If the wish is father to the deed, it “explains” cumulative selection being preferred to random selection. But when one considers the incredible ramification of zoological species, some changes must surely be retrograde, just as some are progressive? And in a completely meaningless world, I would have thought on a purely statistical basis, some retrograde changes would be the abandonment of cumulative genetic change for random change. If so, that would mean the end of evolution for that creature? Whereas if complexity changes the rules, as I believe it does, it at once becomes obvious that one of the rule-changes might be that (apart from disease and decay) future changes had to be towards greater complexity. And that would mean that evolution ceased to be non-directional, and had acquired a purpose.
In addition there is a difficulty in applying observations on primitive creatures to an understanding of man; quite apart from the fallacy of illegitimate induction, there is the difficulty that you, the observer, are a man. To have a detached perspective, when you are not detached but part of the process, requires an insight of which few of us are capable. And to assume that you are detached, when you are not detached, introduces an assumption which is obviously false, and which may falsify all your conclusions. And you cannot possibly know whether it does, or not!
But it may be objected, “Don’t be silly. Common sense tells us that no animal likes being eaten by a predator. Of course it wants to stay alive”. Maybe so; but then evolution is not non-directional. It has as an undercurrent the desire for life; and if the desire for life, why not the undercurrent of a desire for greater life, and a more complicated nervous system? And if it has the desire for greater life, why not the desire for cerebralization and to be like its creator? So we come up against the admonition, “Who told thee that thou wast naked?” Which is the more likely speculation: that in a completely purposeless world in which the mechanism of natural selection “explains” that there is no explanation for it at all, a man suddenly conceives the desire to be like his creator [who doesn’t of course exist, and is merely a figment in his imagination] out of an environment which is completely purposeless; or that the Creator put into man’s mind the desire to be like Himself, even if He did it as an undercurrent of evolution? One must be ready to grasp unpleasant truth; and the truth for one man may be different from the truth for another man. We are told that 2 electrons are identical; were it not so, molecules and therefore structure would be impossible. Maybe even atoms would be impossible. And if you have 2 electrons in a box, you cannot distinguish between them; because of Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle, you cannot follow one electron around the box, and keep track of it. You just have 2 electrons in a box.