Refuting Creationism - How Consciousness Evolved - No God-Magic Required

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Why Do We Have a Consciousness? | Newsportal - Ruhr-Universität Bochum

Having recently watched a grey squirrel carefully plot a route through a line of trees, I was struck by the sophistication of its behaviour. It was not simply moving at random. It clearly knew where it wanted to go and was able to take into account such factors as how much slender branches would bend under its weight, how wide a gap it could safely jump, and—perhaps most importantly—exactly where it was within its own mental map of the environment. It is difficult to see how such behaviour could be possible in a creature that was not conscious and, to some degree, self-aware.

In animal psychology, there is now little doubt that many vertebrates possess some level of self-awareness and therefore consciousness. The remaining debate has centred not on whether consciousness exists in non-human animals, but on how it arose. The fact that consciousness is found across a wide range of vertebrates, and even in molluscs such as cephalopods, suggests either that it originated in a remote common ancestor or that it evolved independently multiple times through convergence. Either way, this strongly points to an evolutionary origin.

According to two papers published in a special edition of the journal Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B, by working groups led by Professors Albert Newen and Onur Güntürkün at Ruhr University Bochum in Germany, consciousness can indeed be explained as the outcome of an evolutionary process, with each step conferring a selective advantage. Moreover, consciousness only makes sense as an evolved biological function. The two open-access papers can be found here and here.

This work is bound to provoke another bout of denialism among creationists, for whom consciousness remains one of the standard “impossible to explain without supernatural intelligence” fallback arguments. As with abiogenesis and the Big Bang, the reasoning typically amounts to: “Science hasn’t explained it and I don’t understand how it could, therefore God did it.” This false dichotomy conveniently removes any obligation to provide evidence in support of the supernatural claim. Creationists also like to flatter themselves that consciousness is a uniquely human trait and thus evidence of special creation. In scientific terms, however, this does not even rise to the level of a hypothesis: it proposes no mechanism, makes no testable predictions, and is unfalsifiable by design. It is, in essence, wishful thinking rooted in the belief that the Universe is obliged to conform to personal expectations.

By contrast, the Ruhr University team have identified three distinct levels of consciousness and demonstrated the evolutionary advantage of each, drawing on detailed studies of birds that show parallel forms of consciousness to those seen in humans. These levels are:

1. Basic arousal — such as the perception of pain, which signals that harm is occurring and that corrective action is required.
2. General alertness — awareness of the broader environment, allowing threats and opportunities to be recognised and responded to appropriately.
3. Reflexive (self-)consciousness — the ability to place oneself within an environment, learn from past experience, anticipate future outcomes, and formulate an action plan; in other words, to construct a narrative with oneself as a participant.

I remember as a child in the 1950 we believed that only humans were truly conscious* Do you have any information on how this view has changed in the last 75 years or so? Yes — that belief was very much the mainstream view in the 1950s, and its decline over the past 75 years is one of the more striking shifts in how science understands minds, both human and non-human. The change did not happen suddenly; it unfolded in stages as psychology, neuroscience, ethology, and evolutionary biology matured.

1. The dominance of behaviourism (1930s–1950s)
   
   in the 1950's, animal psychology was dominated by behaviourism, particularly in the English-speaking world. Figures such as John B. Watson and B.F. Skinner argued that science should concern itself only with observable behaviour, not internal mental states.
   
   Because consciousness could not be directly observed or measured, it was treated as either irrelevant or unscientific. Humans were often granted consciousness as a practical concession, but animals were described in mechanistic terms — stimulus in, response out. Talk of animal “thoughts”, “intentions”, or “feelings” was dismissed as anthropomorphism.
   
   This fitted neatly with older philosophical ideas, going back to Descartes, that animals were essentially biological machines.
   
2. Cracks in the wall: ethology and natural behaviour (1950s–1970s)
   
   The first serious challenge came from ethology, led by scientists such as Konrad Lorenz, Nikolaas Tinbergen, and Karl von Frisch. Instead of studying animals in artificial laboratory settings, they observed them in natural environments.
   
   Their work showed that many animals:
   • plan actions,
   • recognise individuals,
   • communicate symbolically,
   • and modify behaviour flexibly rather than reflexively.
   
