was wrong, but that Darwin, Fisher, Russell, Crick, Stephen Jay Gould, Desmond Morris and anyone else who ever thought the theory of natural selection might have any merit must be accounted not merely wrong, but among the biggest morons who ever lived!

First Mr. Aquino presents the false idea (in Black Magic in Theory and Practice) that while "anthropologists can chart the stages of prehistoric human evolution to the limits of available data," they cannot "explain why the entire phenomenon should [sic] have occurred at all." Here is a curious and confused mixture of truth and falsehood which Mr. Aquino's rhetoric does nothing to clarify, thereby belying the "honesty" he claims for his presentation, unless he just does not know the difference, which I think is a real factor here. The truth is that scientists have not merely charted the stages of human evolution descriptively, as Mr. Aquino suggests: they do have a theory as to why it occurred, called the theory of natural selection as the cause of evolution, already touched on above, the "spew and skew." He is right, however, in saying that they have no idea as to why this "should" have occurred beyond the generation of random variants and the skewing of the prevalence of inheritable traits in populations by environmental pressures. Like the Christian Fundamentalist, Mr. Aquino finds it repugnantly and detestably humbling that the supposed "exalted" status of the human race and the human brain should be due to luck: due to the inelegant fact of human ancestors having been in the right place at the right time - next to developing plains in the Rift Valley of southeastern Africa or possibly somewhere in Asia - and to the luck of having the right pre-existing or antecedent cognitive abilities. Mr. Aquino demands "more" of an explanation. He just does not want Darwin's sufficient explanation: he wants one that calls for the existence of Homo sapiens, one that, like the Creationist interpretation of Genesis or his own theory of genetic tampering by Set, involves some sort of purpose or meaning for human existence. It would have been much more intellectually honest and - to my mind - very respectable, as are some Christians, if he had just outright stated that he wants or needs or demands this of an explanation: that it be outcome oriented, ordaining and leading up to human existence, providing human life with a "meaning," which can only be satisfied by an argument from design. Christians who say this and thereby fall back on their "faith" at least never make utter fools of themselves by pontificating on natural philosophy all the while exposing what ignoramuses they are and what plebeian minds they have. Either Mr. Aquino has failed to understand Darwin's good explanation, or he just plain wants the kind of explanation that gears forward toward producing humans in a clear way all along and is therefore automatically teleological. I believe his problem is both, just like the Fundamentalists who have this exact same difficulty and make the exact same demands on an "explanation" for human existence.

Thus does Mr. Aquino puts himself in the awkward position of showing that the theory of natural selection is not only insufficient to account for human existence, but is absurd. To do this, he first gives what is apparently his own paraphrase of what evolutionists are saying. I say "apparently" because it comes from no source I know of, and anyone who says it this way shows that he clearly does not understand Darwin's theory. Mr. Aquino says that, according to the evolutionists, "man developed high intelligence because he needed it to survive." I have already explained how this is clearly not what Darwinists say, and how it is nonetheless the most common Christian misunderstanding of the theory. Remarkably, Mr. Aquino says his source for this is "textbook after textbook." It would seem, then, that Mr. Aquino can never understand the theory of natural selection, if he has indeed visited "textbook after textbook" on the subject and he thinks they are saying that man developed high intelligence (or any animal any other characteristic) "because he needed it to survive." To reiterate what I said above, a characteristic (intelligence or other) that confers survival advantage merely does so because it is one of a profusion of variants that accidentally turns out to be handy for survival, just as the bridge of the nose turned out to be handy for holding eye-glasses. The conferred advantage does not come into existence, nor is it designed in any way, for survival. As I said, this error is made over and over again by Christians ad nauseam. Mr. Aquino is being a "Christian Fundamentalist" here. It is also remarkable that on the same page in Black Magic in Theory and Practice where he makes this mistake (p. 11), he then gives a correct paraphrase of the theory of natural selection, in terms of accident and selection, to account for how giraffes' necks evolved, but then immediately misapplies the idea of Nature's parsimony to generate absurd implications from the theory of natural selection! He does not clearly see any difference between the two, or is bent on keeping his readers confused and disoriented. This is very suspicious.

Mr. Aquino allows that the theory of accident and selection can account for giraffes' long necks, but not for something as complex as the human brain. This is what I meant earlier, when I said Mr. Aquino eschews the usual Christian "the eye is too complex" argument, but thinks the argument is still good for the human brain. Why does he think this? Several reasons. We shall now consider them one by one.

The first is a supposed "vast intellectual gap between mankind and every other species on the planet," as he says. This is a very important issue that regularly divides Christians and Setians on one side versus Satanists, scientists, and others on the other. Setian and Christian philosophy regularly and consistently exalts "human intelligence" or "spiritual qualities," believing the gulf between humans and animals - especially in regards to intelligence - to be vast, while Satanists and physical science keep reminding us about and bringing us back to man's carnal nature.

Satanists, behaviorists and many others constantly treat us to statements like Anton LaVey's "man is like any other animal..." and often to misanthropic (or perhaps just unanthropic) statements often wrongly interpreted as "cynical" that man's intelligence is not as great as some insist. The latter is not a new idea, for we can find Diogenes in ancient Greece saying the same thing, as well as many modern writers and literary figures frequently classified as "iconoclasts," like Philip Wylie, George Bernard Shaw, H. L. Mencken, et al. Paley openly admitted to having difficulty reconciling the idea of a beneficent and caring God with hecatombs upon hecatombs of suffering sentient beings in the animal kingdom perishing in the struggle to survive and outbreed one another, animals with a consciousness and intelligence possibly similar to - or overlapping with - the human. This agonizing has caused many such types to become vegetarians "in principle" or due to "conscience" (many Setians are vegetarians). The difficult and complex subject of animal intelligence will therefore have to be dealt with briefly here.

