Page 681 - Atlas of Creation Volume 3

Harun Yahya

BABY KILLINGS: A BARBARITY SUPPORTED BY

EVOLUTIONARY PSYCHOLOGY

In 1996-1997 the newspapers reported two shocking cases of baby killings. In the first, two 18-year-old
college students brought a child into the world in a hotel room, killed it, and threw the body into a
dumpster. In the other, an 18-year-old girl left her school prom and gave birth in a bathroom stall, left
the dead child in a garbage can and returned to the dance hall. Both cases resulted in murder charges.

While most people ascribed these events to moral collapse or mental disturbance, Steven Pinker, a pro-
fessor of psychology from Massachusetts Institute of Technology, offered a terrifying explanation: ge-
netic compulsion. In his article published in the New York Times, Pinker claimed that killing a baby
on the day it was born did not represent a mental illness because this had been an accepted practice
in many cultures throughout history:

Killing a baby is an immoral act, and we often express our outrage at the immoral by calling it a sick-
ness. But normal human motives are not always moral, and neonaticide does not have to be a product
of malfunctioning neural circuitry or a dysfunctional upbringing. 1

The most striking part of Pinker's quotation is the expression "but normal human motives are not al-
ways moral." This reveals an abnormality in his way of looking at things. In other words, even if some
behavior is immoral, it can still be regarded as legitimate because it is part of "normal" motives par-
ticular to human beings. According to Pinker, the killing of a newborn baby when circumstances make
that necessary is allegedly "normal" behavior. According to evolutionists' fictitious claims, mothers
under primitive conditions need to make a difficult choice between caring for their already existing
offspring and feeding newborn ones. Therefore, if a baby is born sick or is unlikely to survive, then
she may prefer to try again by eliminating that individual. This assumption is neither scientific nor
true, of course. Nevertheless, a Darwinist mindset propels Pinker to endorse this savagery.

This claim proposed by Pinker and others like him will do obvious damage to society. When the con-
cept of genetic compulsion is advanced in moral choices, then someone who commits murder can say,
"I had to do it—my genes made me." In such a case, since genes cannot be punished, there is no crime
and no criminal. In his claims, Pinker is discounting human reason and conscience, imagining that
everything can be explained in terms of genes. Encountering a reaction from society, he makes a few
changes to his terminology, but this time finds himself in an internal inconsistency.

One of those to criticize Pinker was Andrew Ferguson, who wrote in The Weekly Standard:

They make us see it not as a moral horror, but as a genetically encoded evolutionary adaptation... 2

Pinker is able to defend the claims in question despite their resting on absolutely no scientific evi-
dence. One of the criticisms of Pinker's claims is that they consist of nothing more than conjecture
based on evolutionists' illusory world views. Ferguson, for example, criticized Pinker's logic and stat-
ed that he offered no evidence for his claims. The fact is, all of evolutionary psychology is based on
proofless conjecture and the power of the imagination. In his book The Wedge of Truth, Phillip
Johnson says:

Basically, evolutionary psychology proceeds by erecting a mountain of speculation on the basis of
fragmentary evidence about primitive cultures. 3

Ferguson makes this diagnosis on the subject in his criticism:

Conjecture solidifies into fact; the fact then becomes a basis for further conjecture, which evolves into
another factual premise, and so on. 4

1. Steven Pinker, "Why They Kill Their Newborns," New York Times, 2 November 1997.
2. Andrew Ferguson, "How Steven Pinker's Mind Works", The Weekly Standard, January 12, 1998, p. 16.
3. Philip Johnson, The Wedge of Truth, Intervarsity Press, Illinois, 2000, p. 113.
4. Andrew Ferguson, "How Steven Pinker's Mind Works," The Weekly Standard, p. 16.

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