Are we confounding brain, mind and Evolution with neurosciences?

Professionals in a discipline explain evolution and mind with respect to the perspective and terminologies of their discipline.  This tunnel-vision of explaining serious matter is skewing issues.

In Mind and Cosmos, Thomas Nagel had scientists up in arms because Nagel had the gall to question the neo-Darwinian belief that consciousness, like any aspect of adaptability, is evolutionary in nature.

“It is prima facie highly implausible,” Nagel writes, “that life as we know it is the result of a sequence of physical accidents together with the mechanism of natural selection.”

Nagel claim is not based on evidence that nature is predisposed to give rise to conscious existence, since no mechanistic explanation seems commensurate with the miracle of subjective experience and the ability to reason.

There are very few  scientists who hypothesize that human life was inevitable.

Robert Hazen, a mineralogist and bio-geologist, put it this way: “Biochemistry is wired into the universe. The self-made cell emerges from geochemistry as inevitably as basalt or granite.”

Indeed, the tendency to think that organisms increase in complexity over time seems natural. So why not actual laws of nature to vouchsafe this eventuality?

According to Stuart Kauffman of the Santa Fe Institute, the universe gives us “order for free.”

Kauffman believes that all molecules must sooner or later catalyze themselves in self-sustaining reactions, or “autocatalytic networks,” crossing the boundary between inanimate and animate.

The more common view is that while natural selection encourages the development and retention of traits that help us to survive, evolution is essentially directionless; it has no goals, no set outcome.