Mr. Aquino's first offering as "evidence" (sic) of the "vast intellectual gap between mankind and every other species on the planet" is a "walk into a major library to sense the breadth of this gap." In the same paragraph of Black Magic in Theory and Practice, he attributes such libraries and this gap to the "reasoning potential of the human cerebrum." To someone versed in even basic neurology and brain anatomy, this is a stunning blooper. The cerebrum is the very large dome-like organ composed of two almost symmetric hemispheres that takes up the largest part of the skull cavity in animals. But it is not the part of the brain responsible for libraries, for, if it were, all animals would have libraries, even if only "small." It is the frontal area or lobes of the neocortex that is responsible for the mental prowess of humans. The neocortex is a very thin separate layer of neuron-packed tissue that overlays the entire dome of the cerebrum. It is the most lately evolved part of the brain, and significantly smaller versions of it are found only in those mammals very close to man, like primates and cetaceans (whales, dolphins, etc.) This neocortex is extremely thin: only a few millimeters thick! Counter-intuitively for Mr. Aquino, modern neurology has shown that only a few milligrams of highly specialized neural wiring can accomplish a set of very impressive cognitive tasks. Mr. Aquino thinks of the cerebrum as some sort of - in humans - freakishly enlarged pudding ball packed with neurons that dwarfs not only in size but in thinking power that of all other animals by a long shot. Modern research made possible only recently by non-invasive scanning of human and other terrestrial animals' brains while they are in actual use has shown that "the brain" is entirely modular: it consists of many smaller brains that accomplish very specific cognitive or "mental" tasks separately, while more complex cognitive tasks require the integration or simultaneous use of more than one module acting in concert. Due to the persistence of an older, more naive way of viewing the brain, these modules are still thought of as "organs of the brain," when they are actually separate brains, as is proven by the fact that many animals have evolved some of these modules separately, or have them integrated with modules humans do not have or have inferior versions of! An example of one of these modular brains within our brains is the small area that matches names to faces. Lesions to that area of "the brain" leave victims unable to identify photographs of family members, although the ability to recognize them by the sound of their voices is unimpaired, as are all other cognitive abilities. Another small structure that sorts and stores incoming information can be damaged, leaving the victim unable to learn or remember anything new with the exception of novel motor tasks, yet he remains still in full possession of memories. Many of these modular areas are much superior in other animals, due to their being selected in favor of as being handy in their own ecological or "survival" niches. For example, the part of the brain which sorts and stores olfactory information in a dog is much superior to a human's. This hard neurological fact correlates completely with behavior: even an expert "smeller," like a human perfumer, can recognize, remember and compare at most only a few thousand odors, while a common mutt can do the same with at least hundreds of thousands of odors. Failure to appreciate the modular nature of the brain, and how a little neural tissue, if wired correctly, goes a long way, and thinking (as Mr. Aquino incorrectly does) that big mental abilities only arise from a big brain is the reason why, in comparing human to animal intelligence, Mr. Aquino repeatedly brings up other primates, such as "gorillas" (p. 12, Black Magic in Theory and Practice). Gorillas' brains contain the same modular brain assortment as ours, and though recent observation of gorillas and bonobos in their natural habitats - rather than imprisoned in zoos - by Diane Fossey, Jane Goodall, and others has shown them to be a lot smarter than some people had thought, most of the modular brains in gorillas are clearly inferior to the human's - at least in size, which correlates well with the potential for actual cognitive or mental abilities. It came as a surprise, however, to many of the type of person represented here by Mr. Aquino when an invertebrate life form was discovered that is just as outstanding in the performance of mental tasks compared to its phylogenetically related kindred as humans are to apes, and even has an abstract language second in complexity only to the one you are looking at now. It came as a surprise to those who think of high intelligence in terms of "big cerebrums" because the animal is so small, especially its head, and because the animal is frenetic, encased in an exoskeleton, sports supernumerary legs and has a sting: it is the honey bee!

No one would have bothered to study this insect, were it not for the fact that Karl von Frisch (who died in 1982) was ridiculed by the scientific establishment for saying he could experimentally prove that fish can hear. So he coldly turned to studying bees. He was awarded a Nobel Prize for his life's work in 1973 (and he was right about fish!) Since he initiated these studies, he, his students, and many other experimenters have proven the following remarkable assertions about honey bees that undoubtedly will sting the Christians and Setians reading this and provoke their scorn and ridicule. First, honey worker bees have a complex, abstract language of gestures which is capable of conveying a total possible number of messages of at least one billion, whereas any languages - of sound or gesture - in birds, dolphins, and nonhuman primates appear to be capable of a number of possible messages running only to one hundred to a few thousand at most - and honey bees use all of these messages. If you need an idea of what big numbers mean in the area of cognition, like "a billion possible messages," it simplifies things for starters to think of a single human word as a message, and consider that you who are reading this probably have a vocabulary of only 50,000 to 80,000 words. Secondly, honey worker bees learn, and use this knowledge to form probabilities without prior estimations of likelihoods of any kind. Third, they utilize goal-oriented reasoning strategies, unlike their close kin, like wasps and termites, who experiments have shown are performing only what seem like cognitive tasks, and are actually only running "sub-routines" much like a computer does. (This is how wasps appear to present study. We have heard this kind of assessment before to be later proven wrong. One wonders if bees know more about termites than humans do.) Fourth, bees make choices and do this so clearly that some overly-enthusiastic experimenters immediately began to speculate that human decisions may come from a "hidden bee brain" the discovery and analysis of which, they conceived, might simplify understanding of what humans are doing when they are choosing. All of this and more examples of what can only be considered as "high reason" and even probability theory the bee accomplishes with a small, simple-but-powerful neural system. On the other hand, honey bee individuals have no long-term memory. How such incredible intelligence could exist in so small a body and exist separate from other cognitive functions that we are used to seeing in "one package" (like long-term memory) could not be accepted or made sense of when neurology was a backward science. This is one reason why experiments that proved these things about the honey bee were immediately attacked. Two researchers attempted to prove, for example, that bees were not "talking" at all, but that von Frisch-type experiments were invalid because forager bees were really contaminated - both in the wild and during experiments - with various odors and other substances, which is how they were conveying information to other bees in the hive or swarm (bees converse both in food gathering for the hive and during swarming when about half of the hive and the Queen Bee set out to create a new hive). It is interesting to note here that with these experimenters who sought to refute bee intelligence, it was "all or nothing," that is, they showed a typical dualistic prejudice that pervades and distorts the consideration of animal intelligence, including Mr. Aquino's: that either animals have an abstract language, like humans, or they use "odor clues" (like other forging insects). It is as if only humans can have multiple solutions to a problem, whereas "lower" animals can only be "lucky" enough, due to natural selection, to have one. This is a modern version of "only humans have a soul; animals do not." It is now known that bees have both systems, just as humans do, who, for example, have odor clues that operate (perhaps unconsciously in most people) in selecting mates, but also have a romantic literature (which is one of the broadest and strongest genres of literature in any library) which gives humans something to think and talk about and assist them in mate selection.

