[ccc3]

At some point in the article he states:

Evolution simply could never have anticipated...

Evolution, by definition, doesn't anticipate anything. It's disappointing to see a university professor writing on evolution who seemingly doesn't even understand the evolutionary process.

[redwood]

I'm sorry but this is a way of speaking that doesn't necessarily imply he believes in an evolution capable of cognition. It's a short hand for saying "humans evolved in situations so unlike the situation they have today, that the traits they evolved are no longer best-suited for survival in today's world"

[edanm]

That same paragraph stuck out for me as well.

I would give the benefit of the doubt for the sentence the GP quoted, but then the author actually tries to justify the fact that evolution couldn't have computed it even if it wanted to:

"Evolution simply could never have anticipated the novel environments, such as modern society, that our social primate would come to inhabit. That would be a computationally intractable problem, even for the new IBM Blue Gene/L supercomputer that runs 280 trillion operations per second. Even long-term weather prediction is easy when compared to fitness prediction"

Now that's just begging for people to completely misunderstand how evolution works.

[Stormbringer]

I'm even more sorry that this way of speaking is so utterly prevalent in science reporting.

That, plus the tendency of people from other specialties cough astrophysicists especially cough to wax lyrical and ascribe amazing powers to 'evolution' and the casual observer would be entirely forgiven for thinking that anyone talking about "intelligent design" must be talking about evolution and that those are simply two terms for the same thing.

Before you start flaming me, my issue is not with Science! but it is with how Science! is reported on, which involves both watering down the message (turning everything into a Kipling-esque "Just so story"), and gussying up the message to make it seem more important (gotta get that funding somehow).

[snowwrestler]

It betrays a fundamental misunderstanding of the traits related to cognition. Our "selfish genes" do not tell us how to think; instead cognition represents a delegation of authority from the genes to the carrier. We are attracted to porn, yes, but we are also aware that we are attracted to porn. Thus as some citizens descended into opium stupor, others observed that descent and made conscious choices to avoid it. As a result, human society did not devolve into one big opium den. Just like it will not devolve into one big World of Warcraft game.

The real reason we have not heard from aliens is that the distances are physically impossible to bridge.