Over the last few posts, I have been hammering away at one of the articles of faith of the Singularity: that evolution by natural selection is inevitably heading towards a technology-creating species. 

I first showed that there is no exponential trend leading up to us since all species will show exponential trends if you merely use their taxonomic branching points as data points (as Kurzweil speciously does).  Therefore, the Singularity is false. 

Since then, I’ve been arguing that there is no scientific way one can prove that higher intelligence is inevitable, so belief in it is a matter of faith, no different in principle than Christians’ belief in the virgin birth. 

Conveniently, a paper just came out last month in the Proceedings of the National Academy that nicely bolsters my argument.  The paper is titled “More genes underwent positive selection in chimpanzee evolution than in human evolution,” so I guess you can figure out what its conclusion is.  The authors (Bakewell, Shi, and Zhang) encapsulate the common Transhumanist belief:

“Observations of numerous dramatic and presumably adaptive phenotypic modifications during human evolution prompt the common belief that more genes have undergone positive Darwinian selection in the human lineage than in the chimpanzee lineage since their evolutionary divergence 6-7 million years ago.”

Indeed, if a technology-creating species is inevitable and evolution was accelerating up to us we should expect way more positive selection of genes for humans than chimps. 

However, the authors found the opposite was true.  They found 154 human genes that showed evidence of the rapid positive selection that marks out adaptive traits, but 233 chimp genes with the same qualities. 

The authors conclude:

“These observations … refute the anthropocentric view that a grand enhancement in Darwinian selection underlies human origins.”

HA HA!!!  Exactly my point!!!  SUCCESS!

How sweet it is to see hot-of-the-presses Science refute Transhumanism.