A typical staple on human IQ tests which many of you may remember are three-dimensional object rotation tests. Some are easy and some are difficult, and you have only a limited time to answer questions in which you are shown an object from one perspective, and are asked to choose from among several alternatives which could be the object seen from another angle. Insects resembling honey bees, like moths, do this by storing an image of an object they have seen exactly as it appeared on their retinas. They then "recognize" the object later by matching what they see to this image, or to several images of it, if they have already seen the object from many angles. Bees, however, unlike wasps and moths, can mentally transform visual information, just as you are called on to do on these IQ tests, thereby recognizing the object from a novel perspective, which wasps and moths cannot do. And bees are not alone in this: pigeons are very superior to humans at mental rotations of two-dimensional figures: they answer faster, and whereas it takes a human longer to recognize an object on a test which has been turned through a larger angle of rotation than a smaller one, pigeons take the same amount of time independently of how much the figure has been rotated. Food-storing birds, such as marsh tits, can remember much longer lists of locations than any humans can, and there is some evidence that in this regard many mammals are superior to humans.

Unlike wasps, ants, and termites, who thermodynamically cool their over-heated hives by sprinkling water in them or making bigger or more air vents, an astonishing discovery was made in volcanic areas of Italy quite by accident in the 1960's: bees that use these cooling methods will sometimes switch to using a non-routine tactic: they manufacture a heat-resistant alloy of beeswax to preserve hive structure. This did not surprise some researchers, who already knew that bees have cultural traditions of nest-building, and that these are not completely habitual: like humans, bees show a creative flexibility in (hive) architecture.

This is only the tip of iceberg of bee studies. Rather than to keep multiplying examples, or to present more excellent cognitive feats of other animals, it should be pointed out that this sort of thing leaves Christians and Setians cold. When an animal outperforms a human at some cognitive task, the Christian and the Setian see it as an instance of some sort of "unfair advantage" on that test that the outperforming animals have had conferred on them by natural selection, whereas superior cognitive performances by humans are seen by them as outgrowths of some sort of awesome generalized intellectual prowess residing - as Mr. Aquino thinks - in some sort of big, globular pudding-wad laced with neurons inside the cranium called the "cerebrum" nebulously thought of as responsible for this excellence. There is no amount of evidence that can bridge this gulf between the way the aforesaid two "types" of people think about these things, and there is no way to get the Christian or Setian to see human cognitive abilities (and defects!) as species-specific specializations that best suited us to our original survival niche as hunter-gatherers. To see it this way puts humans, and the supposedly exalted mental abilities that Mr. Aquino sees displayed in large libraries, back into Nature, the realm of the carnal, and the evolutionary continuum. But, unlike Mr. Aquino's theory, which denies or ignores facts of zoology and animal behavior, this "carnal" way of looking at the subject of "mind" does not in any way deny for humans a unique evolutionary trajectory: it says only that man's phylogenetic trajectory has been unique only in the last few million years or so. It is ironic to note that Christian and Setian types that show this particular reluctance and cognitive inability (or disability) are the very humans with the strongest desire to believe in the superiority of the human brain!

How does Darwin's theory explain the existence of large libraries? It sees these as outgrowths of the explosive expansion, according to the laws of the mathematics of large numbers (once again!), in possible neuron connections that can come about when the number of neurons themselves in the neocortex increases due to selection in a hunter-gatherer niche of a certain kind. It may be expecting too much to expect a Christian or Setian to deal with very large numbers, so a simple example will suffice: the number of possible connections you can draw between five dots (representing neurons) on a piece of paper, allowing as "connections" little arrows that may be drawn both ways between any pair of dots, is twenty. If you then double the number of dots to ten, you can then connect them with ninety arrows. This multiplication effect gets much bigger much faster as the number of dots used increases. One of these rapid increases in both numbers of neurons and their connections in the primate forebears of humans was in the areas of the neocortex responsible for speech: Broca's and Wernicke's regions. A similar increase occurred as well as in the modules responsible for association and information processing. It was a very valuable discovery for neuroscience when John Allman discovered that, independent of body-size, the neocortex of fruit-eating monkeys is much larger than that of leaf-eating monkeys. This is exactly what one would expect if brain tissues develop according to the same laws as muscles and body hair, because this larger neocortex would endow fruit-eating monkeys with a richer memory so that they can remember when and where to look for edible, unrotten fruit, making evaluations and inferences based on time, appearance, location, etc. as to freshness. Such a problem is not nearly so critical with leaf-food in the tropics. A greater factual memory and better evaluative reasoning is a conferred advantage inherited by the fruit-eater.

