At least one critic has accused C. S. Lewis of not understanding the theory of Evolution. He or they may have had passages from Mere Christianity (HarperCollins, 2001, 21 & 22) in mind. In his latter days, Lewis wrote about evolution in a way that wasn't so objectionable. For example, in Miracles Revised, he wrote,
It is agreed on all hands that reason, and even sentience, and life itself are late comers in Nature. If there is nothing but Nature, therefore, reason must have come into existence by a historical process. And of course, for the Naturalist, this process was not designed to produce a mental behavior that can find truth. There was no Designer; and indeed, until there were thinkers, there was no truth or falsehood. The type of mental behavior we now call rational thinking or inference must therefore have been 'evolved' by natural selection, by the gradual weeding out of types less fitted to survive. (HarperCollins, 2001, 27 & 28)
In a late essay, Lewis conceded what I wish to refer to as the principle of environmental adoption. In "The World's Last Night," he wrote, "It can even be argued that what Darwin really accounted for was not the origin, but the elimination of species" (The World's Last Night, Boston: Mariner, 2012, 101). At around the same time that the later essays were published (the fifties), the U.C.L.A. economist Armen Alchian published his famous paper that explained the principle of environmental adoption. The principle of environmental adoption forms the basis of a plausible objection to Lewis's Argument from Reason. Many rebuttals to Lewis's argument and ones similar to his unwittingly use the principle. As Alchian explained the principle, the environment itself will "adopt" organisms that, by "sheer chance," perform correctly:
All individual rationality, motivation, and foresight will be temporarily abandoned in order to concentrate upon the ability of the environment to adopt "appropriate" survivors even in the absence of any adaptive behavior…. Consider, first, the simplest type of biological evolution. Plants "grow" to the sunny side of buildings not because they "want to" in awareness of the fact that optimum or better conditions prevail there but rather because the leaves that happen to have more sunlight grow faster and their feeding systems become stronger. ("Uncertainty, Evolution, and Economic Theory," The Journal of Political Economy, Vol. 58, No. 3, Jun., 1950, 214)
Of course, plants don't have awareness, but animals do. Those animals which, for whatever reason, are aware of relevant facts will survive. It's plausible that animals that are in touch with reality―that know what is good or bad for them―will, all other things being equal, outlive their rivals. The environment would then select those animals which are aware of the facts. Alchian continued,
[A]nimals with configurations and habits more appropriate for survival under prevailing conditions have an enhanced viability and will with higher probability be typical survivors. Less appropriately acting organisms of the same general class having lower probabilities of survival will find survival difficult. More common types, the survivors, may appear to be those having adapted themselves to the environment, whereas the truth may well be that the environment has adopted them. There may have been no motivated adapting but, instead, environmental adopting. (Ibid)
Alchian then provided an illustration to show that only organisms that, by chance, stumble upon the correct behavior would live or, in this case, continue their journey: "Assume that thousands of travelers set out from Chicago, selecting their roads completely at random and without foresight. Only our 'economist' knows that on but one road are there any gasoline stations. He can state categorically that travelers will continue to travel only on that road; those on other roads will soon run out of gas" (Ibid). We could infer from the illustration that organisms that can learn about pertinent facts also have a better chance at survival. Those that are aware of the truth, in the mundane sense of the word, will be selected by the environment. It's plausible that natural selection weeds out those who don't know about the world in general. Those that survive know about the world, at least the mundane facts. Those that could not ascertain practical knowledge, narrowly defined, would die out.
J. B. S. Haldane, a biologist Lewis was fond of quoting, almost certainly had a grasp on the principle of environmental adoption; so it's puzzling that he would write "I have no reason to suppose that my beliefs are true." If one's beliefs about strictly practical matters weren't true, one's chances of dying would increase. Those who were prone to erroneous beliefs would be less likely to survive. Those with erroneous beliefs would be displaced by those with correct beliefs. Those organisms that survive and proliferate would be those whose beliefs were correct. Surviving organisms would have correct beliefs. Certainly, we are all the offspring of surviving organisms. Our ancestors apparently had correct beliefs. Why wouldn't we have correct beliefs too?
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