Tacit Creationism

Biological traits are products of evolutionary constraints and tradeoffs that make an engineering view essential.  But systems shaped by natural selection are fundamentally different from designed systems. They do not have parts with sharp boundaries and specific functions connected in sensible ways. Instead, they are organically complex in ways fundamentally different from designed machines. Tacit creationism is pervasive throughout biology and medicine but it will be hard to purge, because our human minds rebel against the untidiness of organic complexity. 

• Stein, D. J., & Nesse, R. M. (2025). Tacit Creationism Encourages Oversimplified Views of Functions and Dysfunctions. European Journal of Neuroscience.

• Evolutionary Medicine Needs Engineering Expertise, a 2021 article for NAE Perspectives about control theory & disease

• Social Situations Shape Social Emotions That Benefit Genes, 2022

• Tacit creationism in emotion research, 2020. 

• Hauser, Nesse, Schwarz:  Lay Theories of Health and Illness, 2016  
  On the metaphor of the body as a machine, and the war on cancer. 

• Video of a ClubEvMed talk about tacit creationism: talk is minutes 6-25. 

• The body is not a machine, a 2016 essay recently updated

• Organic complexity