All evidence today points to the idea that linguistic ability is genetically endowed and even hard-wired: it is innate and species-specific. By species-specific is meant that a language of gestures would not have suited humans to their original hunter-gatherer niche, but calls would do nicely, just like nose bridges do nicely for holding spectacles. Linguistic ability is as hard-wired at birth as the ability to see colors: experiments show that newborn humans are innately hard-wired to divide the color spectrum into four colors: red, blue, green, and yellow. Later on they learn to further sub-divide the spectrum. Likewise, syllable formation, basics of grammar, the means of storing and encoding language, even the manner of language acquisition or the way humans learn it are inborn. The only exceptions are a particular language's vocabulary and its grammatical idiosyncrasies. Once a vocal language existed, made possible as much by the low position of the human larynx in the throat and the structure of the human ear as by the few extra milligrams of high quality neural tissue in various brain modules, the antecedent existed for cultural evolution of a certain kind that did not exist before. Writing itself did not come into existence until humans had made the cultural transition from hunter-gatherers to animal herders and crop growers. Over two-hundred and fifty human generations have passed since the emergence of cities based on agriculture. Those who see humans as carnal and as still part of the evolutionary continuum see no contradiction in the idea that man can slip, or has now slipped, out of the bonds of natural selection. In fact, they seem to be the only ones really aware when this happens and the only ones who make apposite warnings of the dangers inherent in doing so!

Language has a multiplier effect on certain cognitive feats. Only the most obtuse will find this idea puzzling. If one insists on seeing language as the supreme intellectual achievement of man (Mr. Aquino mentioned walking through a library, not a computer clean-room), then it is just another remarkable development of a product of natural selection. We cannot give ourselves, God, or Set credit for it: it evolved with man in its oral and later written forms serving specific functions, whatever other uses to which it may be put (like the bridges of noses).

One of Mr. Aquino's "proofs" of the anomalous position of humans in Nature is a pseudo-scientific fact that had been bandied about in the l970's that apparently enamored him no end: the idea that humans use only ten to twenty percent of their "reasoning potential." This idea was based on the fact that, at that stage in what really amounted to what was still the infancy of neuroscience, there were large areas of densely packed neuron tissues in the cerebrum that were said to be "silent": they seemed to serve no purpose. This was immediately seized upon by die-hard "otherworldly" types and inveterate mystics as the last bastion or seat of the "soul" or what they perceive as the mysterious, non- or super-natural abilities humans have, or seen, as by Mr. Aquino, as unaccountable in terms of the theory of natural selection, as evidence that a great potential unaccounted for by Nature must have been formed and implanted in humans by Set, a potential Mr. Aquino believes Setians accepting what he calls the "Gift of Set" could tap into and use, making them what he calls the "Elect" (sounds like the "saved" or the "Elect of God"). In thinking this, Mr. Aquino correctly applied the idea that Nature is parsimonious: like a cheap car manufacturer who does not give you any extra axle thickness for your money but only the minimum to meet enforced safety standards and keep up a minimal market good will, Nature seems to dole out only about as much bone as you need for a task to which you are adapted. This is, by and large, a correct way of looking at this, so Mr. Aquino cannot be faulted here. So why all the extra neurons? As it turned out, the use of better, non-invasive brain scans of brains in action have shown that almost all of this "silent" material is used or involved in motor functions or processing sensory data, which are a lot more complicated processes than many originally thought. These two processes are, in fact, what most of that great big globe of the brain called the cerebrum (which, we have seen, Mr. Aquino mistakenly thinks is the source of "large libraries") does. Where Mr. Aquino did go astray again, however, is in the idea that "only" man has an excess of brain matter. One of Mr. Aquino's main arguments for the anomalousness of man is that man (he thinks) has both surplus brain stuff and much more brain power than he needs to survive or hold steady at stone age culture. As he puts it, "you and I should be gorillas," that is, all we really "need" to survive better is to get, as he puts it, "stronger, hairier, tougher, meaner, and faster." Once again, he makes the teleologic-teleonomic confusion as to what is "needed" to survive, as if this mattered as to what variants occurred in genetic reshufflings before fertilization or to natural selection. But it is a factual error I want to point out here. He reiterates that if something happens in nature according to the theory of natural selection, the laws of probability dictate that it should not happen just once, so why should humans be the only ones in Nature with the frills of excess computing power having their loci in extra brain matter. As it turns out, things are exactly what one would expect if the laws of probability and natural selection are correct: that such excess brain endowment, though rare, did appear at least once before or in some other species. Compared to flies and moths, who have no excess, the honey bee also has a substantial "surplus" of brain tissue giving it extra computing power beyond what is needed to control muscles and fulfill instinctive urges to gather food and perpetuate their kind, and, like in the case of man once again, this makes the honey bee more adaptive and adaptable than other phylogenetically related animals that look much like the bee. As stated before, this excess brain in the bee solves problems with original goal-oriented strategies and high reason, of which wasps, for example, are (or seem to be) incapable, a level of cognitive finesse far beyond what Mr. Aquino must have thought.

But do bees "know" that "I am I"? Does anyone else know this, or is this "uniquely human," as the theologians are always the first to assert and continue to assert with unflagging ardor while others are less strident about it now? I am glad Mr. Aquino did not ask this question, nor try to use this nebulous idea to prove human uniqueness under Set's tutelage because then this essay would get twice as long as I right now project it to become. I am glad because I am not entirely sure what this question, which addresses the issue of self-consciousness in animals, is supposed to mean. I am not even sure that most or all humans at all stages of the evolution of the genus Homo or even during the existence of the species Homo sapiens "knew" that "I am I," as when his brain was only half the size it is now but already then far larger than that of the nearest modern ape. I am not sure that newborns, who do not seem to come into the world with this idea, are hard-wired for it as they are for almost all the features of language. Neurology shows that an "organic I" exists in many healthy mammals, including healthy humans, but does not exist in humans with specific types of traumatic and developmental brain damage! This would mean that "I am I" means something absolutely different to a person who lacks the "organic I," just as it would mean something different to someone who developed total amnesia who, I presume, would also "know," despite the amnesia and in his own way, that "I am I." Since honey bees have no long term memory, if they "know" that "I am I" it would have to be in the way this is "known" by such an amnesiac. It is noteworthy to point out the irony once again that those that lack this "organic I" are the ones philosophically obsessed with the concepts behind "I am I" (I do not mean to include linguists and logicians in this category, who are fascinated by and study the formal nature of this and other such propositions). It would seem that the Christian and Setian type tends to become obsessed with and focused on, as of paramount importance to them, the very things they completely lack! One might venture to say that such things become so important to them due to the fact that they lack them, especially if they are aware of other humans around them that have these qualities. As an analogy, one might point out that a rich man whose belly is full does not worry about food, but a starving man thinks about it constantly.

