The conclusion to the penultimate chapter “Feeling”, save for an anecdote about a Persian rug purchased in San Francisco.

Evolution designed the human brain not to accurately understand itself but to help us survive. We observe ourselves and the world and make enough sense of things to get along. Some of us, interested in knowing ourselves more deeply—seek to get past our intuitive ideas of us. We can. We can use our conscious minds to study to identify and to pierce our cognitive illusions. By broadening our perspective to take into account how our minds operate, we can achieve a more enlightened view of who we are. But even as we grow to better understand ourselves, we should maintain our appreciation of the fact that if our mind’s natural view of the world is skewed it is skewed for a reason.

Evolution is mentioned numerous times in the course of the book, always in a sort of lighthearted, nontechnical way. As Mlodinow approaches the end of the book, however, he lets his guard down, I think, and allows certain unmistakable notions to creep into the text. One such notion is that evolution is in some way an entity capable of thought and design. Whereas evolution is a process. From the Life Science website:

The theory of evolution by natural selection, first formulated in Darwin's book "On the Origin of Species" in 1859, is the process by which organisms change over time as a result of changes in heritable physical or behavioral traits. Changes that allow an organism to better adapt to its environment will help it survive and have more offspring.

Evolution did not design the human brain. But in terms compatible with evolution, over an extended period of time tiny changes accrued that were passed on to offspring that ultimately resulted in the human brain. Nor did evolution design anything that helped in survival. Survival itself is what perpetuated the brain and all other evolutionary characteristics.

The word “design” is important here because a movement exists called Intelligent Design that seeks to build on the notion that certain systems are too complex to have evolved on their own. The eye is one such system. But remember, no criticism of science is so powerful that it cannot be rejected with a knowing look and a chuckle. There are probably ten articles or videos maintaining with straight faces that the eye is not very extraordinary for every one maintaining that the eye is too complex to have been formed by shaking a box with a hundred billion billiard balls inside. The problem is that the eye consists of numerous subsystems whose sole function is to be part of an eye. Highly complex subsystems. There is no reason for them to exist beyond servicing an eye. So in order to evolve an eye, you need to evolve all sorts of things that seemingly have no purpose until suddenly an eye exists. Only then does it all make sense. If you lack any one of the ingredients, or have one too many, you have no eye.

Of course, Mlodinow’s subject is the brain, not the eye, though he has a great deal to say about the eye and the brain working together in unexpected ways. I would be tempted to say that the human brain is not merely a question of a bit more tissue in the frontal lobe, something that could easily be produced by evolution, but something vastly more complex even than eyes. The fact that we function simultaneously on conscious and subconscious levels should tell us, the moment we come to terms with it, that more is at work in the universe than mere rationality.

So, saying that evolution “designed the human brain” and concluding that “our mind’s natural view of the world is skewed” for a reason is to fall off the Science train and succumb to a kind of religion of evolution. In another era he might have said God designed the human brain and gave us certain propensities of thought to help us survive. And I don’t think anyone would have thought twice about it. But God has not designed, Science has not designed, evolution has designed. And why? To help us survive. Thank God for evolution.