X-posted from my livejournal
I spent a good long time trying to fall asleep last night, thinking about evolution. Considering my chosen faith and general attitude towards science, this is an odd subject to keep me awake at night (especially when there's a perfectly sexy husband next to me and I could be snuggled up against him, fast asleep). There are just some things about the concept that bug me.
All things considered, this train of thought spiralled into a mental commentary on the current state of human affairs and where the species is going... which is entirely relevant to evolution. Someone correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't the basic thought of evolution is "the strongest survive"? And one would extend from this thought that humans are the height of evolution so far (with maybe the exception of insects, as the largest population on Earth). Does it follow that evolution is biased towards creating intelligence?
If so, then we are so ********. Looking at the direction of humans in the last century, we're not getting more intelligent. We're getting lazier. And lazy creatures are hardly more likely to survive. Children across the nation suffer from obesity. We fight wars for reasons nobody's certain of. Selective breeding (if you subscribe to pop culture) is heading us towards impossible body structures and even less intelligence than we've had in the past. More and more people are falling victim to cancer. And don't even get me started on the simple percentages of people who have poor eyesight (not exactly the best of survival traits... I should know). Not to mention the slow slaughter of our ecosystem.
Are we evolution's finest? Why us? Why the ape? Why not the canine or the feline or the avian? Don't tell me it's because of opposable thumbs... parrots have incredible ranges of motion and if opposable thumbs are such a big deal, you'd think other species would have evolved them eventually, too. If "higher" intelligence is such a big deal, why are we the only "intelligent" species on the planet?
Is the human race really such a fantastic thing? When we kill ourselves and kill our planet and shrug our shoulders dismissively at the destruction of the world around us? Are we really lords and kings of the earth? Or just rabid, power-hungry dictators?
 KijiLinn · Fri Jul 28, 2006 @ 11:33am · 3 Comments |