To return to Mr. Aquino's vain efforts to reduce Darwin's theory to absurdity, it is clear to modern zoology, animal behavior studies, neurology and brain anatomy that, contrary to his reductio ad absurdum type argument, Nature has done not only what he says it has not done but even more: Nature has not only produced some species other than man evolving an intelligence at least partway to human level, which we see today in, for example, bonobo apes, but has also produced a type of animal, the honey bee, that looks a lot like its phylogenetically related kin (the wasps, moths, etc.) but is actually paramount over them in intelligence, just as humans look a lot like chimps but are paramount over them in intelligence. This is the answer to Mr. Aquino's question, "why did the brains of other creatures not similarly evolve - at least a little?" (p. 11). This is the refutation of his false answer as to the existence of such creatures, of which he roundly asserts on the same page, "There are none."

A second false argument Mr. Aquino adduces is very confused (or dishonest!) and therefore needs unraveling to separate the true from the false in it. Doing so will take us into the more subtle areas of the Synthetic Theory of Natural Selection, which is the modern version of Darwin's theory that arose in the 1940's, uniting Darwin's theory with modern genetics and probability theory.

Mr. Aquino says that Nature always picks the "easiest way out - that selection favors the less-complicated adaption over a more complex alternative." He says that this means that longer-necked giraffes may plausibly evolve, but that giraffes will therefore not evolve wings to assist them in feeding on treetop leaves. His argument proceeds that the only plausible things natural selection could select in favor of are accidents that occur in a species, but there is a limit, according to the parsimony of Nature he alludes to, as to the complexity of what can occur by accident. (It is not entirely clear as to whether he is saying there is a limit as to the complexity of what genetic accidents could produce, or whether he is saying that there is a limit as to the complexity of what natural selection would permit to survive, so I shall address both; he appears to me to be saying the latter, most likely). He then rules out human brains as too complex for this to happen, especially when being "stronger, hairier, tougher, meaner, and faster" will do just well for survival, as would stone age culture.

Note that in this argument, he employs a correct, non-teleologic paraphrase of the theory of natural selection. No sooner does he do so, however, than he misrepresents what the theory says about the evolution of complexity (or just does not know it), and misapplies the idea of Nature's parsimony, a valid concept in itself!

The first fallacy is his saying that probability in genetic reshufflings before fertilization and Nature's parsimony make evolution toward extremely complex organs and life forms highly unlikely. I have already mentioned Mr. Aquino's position, quite apart from his ideas about the Darwin's theory, in which he mistakenly believes that entropy, Nature's parsimony or Its taking the path of least resistance, and "energy downhill" are unable to produced any complexity, and should not do so, almost by definition, in the inorganic realm either. Mr. Aquino is a believer in the discredited idea of "reverse entropy," which scientists fairly and honestly considered at one time - and rejected. He believes reverse entropy is needed to account for the fact that the universe is not just murky soup, but is very highly developed, structured, and complex. I have already shown how the path of least resistance can and does account for the emergence of complexity in a simple case: a salt molecule. In the realm of biology now Mr. Aquino roundly asserts that Nature "favors the less-complicated adaption over a more complex alternative" (p. 11). This is not so. Here Mr. Aquino has gone over the edge again and is falsifying, either deliberately or due to a cognitive disability, in a way that precludes an understanding that might lead to an acceptance of the theory of natural selection. First of all, genes have no "information" beforehand as to whether a new reshuffled combination or mutation they are involved in before fertilization will produce a variant more or less complex than before. From the standpoint of the "spew" part of Darwin's theory, there are exactly equal probabilities for "more or less complex" here. But, as I said, I do not think Mr. Aquino is contradicting this, if he is even aware of the difference. What he is contradicting - and does not realize - is that as to the part of Darwin's theory relating to natural selection (the "skew" part), there are also about equal probabilities of selection favoring simpler versus more complex adaptive features in an animal. In fact, the theory says that when an animal is well-suited to its environmental niche, natural selection actually selects against both simpler and more complex variants. This is a fact of nature known as "selection inertia." The correct application of the idea of Nature's parsimony is this: natural selection disfavors variants (which are or could be useful adaptions) which require a greater re-adjustment of an animal's existing structure, organization, or embryonic developmental patterns. This is the correct explanation as to why giraffes do not also sprout wings for feeding on treetop leaves: this would require a drastic re-adjustment of the animal's entire body plan. That is not parsimonious. A giraffe's neck, long as it is compared to the little mouse's, has the same number of vertebrae as the mouse's (seven) - they are just extremely elongated. Further elongations of the neck accomplished this way requires much less complicated readjustments of the animals body plan than would new wing additions. Mr. Aquino's "explanation" for wingless giraffes - that "Nature favors the less complex" - would mean that animals, if they ever even came into existence at all, would all just devolve back into primal slime. This is, admittedly, a very subtle idea from the Synthetic Theory of Natural Selection. A purely theoretical example will say more than a thousand abstract explanations. Imagine a type of animal for whom seeing and capturing its prey is a simple matter: it would just run around and whatever fell within its field of vision it would grab and eat. Now suppose something in the environment changes and the animal cannot expend so much energy running around anymore, but has to sit pat instead, and use its eyes to scan a great depth of its environs to spot prey before capture. If variants do not appear in its offspring with an ability to start focusing their eyes, at least a little at first, the entire species might be wiped out. But suppose two such variants do appear. One is able to elongate and shrink its eyeballs, ever so slightly at first, to gain focus, while the other variant is able to elongate and shrink only some part of the front of the eye adjacent to the cornea. An animal with an adjustable lens in front of its eye is more complex than one that can only stretch its already existing eyeballs: the one with the lens has an additional structure (lens), like the hypothetical giraffe with wings, while the eyeball-stretcher is like the giraffe who only elongates it neck. But which would selection favor, the simpler eye-ball stretcher or the one with the lens? This is not as easy to answer in the abstract as Mr. Aquino pretends it is. The theory would say that the more complex variant, with an adjustable lens, is favored because stretching an eyeball (the simpler variant) would actually require more readjustments to the entire cranium of the animal, due to the changes in pressure a reshaping of the eyeball would cause inside the skull - a possibly lethal effect. A small, adjustable organ near the outside of the eye (a lens) requires no such radical readjustments of skull plan or organization. This is the kind of answer that the modern Synthetic Theory of Evolution gives, but the theory is open minded: how do we know that a variant who can squish his eyeballs may not be lucky enough to have a second variation also, like a vent hole in the skull somewhere to release pressure? And if he did, this would be accounted the simpler readjustment of body plan, and therefore the less complex squisher-vent hole variant would be favored by natural selection. It is also possible that the original animals among which these variants occur have such a vent holes to begin with, or could make ones they already have for some other use do double-duty, so, again, in this case, the simpler squisher would have to be favored. You can see that you have to take the entire animal's structure into account - you cannot be ignorant! - and this is what the modern theory calls mosaic evolution: there is a mosaic of features to be considered when thinking about variants, and nothing should be considered in isolation (no "small decks," thank you). What's more, until a pair of variants occurring together in an animal become useful as an "adaption pair," there may be no prior connection between these variants (like being lucky to have a skull opening just when you are called upon to start squishing your eyeballs).