   This did not immediately lead to claims about consciousness, but it made purely mechanistic explanations increasingly implausible.
   
3. The cognitive revolution (1960s–1980s)
   
   From the 1960s onwards, psychology underwent the cognitive revolution. Mental processes — memory, attention, representation, decision-making — were back on the table.
   
   Once human cognition was treated as information processing rather than mystical introspection, it became much harder to deny similar processes in animals. Researchers began cautiously talking about:
   • mental maps (e.g. Tolman’s rats),
   • problem-solving,
   • expectation and surprise,
   • and goal-directed behaviour.
   
   Still, consciousness itself remained a sensitive topic, often avoided in favour of terms like cognition.
4. Self-awareness enters the discussion (1970s–1990s)
   
   A major symbolic turning point was Gordon Gallup’s mirror self-recognition test in the 1970s. Chimpanzees recognising themselves in mirrors challenged the idea that self-awareness was uniquely human.
   
   Over the following decades, evidence accumulated for sophisticated cognition in:
   • great apes,
   • dolphins,
   • elephants,
   • corvids,
   • parrots,
   • and later cephalopods.
   
   The question shifted from “Are animals conscious?” to “What kind of consciousness do different animals have?”
5. Neuroscience closes the gap (1990s–2010s)
   
   Advances in neuroscience further eroded the old view. It became clear that:
   • consciousness correlates with specific neural architectures,
   • many of these architectures are conserved across vertebrates,
   • and similar functional solutions have evolved independently in very different brains (e.g. birds and mammals).
   
   Once consciousness was treated as a biological function rather than a metaphysical property, denying it to animals with comparable neural complexity became untenable.
6. The modern consensus (2010s–present)
   
   Today, the mainstream scientific position is roughly this:
   • Consciousness is not all-or-nothing
   • It comes in degrees and forms
   • It evolved because it is useful
   
   The 2012 Cambridge Declaration on Consciousness, signed by leading neuroscientists, explicitly stated that many non-human animals possess the neurological substrates necessary for conscious experience.
   
   Recent work — including the Ruhr University research you mention — goes further by identifying levels of consciousness and showing how each can be favoured by natural selection.
7. Why the old belief persisted so long
   
   Looking back, the 1950s view survived not because it was well supported, but because:
   • tools for studying brains were primitive,
   • behaviourism discouraged discussion of inner states,
   • and human exceptionalism exerted a strong cultural pull.
   
   Once those constraints lifted, the idea of uniquely human consciousness quietly collapsed under the weight of evidence.
   

In short, what changed over the last 75 years was not sentimentality towards animals, but methodology, evidence, and conceptual clarity. Consciousness moved from being treated as a mysterious human essence to being understood as an evolved biological capacity — unevenly distributed, but very much part of the natural world.

The research carried out by the Ruhr University team is also the subject of a Ruhr University press release, which helps place these findings in a broader evolutionary and cognitive context.

Why Do We Have a Consciousness?

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What is the evolutionary advantage of our consciousness? And what can we learn about this from observing birds? Researchers at Ruhr University Bochum published two articles on this topic.

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Although scientific research about consciousness has enjoyed a boom in the past two decades, one central question remains unanswered: What is the function of consciousness? Why did it evolve at all? The answers to these questions are crucial to understanding why some species (such as our own) became conscious while others (such as oak trees) did not. Furthermore, observing the brains of birds shows that evolution can achieve similar functional solutions to realize consciousness despite different structures. The working groups led by Professors Albert Newen and Onur Güntürkün at Ruhr University Bochum, Germany, report their findings in a current special issue of the journal Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B from November 13, 2025.

Purposes of pleasure and pain?

Our conscious experience makes up our lives, often through positive pleasure: I feel the warm sun on my skin, I hear the singing of birds, I enjoy the moment. Yet we also often experience pain: I feel my knee hurt from falling on the stairs, I suffer from always being pessimistic. Why have we, as living creatures, even developed a perception that can involve positive experiences as well as pain and even unbearable suffering?

