There's a lot of energy backed-up around the idea of origin, of human origin, where we came from. Or around the topic, rather. My point here, if I get to it in time, will be that that's a diversion, that the real conflict is, as it's always been, about our goal, or our fate, what's ahead, where we're going.
It's a simple fact of biological living that if you control someone's life in the present you have a lot of influence on what their life is going to be like in the future.
"The child is father to the man." "As the twig is bent so grows the tree."
Some people learn that by controlling what's around them they can be more comfortable, more gratified, more secure. The more control you have over now, the more you'll have over tomorrow, barring unforeseen change.
Others have learned that adaptation and flexibility, while relinquishing immediate control, make it possible to change with those same unforeseen circumstances, which the world has in plenty. And which require, from a stance of control, complete world domination. If we aren't going to adapt to the weather we'll have to adapt the weather to ourselves, so to speak. Saying it that way makes the hubris of it absurd, but that's pretty much it.
We look at things the way we're trained to - we see an oak tree, and we see the acorn as the thing that makes the oak possible. But what we're really seeing is a thing with no clear boundaries in the past or future, made up of trees, and seeds. That is a thing that can be named, to distinguish it, the way we've named the acorn and the tree and the forest. We don't have a name for that thing because there was no need for a name for it before now, in the practical tongues the builders use to get their jobs done.
The acorn is a way for that thing to move through time, against harsh circumstance and uncertain conditions. It is as much what that thing is as the tree is, just not to us, now. To the people who once lived where I live now, it was more clear, because they ate acorns, relied on them; and because people who live close to the ground are like someone who's hungry - food is revered, not taken for granted, never wasted; and that regard, the cultural attitude toward something as essential as food, put acorns in as prominent a place as the carpenters of the Old World put trees. There's a reaction to that truth that makes its case against "romanticizing" what were primitive people living short brutish lives of etc. etc.
I'm talking about the way they lived, not the people themselves. Clearly even the most technologically-dependent among us came through the same fire as everyone else. But again, the subject isn't what was - it's what's going to be, and how that comes out of now, what is.
Seeds can last a long time in a state that's neither dead nor alive, only waiting, needing nothing. Acorns are how that thing that acorns and oak trees are a part of got itself through times of harsh weather and chaotic seasons. Millions of years of change and stability woven together, and the trees adapted, what we call the trees adapted.
This starts to seem almost silly to people who were trained to see sperm and ova as relatively unimportant "secretions" unless they took, unless they quickened and became a child. But the anonymous drones and the star athletes of genetic research are proving daily that that small bit is what we are, at least as certainly as this thing with its names and addresses is. And they're fashioning the tools of its control.
The great frustration for modern man is his inability to control the weather, especially as it cycles out into chaos. Virtually everything else has come under his thumb, starting with the large predators right down to the germ of life itself in the present day. In that light I don't think it's too outlandish to look for signs of control and the attempt to gain control in the seemingly intense conflict over the origin of the human species. And signs there are.
The illusion is set by the frame of the argument being rigidly stuck in the past, but even the unscientific can see that the two sides enable entirely different futures. Or do they?
Is it possible, despite their absolutely contradictory versions of the origin of humankind, that both the evolutionists and the creationists have virtually identical dreams of the future?
Man at the center of things. Even though the creationists deify man in the collective and the Darwinists denigrate him collectively - significant man, insignificant man . The position of mankind on earth, and one assumes in the universe itself, in that view, is one of centrality, as far as opportunity and permission to alter and force the conformity of whatever stands in our way. One because a loving God has granted us that permission, the other because a hostile, at best uncaring universe has nothing to say about it.
In that broad general sense the main proponents of the two sides of the conflict are in complete agreement. And both are united in their scorn for and dismissive treatment of people who have evolved ways of being that have been proven as viable as the adaptations of trees, but that don't include attitudes of control, and dominance-to-survive.
The real conflict is invisible and unengaged, while the two seeming combatants reinforce their points of agreement about the present and the future - by arguing about the past.
Man is the most important creature in the world; we have to control everything in order to survive; this earth is temporary and disposable. The only reverence the combatants have they have in common - for themselves, for the god they make of themselves.