A real example of this - crucial to human brain development, of which Mr. Aquino is so enamored - is that the larger cranium that humans developed to house a larger brain would never have happened, and humans would not be around now - only apes - if certain human mothers did not produce simultaneous genetic variants (along with the bigger-brain variant) which were inclined to give somewhat premature births. Compared to a newborn ape, a newborn human needs a more womb-time; but, if he had that, his little skull, in that short extra time in the womb, would get too big and too hard and kill the mother when she delivered the baby. So then there would be no humans around either. Evolution - not just of humans but of all animals - is a beautifully complex mosaic with lots of drama, ironies, and accidents in it. Evolution did not move in a straight line to produce humans, as the telelogic arguments fancy: it "zig-zagged" chaotically all over the place before it produced them, and untold billions and billions of variants perished along the way on the other "zigs" and "zags." If there had been straight-line development toward human life or human brains, I too would consider that some sort of strong evidence of "ordaining" or outcome-orientation toward humans, some sort of design.

Mr. Aquino also makes the fallacious argument that while humans have all this "extra" brain matter, why don't we find super-giraffes with lots of extra neck length, like giraffes with forty-foot instead of just four-foot necks. This is an argument based on the Christian type's monkish ignorance of Nature, though it is somewhat excusable here on Mr. Aquino's part because giraffes are not as frequently observed in our part of the world as, say, small cats and various dogs. He apparently never spent any real quality time at a zoo and observed how a giraffe trying to get a drink of water from a basin to wash down his dinner of leaves has to very awkwardly spread his forelegs in a "V" to get his long neck and head down far enough to get his drinks. A forty-footer would have even more difficulty doing this. In fact, a forty-footer might even have difficulty feeding, because the giraffe's neck is almost perfectly suited to the kinds of trees it feeds on: he does not need to spread his forelegs to feed on treetops far below him, nor bend his neck too far over, as a forty-footer might.

Mr. Aquino's misunderstanding of the theory of natural selection is evident again when he incorrectly argues that proto-men would have long-since been extinguished before hostile environmental stresses could have had any effect on their brains to give them brain power they would need to meet the new challenges. This once again shows a complete misunderstanding of the theory of natural selection. The theory does not postulate any sort of effect in an evolving organ due to environmental forces of some sort acting upon that organ which would then be the cause of that organ's evolution. There is no such "force (or action) of evolution." The theory says (to repeat once again an idea Christian types just cannot seem to assimilate and hold on to and keep before them when they think about these things) that the cause of evolution is not some force or entity but rather theskewing of variants in a population. If an animal's vision is not up to par with environmental challenges, the only "force" that extinguishes his life and prevents him from having as many offspring as animals with more acute vision is light, the laws of light refraction, etc. If an animal type becomes extinct because it cannot digest available food, the only "force" (or forces) that kill it off are those of the enzymatic chemistry of digestion and the laws of organic chemistry. It is a kind of simple-mindedness that Setians share with Christian Fundamentalists to ask for or demand an answer to the question, "What (single) 'force' causes evolution." Singles are for simples. There is nothing inconsistent, as Mr. Aquino claims on p. 12 of Black Magic Theory and Practice, with the idea that one organ or set of organs in an animal can get stronger while others - or even most others - gets weaker, as he claims for the rest of human anatomy compared to the strengthening of the human brain. This is a frequent occurrence in evolution. He generates the inconsistency himself in his own confused mind by thinking that "the brain is evolving" because of some sort of "force of evolution in Nature," while many parts of the rest of the human body are devolving, as if that force has refrained to act or been nullified with respect to acting on these organs. This false argument is adduced to show once again how the human brain is an anomaly in Nature. This argument is also founded on the aforementioned ignorance of Nature, as if other animals never have one organ or feature excessively strengthened or one adaption highly exaggerated at the expense of one or more other features. There is clear evidence that cetaceans have hands and legs, but these have been rendered utterly hidden and useless in order for the adaption of a streamlined aquatic form to govern these animals completely.