Albert Newen and Carlos Montemayor categorize three types of consciousness, each with different functions: 1. basic arousal, 2. general alertness, and 3. a reflexive (self-)consciousness.

Evolutionarily, basic arousal developed first, with the base function of putting the body in a state of ALARM in life-threatening situations so that the organism can stay alive. Pain is an extremely efficient means for perceiving damage to the body and to indicate the associated threat to its continued life. This often triggers a survival response, such as fleeing or freezing.

Professor Albert Newen, lead author of the second papers.
Institut für Philosophie II,
Ruhr-Universität Bochum
Bochum, North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany.

A second step in evolution is the development of general alertness. This allows us to focus on one item in a simultaneous flow of different information. When we see smoke while someone is speaking to us, we can only focus on the smoke and search for its source.

This makes it possible to learn about new correlations: first the simple, causal correlation that smoke comes from fire and shows where a fire is located. But targeted alertness also lets us identify complex, scientific correlations.

Carlos Montemayor, co-author of the second paper.
Department of Philosophy
San Francisco State University
San Francisco, CA, USA.

Humans and some animals then develop a reflexive (self-)consciousness. In its complex form, it means that we are able to reflect on ourselves as well as our past and future. We can form an image of ourselves and incorporate it into our actions and plans. “Reflexive consciousness, in its simple forms, developed parallel to the two basic forms of consciousness,” explains Newen. “IN such cases conscious experience focuses not on perceiving the environment, but rather on the conscious registration of aspects of oneself.” This includes the state of one’s own body, as well as one’s perception, sensations, thoughts, and actions. To use one simple example, recognizing oneself in the mirror is a form of reflexive consciousness. Children develop this skill at 18 months, and some animals have been shown to do this as well, such as chimpanzees, dolphins, and magpies. Reflexive conscious experiences – as its core function – makes it possible for us to better integrate into society and coordinate with others.

What Birds Perceive

Gianmarco Maldarelli and Onur Güntürkün show in their article that birds may possess fundamental forms of conscious perception. The researchers highlight three central areas in which birds show remarkable parallels to conscious experience in mammals: sensory consciousness, neurobiological foundations, and accounts of self-consciousness.

Firstly, studies of sensory consciousness indicate that birds not only automatically process stimuli, but subjectively experience them. When pigeons are presented with ambiguous visual stimuli, they shift between various interpretations, similar to humans. Crows have also been shown to possess nerve signals that do not reflect the physical presence of a stimulus, but rather the animal’s subjective perception. When a crow sometimes consciously perceives a stimulus and does not at other times, certain nerve cells react precisely according to this internal experience.

Secondly, birds’ brains contain functional structures that meet the theoretical requirements of conscious processing, despite their different brain structure.

The avian equivalent to the prefrontal cortex, the NCL, is immensely connected and allows the brain to integrate and flexibly process information. The connectome of the avian forebrain, which presents the entirety of the flows of information between the regions of the brain, shares many similarities with mammals. Birds thus meet many criteria of established theories of consciousness, such as the Global Neuronal Workspace theory.

Professor Onur Güntürkün, lead author of the fist paper
Department of Biopsychology
Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience
Faculty of Psychology
Ruhr University Bochum
Bochum, Nordrhein-Westfalen, Germany.

Thirdly, more recent experiments show that birds may have different types of self-perception. Even though some species of corvids pass the traditional mirror test, other ecologically significant versions of the tests have shown further types of self-consciousness in other bird species.

Experiments indicate that pigeons and chickens differentiate between their reflection in a mirror and a real fellow member of their species, and react to these according to context. This is a sign of situational, basic self-consciousness.

Professor Onur Güntürkün.

The findings suggest that consciousness is an older and more widespread evolutionary phenomenon than had previously been assumed. Birds demonstrate that conscious processing is also possible without a cerebral cortex and that different brain structures can achieve similar functional solutions.

