EVOLUTION

There is no more room for dispute: evolution is how all existing life forms came into being.  It is the result of natural selection by the dictate of the survival skill of the fittest.  I resent the claim by some Christians that only “creationist theory” is the universal truth.  I am a Christian too and have no problem accepting the theory of evolution.  If they insist that the Biblical story of creation is how the world came into being, I say, “Not true.”   The Bible is not a scientific book.  The writers of the Bible would be embarrassed to find that some people take their words literary.   The Bible is a spiritual book.  It’s a collection of apocalyptic fantasies, folk tales, legends, metaphors, poetry, and sermons, all of which are the record of human’s search for the ultimate reality.   Scientific facts were not their interest.

I don’t care if some people want to believe that what the Book of Genesis says is how the world came into being.  But I have difficulty if a belief affects people adversely.  In that sense, I have two problems with the theory of evolution.  First, some people say that evolution is also a social theory.  They use evolution to justify ethics of free market economy: the winners are entitled to the riches because they have proven to be fit, and the losers deserve to be poor and are unfit to survive.  You can not do that.  Evolution is natural, not social, science.

The second problem is an assumption that human species are on top of food chain because we have survived this long and now dominate the planet.  They credit this to our survival skills and superior wisdom.   Here, we must remember that human race have existed for only about a million years.   I think that the jury is still out on the question of human forte.  Yes, we humans advanced so fast and are thriving.  The rate of human population increase is phenomenal.  In the process, we must also recognize that we are destroying the balance and equilibrium of the eco-system.   It is suicidal.  We are rushing in top speed towards a precipice.  We could be the shortest-lived organism hence the stupidest and the most unfit.

At the Museum of Insects in Montreal, the most impressive educational show piece for me is the section on cockroaches.  I had no idea that cockroaches had lived a few million years before dinosaurs.  And they are still with us.  Surely the skill to enable a species to survive must be the ultimate test of skill and wisdom.   Then, you can say we are inferior to cockroaches judging from the way we are destroying our environment hence ourselves.  We certainly are not on top of evolutionary process.  Or are we?  We’ll see in a billion years.