Evolution and the Naturalistic Paradigm — Ali Shukri Amin
First published on my writing site: www.aliamin.info/2026/01/evolution-and-the-naturalistic-paradigm/
By Ali Shukri Amin. I first wrote this as a comment on r/PhilosophyMemes, in the thread “Evolution!!”, copied here as written.
Unfortunately while what you said seems much more consistent with a naturalistic paradigm, what is in the panel is constantly proposed by naturalists/materialists. If we accept evolution as an unguided process then it would be random, inefficient, often fail, and not be optimized for anything. It would just so happen that some subset of traits allowed enough of a survival advantage that they were passed on, but for whatever confluence of traits allowed for that, there would be a non-zero number of superfluous, counterintuitive, or “harmful” traits.
There would be no way to reliably test whether consciousness or reason was actually evolutionarily “advantageous” because we wouldn’t be able to run experiments across billions of years to control for it. That would also require us to define some desire end goal for evolution which it does not have, being a random process.
I’m not a naturalist or materialist but I appreciate that you have some actual nuance on this point
Posted January 27, 2026. Read it on Reddit.
Find me on Reddit, YouTube, Letterboxd and Linktree; more of my work is on my portfolio, alishukriamin.com.
Read this post on aliamin.info, or browse all my writing.