Publications:

Gianmarco Maldarelli, Onur Güntürkün
Conscious birds. Philos Trans R Soc Lond B Biol Sci 13 November 2025; 380 (1939): 20240308. https://doi.org/10.1098/rstb.2024.0308

Albert Newen, Carlos Montemayor
Three types of phenomenal consciousness and their functional roles: unfolding the ALARM theory of consciousness.
Philos Trans R Soc Lond B Biol Sci 13 November 2025; 380 (1939): 20240314. https://doi.org/10.1098/rstb.2024.0314

Abstract
In this article, we start from the assumption that consciousness is not the ultimate triumph of human evolution but rather represents a more basic cognitive process, possibly shared with other animal phyla. In this article, we show that there is growing evidence that (i) birds have sensory and self-awareness, and (ii) they also have the neural architecture that may be necessary for this. We present behavioural studies and recent neurobiological data and discuss them in relation to three major theories of consciousness: the Global Neural Workspace Theory (GNWT), the Recurrent Processing Theory (RPT) and the Integrated Information Theory. Although the findings so far do not allow for a strong conclusion, the neurophysiological and anatomical features of the avian brain seem to align with the prerequisites of the GNWT and RPT to host consciousness.

This article is part of the theme issue ‘Evolutionary functions of consciousness’.

1 Introduction
Just two decades ago, neuroscientists were highly sceptical about the possibility of consciousness in non-human animals. Today, the tables have turned, and comparative cognitive neuroscientists increasingly consider it plausible that different species could possess consciousness. This change has been prompted by theoretical advances and novel neuroscientific experiments. As a result, consciousness in non-human animals is not only hotly debated (e.g. [1–3]), but sometimes also taken for granted, at least in great apes and some monkey species [4,5]. Therefore, the scientific community has nowadays been discussing the presence of consciousness in animals such as insects and fishes [6,7], while also proposing alternative approaches to explore animal consciousness [8].

One of the current conundrums of consciousness concerns its function(s). While some have asserted that it has no function and no causal role in cognitive processes, other authors have suggested that consciousness enables various behavioural and mental functions that an unconscious organism could not recruit (for a review, see [9]). Because evolution can only operate by selecting an animal’s behavioural output, we assume that theories of consciousness must account for both its neural basis and its behavioural implications. When looking at their behavioural repertoire and cognitive abilities, birds have proved to be much smarter than previously thought [10–15]. However, are they therefore conscious? This discussion has started, and some recent interesting findings have stimulated the debate on avian consciousness [16–19]. In this review, we will show the most recent discoveries in the field of avian consciousness in terms of sensory- and self-awareness, and we will argue that evidence for that is already emerging. Besides that, many theories of consciousness have been proposed in the last decades to put forward the neural mechanisms involved in subjective experience (for a review, see [20,21]). However, they have been mainly designed and tested on humans or non-human primates. Thus, we will discuss whether the avian brain could also meet their requirements. To do so, we will take into account three major theories of consciousness, i.e. the Global Neural Workspace Theory (GNWT), the Recurrent Processing Theory (RPT) and the Integrated Information Theory (IIT).

These three theories are based on different assumptions and neural mechanisms and state different predictions. The GNWT holds that consciousness arises when information becomes globally available through a nonlinear ‘ignition’ across a distributed network of long-range neurons, particularly involving parietal and prefrontal areas [22,23]. Conscious content becomes available when it is selected, amplified and broadcast across brain areas, enabling reportability, flexible routing and integration of features [23,24]. Experimental findings support key predictions, such as spontaneous ignition and the decoding of conscious content from prefrontal neural activity, including abstract and sensory information [5,25].

The RPT posits that conscious visual perception arises from local recurrent interactions within the visual cortex [26,27]. Empirical findings show that feedforward processing, while capable of activating both low- and high-level areas, does not correlate with consciousness, whereas recurrent activity is consistently associated with conscious experience [28–30]. RPT advocates for consciousness as an independent process, orthogonal to cognition and attention [31].

The IIT explains consciousness by starting from the phenomenology of subjective experience and its essential properties [32]. It proposes that consciousness corresponds to the cause–effect structure (Φ-structure) of a physical substrate, defined by how the parts of a system influence each other [33]. Consciousness is quantified by Φ, while the specific quality of experience depends on the structure of causal relationships within the system [32]. IIT suggests that regions like the posterior cortex support high Φ because of their integrated architecture [34], whereas structures like the cerebellum do not, owing to their modular organization. In the following, we will first show studies of sensory awareness in birds and then discuss whether their neurophysiology and neuroanatomy fit with the assumptions and predictions of the mentioned theories. Last, we will discuss studies about avian self-awareness.

