16 minutes ago, Doug Morris said:
Yes, although there may have been more than one mutation, and one gene can affect the functioning of other genes.
Sure, I mean, who can tell, right?
So “reason” – the faculty that identifies and integrates the material provided by perception – is not mental at all but actually physical, right? And if someone has a superior reasoning faculty, it must because he or she has superior genes underlying that faculty. Similarly, if someone has an inferior reasoning faculty, it can only be because he or she has inferior genes. Sounds like something out of an early 20th century book on eugenics.
By the way, you’re aware that genetics has established that the great majority of chance mutations to the genome are either injurious to the organism, or simply neutral (i.e., they don’t change the organism in any fundamental way, e.g., blue eyes and blond hair vs. brown eyes and brown hair). The idea that a random, chance, pure-dumb-luck mutation from a DNA copying error, or a stray cosmic ray hitting the genome, caused a fundamental and beneficial change in an animal species to such a large extent – acquisition of reason, acquisition of language, etc. – is far-fetched, with no compelling evidence except, of course, philosophical bias (which is not evidence at all).
And you’re aware that Ayn Rand herself implicitly expressed some skepticism about Darwinian evolution at a Ford Hall Forum lecture in the 1970s? Someone in the audience asked her about evolution and she said simply, “I’m not a student of Darwin’s theory.”
The truth is that Darwin’s notion of dumb-luck combined with natural selection is not a theory at all but, at best, a hypothesis . . . and one that is not well supported either by the fossil record (which mainly shows long periods of stasis punctuated by rapid change, with few or no intermediates) or by modern biochemistry (which shows genetics to be based on a system of coded-chemistry, and which also shows biological systems – the cell, for example – to be hierarchical, with systems being dependent on lower, more fundamental systems. The systems could not have “evolved” piecemeal, element by element, because the entire system needs to be in place simultaneously for other systems to function at all. So the “slow-and-steady-over-long-periods-of-time” notion of classical Darwinism doesn’t work in the laboratory, regardless of how attractive it might be to a philosophically naïve-materialism bias).
Finally: The genome determines protein synthesis (the “proteome”). There’s no evidence that proteins of any sort cause or lie at the foundation of “mind”, “consciousness”, or of a power or faculty of mind or consciousness such as “reason.” To assume otherwise is simply arbitrary.