Mr. Aquino may consider his own brain "exceptional" and anomalous in the carnal realm of Nature, but I have a different picture to paint. Imagine a human born who really did have the mental analogue of a giraffe's forty-foot neck, a human who did not "merely" have an IQ of just over 200 or so, which is a high as any humans seem to get, but closer to 2000, assuming one could extend the Stanford-Binet or Wechsler intelligence test-score scales meaningfully in this range to accommodate such a truly anomalous intelligence. It is then possible that, like with the forty-footer giraffe, natural selection might work against such an individual and his offspring: he might be like Archimedes, who, when attacked by a Macedonian warrior while working at his easel on a geometry problem, reluctantly turned away from it to the soldier (who then immediately slew him) with the dying words, "Please don't hurt my circles." Or he might be like the "first philosopher" (in the West) Thales, who came into mortal peril by falling into a ditch he didn't see at night because he was absorbed looking up at the stars while walking. A truly anomalous "forty-foot" intelligence such as I am trying to convey a picture of here might be like Archimedes and Thales, and even more so! Selective inertia is more likely to be keeping the intelligence of primates (including humans) in a range much narrower than Mr. Aquino imagines it to be. If we met an organic life form with an intelligence outside this range, it is likely that we would be able to communicate little with it, like a human attempting to explain to a chimpanzee Quantum Mechanics or topology. What I am saying requires an imaginative leap on the reader's part, of the kind you might make when reading, say, the fiction of H. P. Lovecraft.

I am trying to convey the idea that selection in our ecosystem, among the life forms we know about, has confined primate intelligence to a narrow range to begin with. The range of primates, from Kanji the chimp to Albert Einstein, is actually a lot narrower than Mr. Aquino imagines it to be. The few human variants who may push this confining intelligence envelope outward at its borders always have to invent new languages altogether to convey their thoughts to others. The speech that was useful to hunter-gatherers, even in its written forms, is not sufficient for this. So they invent new "symbolic" systems that appear mystical or inscrutable to those who fall nearer the mean or even the high mean of human intelligence, symbolic systems like that used in mathematical group theory, or in the Taoist hexagram system of the I Ching, or the Tantric mandalas and cosmogonic diagrams.

If Mr. Aquino were not so ignorant of a subject he so freely pontificates on, he would know that there has been an incident in the evolution of all life on Earth that happened only twice, which means it is close to being as improbable as the same individual winning the state lottery twice (not impossible, but how often does or could this happen?) Twice, and only twice, during the entire history of life on Earth have the numbers of chromosomes in the cells of living things doubled. This happened once a little over half a billion years ago just before the start of the Cambrian era, when life suddenly got large. Before then, there were few living things the size of a human hand, and most were microscopic. Then the number of chromosomes in a cell somewhere doubled, and most of the modern phyla of living things we see today came into existence. Then this happened one more time, eons later: the number of chromosomes in a vertebrate's cell somewhere doubled, and vertebrates became possessed of complex heads and jaws, in which the sensory organs were concentrated. If one seeks improbability and extra-ordinary events in Nature, one should look to these, which appear to violate an evolutionary continuum more than the appearance of Homo sapiens from among the primates. The doubling of single chromosomes in a cell has been observed and is usually selected against: one such doubling produces the well-known "Down's syndrome." But to have a cell's entire set double, and to have selection favor this, is extraordinary indeed, unless (there is much we do not know) chromosomes doubled one at a time over long periods until the an entire set was doubled, then this stopped for a few eons, only to happen again much later - which would still seem like a great improbability or rarity. Why did this kind of event take so long to repeat itself? Why hasn't it happened again since?

On pp. 10 - 12 of Black Magic in Theory and Practice, Mr. Aquino gives us what appear to be scientific and philosophical arguments about Nature and the theory of evolution. Then, in the transition to the very next and last paragraph on p. 12 therein, he suddenly jumps to the idea that if we really want to learn about these things, we should look instead at Stanley Kubrick's 200l: A Space Odyssey, a science fiction film based on Arthur C. Clark's novel Childhood's End. He tells us that to really learn about evolution, we need to pay attention to the spectacular scene of the film where proto-men who look like apes have their intelligence artificially boosted by a rectangular monolith, a symbolic stand-in, he says, for the Devil, for whom he (incorrectly) claims the oldest name to be Set. At this point, many readers of his essay do what I once did many years ago with it: they put it down with a knowing smile and read no further - if they do not just outright chuck it in the garbage, as several people I know who paid for it did. Either way, they tend to find it this part of the publication hilariously funny.

It cannot be disproved that a deity or deities, demons or demonic forces, the Devil or Satan, Cthulhu, or even extra-terrestrials did not have a hand in human evolution, or, say, in the explosion of large living things in the pre-Cambrian, or in the change from protostome to deuterostome, a developmental form men still share with humble annelids. In the absence of the existence of extraterrestrial artifacts, a role for extra-terrestrials seems unlikely, as Mr. Aquino has correctly stated, though this does not really disprove this either. Entropy drives the entire process of evolution forward, if any single thing can be said to be responsible for it, and this "force" appears to be a fair equivalent of what the most ancient historical traditions, as reflected in old literature like the I Ching and the Vedas, call a "dark force," like Anton LaVey's "Satan," whom he called "a dark hidden force in Nature, guiding it," or like Tani Jantsang's "sat-tan," a compound word consisting of two very ancient linguistic morphemes (sat and tan) that appear to have come down from some root language. Set is neither a "dark force," nor anything like entropy, nor as ancient. If Set is anything at all, it is, according to Mr. Aquino's description of it, a "light force" of some kind, opposes entropy much as Set's own "prophet" Mr. Aquino does (albeit he does so only philosophically, since one cannot physically oppose entropy), and is linguistically recent (see Set, by Tani Jantsang). The problem with Mr. Aquino's Black Magic in Theory and Practice is not that one can disprove everything he says about Set; the problem with it is that evolution really works the way Darwin theorized that it did, so that anything "doing" this, be it extra-terrestrials, demons, deities, or whatever is truly doing it "blindly and idiotically" through the random chaos of "spew and skew." That some entity, demon, or god could be doing it this way is entirely possible. So why then is Mr. Aquino so intent on refuting Darwin's theory? Because his conception of Set is of something, unlike the pre-Aryan Vedic tamas, Dr. LaVey's "Satan," or Ms. Jantsang's "sat-tan," that just does not do things this way. And because his cognitive proclivities or thinking style is identical to that of Christian Fundamentalists.

