Open to explore possibility

[Belacqua]

Here is the paper on the fitness vs truth argument:

Prakash, C., Stephens, K.D., Hoffman, D.D. (2020). Fitness beats truth in the evolution of perception. Acta Biotheoretica, https://doi.org/10.1007/s10441-020-09400-0

I think the notion that human beings have some access to the truth is a hold-over from religion. I don't see how modern atheists can support it, really.

Some Christians, Gnostics, and Platonists hold that there is a spark of rationality imprisoned in our material body. They think that if we can stop the body from interfering with proper thinking, then we have a chance of knowing what the world is really like, independent of some image that our minds make. Because the soul or rational spirit has some way of being connected to the truth. 

But of course we atheists don't believe any of that. There is no rational soul independent of the body. Thinking is an activity done by meat and chemicals. Human beings are wildly irrational, and are capable of believing conflicting things at the same time, or believing X and acting on Y, or believing things they hear for which there is no evidence whatsoever. (For example, a lot of people think that Putin has significant influence in US elections!) If people are going to start arguing that natural selection favors what's true rather than just what survives best, we're going to have to throw out Darwin and start again. 

There is a lot of unexamined metaphysics at work in the thinking of many atheists.