It's important to remember that there are more than two choices available on the subject of how we got here; and where "here" is, come to that.
And that all those choices lead in different directions, eventually, no matter how parallel or non-exclusive they seem.
The bomb-proof proofs of evolution refute the assertions of what looks like magical-thinking on the part of the "creationists", but a closer examination will show there's no loyalty whatsoever to the evolutionary process now on the part of the defenders of logic and right thinking. They're adamant that evolution happened, but they're equally adamant that it must not be allowed to continue, unregulated, though they will admit that unregulated evolution is how we gained the qualities and strengths that allowed us to rise to our current position of dominance in the world. Shaky as it is.
The other side seems to be defending a literal reading of Scripture - this is the only substantive cause anyone points to for their insistence on what virtually all scientists agree is nonsense - a denial of the fossil record and the observable fact of evolution we can see at work in the world around us. But it's likely there's a deeper cause than that, considering the literalists don't appear to be advocating stoning as a form of punishment, or forcing brothers to marry their widowed sisters-in-law; it's likely what motivates them is something more closely related to their own estimated chances for survival.
One possibility is that Christianity itself has evolved, from an underground band of criminalized renegades to a massive, and massively wealthy institution with a tremendous influence on the daily lives of billions of people, believers or not.
A recognition of evolution as something that's caused change in the human species would lead pretty directly to a recognition that the institutions that govern our lives were performing and maintaining actions and conditions that caused, and continue to cause those changes. Especially when they so fully encompass the environment.
That humanity takes more control over its own evolution the more control it takes over its environment.
Science doesn't articulate that aspect of evolution, even as it champions the theory itself against the superstition and fantasy of religion.
They're both united in avoidance; one ignoring the centrality of human direction on current human evolutionary process - the other running from the idea wholesale, and the corollary of the idea, that Christianity itself, as an institution regardless of its changing doctrines, has been responsible for a great deal of the hidden, or unrecognized, evolutionary pressures that have altered the human shape these last millennia.
The unspoken and unquestioned assumption is that human stuff is immutable, that our DNA is somehow fixed as it is, while all other species are in constant flux; our cultures may evolve, and our tools and understanding of the world advance, but what we are doesn't ever change, and certainly never gets changed. Isn't being changed right now just like and in the same slow way as Darwin's finches on the Galapagos Islands.
We have big brains and powerful immune systems, a need and an aptitude for complex social cohesion, and an ability to respond and adapt to sudden profound alterations in the environment - some of us even have a genetic predisposition to seek that sudden change for thrill; we got those qualities through the standard evolutionary means - mutation, selection, and reproduction.
Now mutation is frowned upon and medically attacked whenever it shows up; selection, because it has a large component of death to it and death, or de-selection is now the enemy, is resisted in all forms but the economic; reproduction is tightly scripted and subject to intense social control.
The Darwinian sexual attractiveness of successful mutation is not allowed to express itself in the next generation as rapidly and openly as it would if the prohibition and criminalizing of sexual activity outside the approved and regulated form wasn't strictly enforced.
Believing in evolution in this instance means believing that it happened, not that it should happen.
And that's where the two sides in this pseudo-debate are in complete agreement. Evolution should be allowed to happen to us only by our expressed permission.
De-selection, or death, is an important, an essential component of the evolutionary process as well, and the greatest de-selector of human beings under 30 years of age in the US right now is the automobile accident.
Is there an evolutionary principle involved there?
What would it be?
What qualities are being selected for?
And what qualities are being de-selected?
The greatest evolutionary pressure on modern American children is anti-Darwinian, random predation, and it's coming from within the human construct, from inside an artificial environment that's almost entirely under human control.
A mountain lion kills a child in the hills of Los Angeles and the nation is shocked and horrified. Thousands of children die every year in the violence of car-wrecks and the news is brushed aside.
Darwinian in this context being the expression of viability in organisms within the balance and harmonic flux of essentially stable systems. Even the great slams of punctuated equilibrium having that tonality of seed and soil and flower in the midst of disruption. The growth from within a greater, living reality.
Because you can make a case for anything being Darwinian, and you can make a case for a planet void of life being a Darwinian result no different, no better or worse than a planet of moss, or apes, or cities of birds.
I think Charles Darwin would agree that there is something central to life that isn't of the void, and I think he'd also agree that harnessing evolutionary processes to abet your own survival at the expense of the species you were nominally a member of is a kind of cannibalism, a place where the road forks - the beginning of a species splitting into something else and something else.
The mystery of the Neanderthal has Cain and Abel written all over it.
I think that's where we are right now.
And I think these false polarities are dividing and weakening people who need each other, to defend themselves against an as-yet unseen enemy who will use them and discard them with less concern for their fate than we have now for the dodo's or the great auk's.