Bertrand Russell once said that the debate about the existence of God was once an intellectually respectable endeavor, because such arguments once-upon-a-time involved errors of fact or fallacies of logic and thought that could be identified and disputed. He said that since science and logic have already taken so much of the wind out of these old sails, such debates have begun to rely on more nebulous ideas. For example, one argument I have heard more than one "intellectual" modern Christian make is an argument based on the existence of beauty in the world. The argument asks, why would a blind mechanism, even if it could produce complex brains and minds, have produced such a wonderful thing for the human mind to contemplate as beauty. (There are those who would immediately find this idea laughable, for what is "beauty" except a subjective experience that not all might share. There are those, including some of the most renowned Christian scholars, who found no beauty in the world at all, but only ugliness.) The Christian is thereby attempting to appeal to his listeners' higher intellect - of which the contemplation of beauty and aesthetics is undoubtedly a part - and insinuate that beauty is some sort of "from on high" intrusion into the carnal and earthly realm of what awaits the "righteous" in the Kingdom of God. Arguments like this are not intellectually respectable and prey upon ignorance. To this argument atheists often reply that beauty is in the eye of the beholder. This is certainly true, and I guess that this is the first thing they think of to answer this so-called argument. But there is a simpler refutation that relies on knowledge of nature, rather than ignorance, an argument that does the double-duty of simultaneously confirming the Theory of Evolution. This argument asks you to consider something in Nature that almost everyone considers beautiful: the colors of flowers. The refutation of the Christian's argument is this: that there are no colored flowers among those which are wind-pollinated. Colored flowers occur only among those that are pollinated by flying insects, who can see and identify them - even as to flower type - by their brilliant and variegated colors. In other words, the colors of flowers confer on certain flowers a reproductive advantage that enlists insects as assistants. So the argument gets turned around back on the Christian apologist: if evolution automatically produces beauty, or if God put it unnecessarily into evolution to give us "an intimation of immortality," why did He only put it in insect-pollinated flowers? Or why do colors appear (or God put them) only on the beautifully colored fruit of otherwise homely, drab and unattractive trees (like the orange tree), among their fruits and berries? The answer to this is the same: so birds (or others!) can see and identify their fruit and berry food, eat it, and defecate the undigested seeds at some distance from the tree, beyond where the wind would take the seeds. There is a pattern here, a pattern explained by the Theory of Evolution, not by a decision or fiat by God only to put beauty among only certain evolving plants and animals according to arbitrariness. A clear pattern belies arbitrariness.

It has never been clear to my why the existence of improbable things in Nature is automatically supposed to be evidence of design. It is improbable that a African-America I met in New Jersey won the state lottery. Yet he did so. It is entirely improbable that I have successive descendants in the male line - sons, grandsons, etc. - uninterruptedly for 100 generations from now. It is entirely improbable that any given man alive today will have this. But every living man today is living proof that such an uninterrupted line has in fact occurred, however improbable it might have been 100 generations ago. So I don't see why improbabilities in Nature, even recurring ones, prove anything about design or hidden helping hands. Are we to assume the African-American from New Jersey must have cheated to win, or that my male ancestors must have had guardian angels to direct the course of their progeny, that is, that there was really a conspiracy in the former case and a design in the latter?

One of the classic arguments for the existence of God was studied by Mr. Aquino, for he mentions it. This is the "first cause" argument which says that everything must have a cause, and as you go back further and further in the chain of causes you eventually come to the cause of the universe itself, which is called "God." Mr. Aquino is too modern and sophisticated to not see the fallacies in this argument, one of which is that the argument is saying that God has no cause, and if that is so, if there is a cause without a cause, you might as well allow it to be the universe itself as "God." This undermines the force and validity of the argument, so you do not hear much of this old argument any more.

But now you hear something vaguely similar from the same type of thinker. Science now seems to be saying that everything is the result of random events. Everything is improbable, but happens anyway (like the lottery winner and the man with male descendants 100 generations from now). In this sea of chains of improbable existences, the universe itself may even be improbable. So it is felt by some that there still must be out there a certain foundation for all these improbabilities at the very beginning of the chain of improbabilities, and this is called "God." You might call this a "new" version of the old "first cause" argument. But then, just like with the older argument, if you allow one thing among all the other improbabilities to be a certainty ("God"), then it might as well, once again, be the world or the universe itself as God. I have not heard anyone make such "variant" of the old "first cause" argument, but there seems to be something vague like this working in the backs of the minds of people, like Mr. Aquino, William Paley, and others, who think improbabilities in Nature count as weighty evidence of a design somewhere, or demand there must be one certainty somewhere on which all of these improbabilities and chaotic random events can be hung. None of them have ever thought this out or stated this as clearly as I have tried to do in this paragraph. This is what Russell meant that "new" arguments for the existence of God or Providence or design have gotten more nebulous. This is invariably the case, when these arguments are not just dishonest, fallacious, or based on factual errors or ignorance of Nature, as were William Paley's and as are Michael Aquino's. Perhaps one might venture to name this deity behind chaos and improbability "Azathoth," in which case we return again to the most ancient concepts of the pre-Aryan Vedics, a concept-word mentioned and explained by Tani Jantsang: Asat. The suffix "-oth" might show the word's origin to have been influenced by Hebrew (in which "-oth" indicates female-plural.) It is well known that H. P. Lovecraft, who invented the name "Azathoth," claimed, in his Selected Letters, to have relied on Tibetan, Tartar and Hebrew words in creating most of the names of his "Old Ones": "Azoth" (the same as Asat) and "-oth." Lovecraft also depicted it correctly as an uncaring, blind, and idiotic force. The answer offered by the doctrines of certain aforementioned ancient peoples (Asians, Vedics, Hellenes) to "why did the universe occur?" is given in one vague word, not easily explained: "Necessity." Their idea of "Necessity" finds its best equivalent in one (apparently woefully misunderstood by some) modern term: "entropy."

One may ask: does entropy act upon itself? This cannot be known. And that's exactly what the ancients said about Necessity!