Don't tell me there's no proof for evolution

If you placed old the parts of a computer into a bag and shook that bag for billions of years, would you have a working computer by the end?

No one has been able to 'prove' (show it could work) evolution to me.

Consequently, the distinctive philosophy of the 19th Century is only Ethics and social critique in the productive sense — nothing more. And consequently, again, its most important representatives (apart from actual practitioners) arc the dramatists. They are the real philosophers of Faustian activism, and compared with them not one of the lecture-room philosophers and systematics counts at all. All that these unimportant pedants have done for us is, so to write and rewrite the history of philosophy (and what history! — collections of dates and "results") that no one to-day knows what the history of philosophy is or what it might be.

Thanks to this, the deep organic unity in the thought of this epoch has never
yet been perceived. The essence of it, from the philosophical point of view, can be precised by asking the question: In how far is Shaw the pupil and fulfiller of Nietzsche? The question is put in no ironic spirit. Shaw is the one thinker of eminence who has consistently advanced in the same direction as that of the true Nietzsche — namely, productive criticism of the Western morale — while following out as poet the last implications of Ibsen and devoting the balance of the artistic creativeness that is in him to practical discussions.

Save in so far as the belated Romanticist in him has determined the style,
sound and attitude of his philosophy, Nietzsche is in every respect a disciple of the materialistic decades. That which drew him with such passion to Schopenhauer was (not that he himself or anyone else was conscious of it) that element of Schopenhauer's doctrine by which he destroyed the great metaphysic and (without meaning to do so) parodied his master Kant; that is to say, the modification of all deep ideas of the Baroque age into tangible and mechanistic notions. Kant speaks in inadequate words, which hide a mighty and scarcely apprehensible intuition, an intuition of the world as appearance or phenomenon. In Schopenhauer this becomes the world as brain-phenomenon (Gehirnphanomen). The change-over from tragic philosophy to philosophical plebeianism is complete. It will be enough to cite one passage. In "The World as Will and Idea" Schopenhauer says: "The will, as thing-in-itself, constitutes the inner, true and indestructible essence of the man; in itself, however, it is without consciousness. For the consciousness is conditioned by the intellect and this is a mere accident of our being, since it is a function of the brain, and that again (with its dependent nerves and spinal cord) is a mere fruit, a product, nay, even a parasite of the rest of the organism, inasmuch as it does not intervene directly in the latter's activities but only serves a purpose of self-preservation by regulating its relations with the outer world." Here we have exactly the fundamental position of the flattest materialism. It was not for nothing that Schopenhauer, like Rousseau before him, studied the English sensualists. From them he learned to misread Kant in the spirit of megalopolitan utilitarian modernity. The intellect as instrument of the will- to-life,^ as weapon in the struggle for existence, the ideas brought to grotesque expression by Shaw in "Man and Superman" — it was because this was his view of the world that Schopenhauer became the fashionable philosopher when Darwin's main work was published in 1859. In contrast to Schelling, Hegel and Fichte, he was a philosopher, and the only philosopher, whose metaphysical propositions could be absorbed with ease by intellectual medi- ocrity. The clarity of which he was so proud threatened at every moment to reveal itself as triviality. While retaining enough of formula to produce an atmosphere of profundity and exclusiveness, he presented the civilized view of the world complete and assimilable. His system is anticipated Darwinism, and the speech of Kant and the concepts of the Indians are simply clothing. In his book "Ueber den Willen in der Natur" (1835) we find already the struggle for self-preservation in Nature, the human intellect as master-weapon in that struggle and sexual love as unconscious selection according to biological interest. (1)
It is the view that Darwin (via Malthus) brought to bear with irresistible
success in the field of zoology. The economic origin of Darwinism is shown by the fact that the system deduced from the similarities between men and the higher animals ceases to fit even at the level of the plant- world and becomes positively absurd as soon as it is seriously attempted to apply it with its will tendency (natural selection, mimicry) to primitive organic forms. (2) Proof, to the Darwinian, means the ordering and pictorial presentation of a selection of facts so that they conform to his historico-dynamic basic feeling of "Evolution. " Darwinism — that is to say, that totality of very varied and discrepant ideas, in which the common factor is merely the application of the causality principle to living things, which therefore is a method and not a result, was known in all details to the i8th Century. Rousseau was championing the ape-man theory as early as 1754. What Darwin originated is only the "Manchester School" system, and it is this latent -political element in it that accounts for its popularity.

Note 1. Even the modern idea that unconscious and impulsive acts of life are completely efficient, while intellect can only bungle, is to be found in Schopenhauer (Vol. II, cap. 30).

Note 2. In the chapter "Zur Metaphysik der Geschlcchtsliebe " (11, 44) the idea of natural selection for the preservation of the genus is anticipated in full.

It must be a bit of a pisser to have studied bloody science up to 21 and beyond as the best years of life pass by and then find the scientific profession depicted in movies as being off its collective head