Gianmarco Maldarelli, Onur Güntürkün
Conscious birds. Philos Trans R Soc Lond B Biol Sci 13 November 2025; 380 (1939): 20240308. https://doi.org/10.1098/rstb.2024.0308

Copyright: © 2025 The authors.
Published by The Royal Society. Open access.
Reprinted under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license (CC BY 4.0)

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Abstract
The evolution of consciousness is a neglected topic that plays a surprisingly insignificant role in all major theories of consciousness. Furthermore, substantial disagreements can be observed in the dominant views on the neural correlates of consciousness (NCCs), which focus too much on cortical brain regions. In order to dissolve some of the contradictions among these views and to constrain the rival theories, we propose to distinguish three core phenomena of phenomenal consciousness: basic arousal, general alertness and reflexive (self-)consciousness. The central aim is to show that we can fruitfully distinguish specific functions for each of the three phenomena. Basic arousal has the function to alarm the body and secure survival by intervening in the slow updating of homeostatic processes. General alertness fosters advanced learning and decision-making processes, enabling various new behavioural strategies to deal with challenges, and reflexive (self-)consciousness enables future-directed long-term planning, accounting for the mindset of oneself and other agents. Constraining our contemporary theories of consciousness with this evolutionary and functional approach will enable the science of consciousness to make progress by accounting for three specific functions of consciousness, thereby informing the search for distinct an NCC.

This article is part of the theme issue ‘Evolutionary functions of consciousness’.

1 Introduction
Evolution is typically discussed as a conundrum in the context of consciousness research, with authors defending a wide variety of views, with respect to both the demarcation problem of what species are conscious and the time during our evolution when consciousness first emerged [1.1–3.1]. Consciousness certainly is, as Lane [4.1] puts it, a great invention of evolution. Our lives would not be the same without it; it might even be inconceivable to imagine our lives without being conscious. Yet, because of the standard interpretation of the ‘hard problem’, most functional accounts, including evolutionary ones, are still considered as preliminary, at best. This situation of lack of empirical constraints concerning evolution is reflected in the core commitments of the major scientific views on consciousness, none of which takes evolution as a major factor in its explanation of consciousness. Moreover, the empirical predictions of these theories at the neural level are incompatible, making the situation worse. If, besides the scientific obfuscation produced by the hard problem, the leading scientific theories contradict each other, then it is not surprising that our scientific understanding of consciousness has not progressed much.

We believe that the recent and considerable progress in neuroimaging techniques needs to be accompanied by equally substantial theoretical progress regarding our understanding of the functionary roles that consciousness performed in the evolution of the minds. Evolution needs to become a major factor in our explanation of consciousness. We start by setting the stage with two observations that we take to be criteria of adequacy: first, we argue that non-cortical areas must be part of the explanation of consciousness, and that we can best characterize the non-cortical processing of consciousness as basic arousal (§1). Second, we need to distinguish three phenomena of consciousness, namely basic arousal, general alertness and reflexive self-consciousness (§2): those are different varieties of phenomenal consciousness. Since it is not clear whether reflexive self-consciousness should be included in the discussion of an evolutionary perspective on functions of consciousness (in addition to basic arousal and general alertness), we clarify the status of this phenomenon. We show that there are non-linguistic tests indicating the realization of reflexive self-consciousness in non-human animals (§3a). Furthermore, we argue that reflexive self-consciousness is best described as a special case of general alertness (§3b), but it nevertheless has a specific functional role going beyond the function of standard general alertness. With this background, we then unfold the main argument of the paper as follows: we show that an evolutionary perspective in combination with neuroscientific evidence supports (i) that three selected scientific theories of consciousness (information integration theory (IIT), higher-order-thought (HOT) and global neuronal workspace theory (GNWT)) either do not adequately account for the basic form of consciousness called basic arousal or do not consider it at all (§4), and (ii) that the three distinct phenomena of consciousness (basic arousal, general alertness and reflexive self-consciousness) have three different core functions (§5).

