Evolution and Idealism

[Idealism_Existence]

I really cannot persuade myself from the Darwinian mechanisms of evolution; and as an objective idealist I do think that consciousness cannot have been evolved by means of natural selection. Maybe there are other means by which evolution can produce adaptive phenotypic characteristics. Saltationism and Mutationism in a non-random sense for example. Darwinian evolution cannot explain why - and this may be sound ridiculous - why we do have the exact shape of our body that we have. Or take the eye brow for example. Many Darwinists like Dawkins try to explain this by natural selection but it cannot work. And a more persuasive argument is that the eye cannot have been evolved in this short time; also other adaptations. Time spans are to short.
Idealism takes consciousness for granted. One can say it takes it as a postulate as in mathematics. Consciousness cannot have evolved.
What do you think of what I have said. Evolution and idealism.

[AshvinP]

I really cannot persuade myself from the Darwinian mechanisms of evolution; and as an objective idealist I do think that consciousness cannot have been evolved by means of natural selection. Maybe there are other means by which evolution can produce adaptive phenotypic characteristics. Saltationism and Mutationism in a non-random sense for example. Darwinian evolution cannot explain why - and this may be sound ridiculous - why we do have the exact shape of our body that we have. Or take the eye brow for example. Many Darwinists like Dawkins try to explain this by natural selection but it cannot work. And a more persuasive argument is that the eye cannot have been evolved in this short time; also other adaptations. Time spans are to short.
Idealism takes consciousness for granted. One can say it takes it as a postulate as in mathematics. Consciousness cannot have evolved.
What do you think of what I have said. Evolution and idealism.

There are a lot of problems with Darwinian evolution when framed with materialist assumptions. The big one being the question of how did consciousness evolve from non-consciousness. Another one may be that certain body structures seem unlikely to have evolved over the time frames given, but I believe that is generally a weak criticism because an increasing number of those have been resolved over time. However, none of this means that Darwinian science must be discarded under idealism. In fact, Darwinian theory is likely the most powerful scientific theory we currently have to explain the development of life and even the mind.

The key will be to get rid of the ingrained materialist assumptions within the field and reimagine the theory with idealist assumptions, which is basically what Donald Hoffman is working on now. I would also say that discoveries in the field of 'epigenetics' correspond to this shift towards a more idealist view of evolution, i.e. how mutation, variation and selection are acting on consciousness rather than on bits of 'matter'. The jury is definitely still out on that one, but it seems to have all the potential for leading to a major paradigm shift in evolutionary science. And, again, that is the science that no one can reasonably dispute in terms of its vast explanatory power, so it may very well bring all other 'hard sciences' along for the ride.