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Frank Visser, graduated as a psychologist of culture and religion, founded IntegralWorld in 1997. He worked as production manager for various publishing houses and as service manager for various internet companies and lives in Amsterdam. Books: Ken Wilber: Thought as Passion (SUNY, 2003), and The Corona Conspiracy: Combatting Disinformation about the Coronavirus (Kindle, 2020).

'Male in Siberia, Female in Mexico'

Placing Wilber's Anti-Darwinian Rhetoric in Context

Frank Visser / ChatGPT

Ken Wilber's attacks on Darwinism have always struck me as oddly disproportionate. The language is not that of careful philosophical critique, but of irritation and theatrical dismissal: Darwinism “can't explain shit,” it has “holes large enough to drive Hummers through,” it is a “flatland reduction of a living Kosmos.” These are not marginal asides; they recur across decades of his work and interviews.

What makes this eccentric is not that Wilber criticizes evolutionary theory—many philosophers and scientists do—but the form and function of the criticism. Darwinism is rarely engaged at the level where contemporary evolutionary biology actually operates. Instead, it is presented as a stubborn, almost willfully obtuse worldview that refuses to acknowledge interiority, value, or depth. The vehemence is telling. One gets the sense that something more than a scientific disagreement is at stake.

A particularly revealing example of this eccentricity is Wilber's frequently repeated argument that speciation by mutation could never work if, say, the male organism lives in Siberia and the female in Mexico. How, he asks, could such separated individuals ever coordinate their mutations? The implication is that natural selection collapses under the sheer improbability of such scenarios.

This example is remarkable—not because it exposes a weakness in evolutionary theory, but because it exposes Wilber's unfamiliarity with its most basic premises. Population genetics does not operate on isolated, globally dispersed individuals. Speciation occurs within populations, through reproductive isolation, gene flow, drift, and selection over many generations. Wilber's Siberia-Mexico thought experiment is not a penetrating critique; it is a category error so elementary that it effectively disqualifies him as a commentator on evolutionary mechanisms.

What makes the argument doubly ironic is that it rebounds on Wilber's own solution. If random mutation allegedly cannot coordinate across continents, how exactly would Eros fare any better? How does a diffuse cosmic tendency toward complexity solve a logistical problem that Wilber himself has invented? The appeal to Eros does not repair the misunderstanding; it simply floats above it.

Seen in this light, Wilber's anti-Darwinian rhetoric is not merely exaggerated—it is strategically insulated from correction. By operating at the level of intuition, incredulity, and rhetorical flourish, it avoids the discipline of population-level thinking altogether. Evolution is dismissed not because it has failed, but because it refuses to behave like a spiritual narrative.

Over the years, I have tried to understand this not simply as error, but as strategy. Wilber's rhetoric consistently works to create a sense of explanatory crisis. By exaggerating the limits of Darwinian explanation, and by occasionally pointing to creationist or Intelligent Design critics as evidence that “even they see the problem,” he constructs a narrative in which naturalistic evolution appears exhausted, brittle, and conceptually bankrupt. Once that mood is established, the introduction of Eros feels less like speculation and more like necessity.

My own engagement with this material has stretched over more than twenty years, not because I enjoy refuting Wilber, but because the pattern he exemplifies keeps resurfacing in new guises. Again and again, spiritual thinkers latch onto minority scientific dissent, inflate it into a paradigm crisis, and then offer metaphysics as the remedy. Wilber is a particularly articulate and influential case, but he is not unique.

What I have tried to do in this series is place Wilber's anti-Darwinian rhetoric where it belongs: not at the cutting edge of evolutionary debate, but within a long tradition of spiritual discomfort with unguided processes. Once that context is made explicit, the arguments lose much of their mystique. They appear less like profound insights into the limits of science and more like variations on a familiar theme: the refusal to accept that evolution might be sufficient without being meaningful in the way we wish it to be.

After twenty years, the fascination remains—but it has changed character. What once felt like a profound unresolved tension now appears as a recurring intellectual temptation: to mistake dissatisfaction with a world without guarantees for evidence that such guarantees must exist.

If that final observation hurts, it is not because it is harsh—but because it removes the last refuge of rhetorical escape. Evolution does not fail because it lacks Eros. It fails only to console.