Let us set the stage with some methodological remarks: first, we do not discuss vegetative states or other preconscious states, but focus on phenomenal consciousness, in the sense of having a conscious experience in a state of wakefulness [5.1]. We also abstract in this context from the distinction between access and phenomenal consciousness [6.1] since we focus on phenomenal consciousness that is experienced longer than the duration of ultra-short-term memory, which is the focus of Block [6.1]. Second, we do not characterize types of consciousness as certain types of contents, e.g. higher-order theories are inclined to do this. We presuppose an independence of phenomenality and content in the sense that a phenomenal experience cannot be explained by a certain content, but only by the way a content is processed [7.1,8.1]. Third, we want to distinguish three ways of answering the question about the functional role of phenomenal consciousness [9.1]: (i) consciousness is the result of an adaptation; or (ii) it is an inseparable element of something else that is an adaptation; or (iii) it is a useless by-product, which means that it is an epiphenomenon. We are not discussing here epiphenomenalism, which is, e.g., a constitutive component of Chalmers’ dualism [10.1], because we think that there is convincing criticism for not going in the direction of epiphenomenalism (neither version of it) [11.1,12.1]. Furthermore, to discuss the function of consciousness, we will focus on the best candidates for a theoretical framework to investigate and understand consciousness, namely GNWT, IIT and HOT. We aim to show that they are missing a basic evolutionary perspective, namely what the earliest evolutionary functional role of consciousness could be. We want to close this gap but remain neutral about the debate about which of the three theories (if any) will win the open race about the best theoretical framework of consciousness. However, we claim that our evolutionary perspective is an important foundation for any successful and more detailed theory of consciousness in the future. Our fourth methodological commitment highlights the limits of our approach: we explicitly account for the co-evolutionary unfolding of consciousness in species with quite different brain structures, like birds and fish. Thus, we are not expecting one and the same cluster of neural mechanisms to be the realizer in all conscious living beings. With the ALARM theory of consciousness, we propose to start with the characterization of the most basic form of consciousness by describing its embeddedness in core principles of life, focusing on improving homeostatic regulation systems that keep the body alive (see below). Therefore, we propose a combination of a functional and neural characterization of the evolution of consciousness, and the result is our proposal for distinguishing three forms of phenomenal consciousness.

Gianmarco Maldarelli, Onur Güntürkün
Conscious birds. Philos Trans R Soc Lond B Biol Sci 13 November 2025; 380 (1939): 20240308. https://doi.org/10.1098/rstb.2024.0308

Copyright: © 2025 The authors.
Published by The Royal Society. Open access.
Reprinted under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license (CC BY 4.0)

What this body of research demonstrates is not merely that consciousness exists beyond our own species, but that it can be understood as a natural consequence of evolutionary processes. Once consciousness is approached as a biological function rather than a metaphysical mystery, its distribution across the animal kingdom becomes explicable. Different forms of consciousness emerge where they confer a survival advantage, shaped by ecological pressures and constrained by neural architecture, just as with any other evolved trait.

Creationist claims about consciousness rest almost entirely on argument from ignorance. The assertion that consciousness “cannot be explained” is not evidence for supernatural design; it is simply a reflection of limited understanding at a given moment in time. History is replete with phenomena once declared beyond natural explanation that later yielded to careful observation and theory. Consciousness is following the same trajectory, with each advance narrowing the explanatory gap that creationism relies upon.

Moreover, the insistence that consciousness is uniquely human is now empirically indefensible. Evidence from birds, mammals, and cephalopods shows that self-awareness, planning, and subjective experience are not singular human endowments but evolutionary solutions to complex environmental challenges. These capacities differ in degree and form, but they are recognisably continuous rather than categorically distinct.

In the end, creationism offers no competing explanation of consciousness at all—only a refusal to engage with mechanisms, predictions, or evidence. Evolutionary biology, by contrast, provides a coherent framework in which consciousness emerges incrementally, leaves traces in comparative anatomy and behaviour, and can be investigated scientifically. That is not merely a better explanation; it is the only one that actually explains anything.

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