[recycled material - first appeared here]

Evolution has been, and still sometimes mistakenly is, portrayed as a grand parade to the new, the better, the more complex. But two things, at least, make this flatly untrue.

First, the failures are an undeniable yet indispensable part of the parade. Sure, they tend to be fleeting and thus partly invisible — joining the parade for a mere half block before veering off to nowhere — but to overlook them is sheer folly. The numbers, were we to count them, are staggering.

Second, there is no force pushing evolution inextricably toward the bigger and the better. None that seems more than a human projection, in my opinion. Consider this recent science news headline:

Male Sex Chromosome Losing Genes By Rapid Evolution, Study Reveals.

That’s right, the male “Y” has been losing size (and hence complexity) over time. It’s shrinking. And not due to immersion in cold water.

With evolution, whatever works in one form or another, persists. Whatever doesn’t, disappears. Sometimes. If we are talking organisms, that is absolutely true. But non-working (non-functional) characteristics of organisms can persist if there is no cost the selective pressures can subtract. Sometimes.

I’m not an evolutionary biologist, so don’t take my word for it. I also wouldn’t advise taking any single thinkers word for anything. I suggest aiming for a deeper education.

“Having a protector clearly reduces stress.”  – Dorothy Cheney and Robert Seyfarth, Baboon Metaphysics (1)

 He is a shield for all who take refuge in him. (Psalms 18:30)

Just as there are costs and benefits to being a group alpha, there are likewise costs and benefits to having a group alpha.  One of the benefits is protection.  A strong leader will protect his group.  From what?  How?  We’ll get to that.

Of the Bible non-supernatural alphas, King David is legendary.  What did he do to deserve the pedestal?  As Isaac Asimov noted in his erudite book about the Bible, David became the ‘master’ of a the combined, twelve tribes of Israel and Judah.(2)  David united a great group of people and, with their necessary loyalty and assistance, secured and enlarged an expansive homeland.  David protected his people from skirmish both internal and eternal.  The internal harmony being crucial to waging war against external threats.

But all Israel and Judah loved David, because he led them in their campaigns. (1 Samuel 18:16)

No doubt, David was revered not because he led them on campaigns, but on successful campaigns.  King David, however, did not accomplish this all on his own.  He had yet another mighty agent on his side -

And [David] became more and more powerful, because the LORD God Almighty was with him.(2 Samuel 5:9-10)

A significant amount of biblical material relates the theme of human masters being supported and assisted by their heavenly master.  There are those verses, however, that have a people’s god acting as an agent itself, without a human intermediary, to the benefit of all group members.

Of course, different groups at different times have had different concerns; they experienced differing threats to their well-being. In a great-father role, a god is capable of delivering his children from all manner of harm; at least he is capable of being perceived as having the ability and actually delivering thanks to rationalizing hindsight.  And so many verses in the Bible hint at this “general protector” god.  Psalms, in particular, speaks of this facet of god worship.  Besides multiple mentions of “the Lord is my shield,” there is this:

The LORD will keep you from all harm—he will watch over your life.  (Psalms 121:7)

In the New Testament we see a number of verses manifesting the them of “general protector.”  This one, from 2 Timothy, hints at the more primitive origin of the need for protection from threat:

And I was delivered from the lion’s mouth. The Lord will rescue me from every evil attack and will bring me safely to his heavenly kingdom.(4:17-18)

Of course, the “lion’s mouth” is largely metaphorical.  Unless of course, you were a Christian thrown in an actual den of lions by Romans.  Yet the roots of Christianity to run into deep time, a time that predators and other wild animals posed a real risk to human beings.  Consider these verses:

The fear and dread of you will fall upon all the beasts of the earth.  (Genesis 9:2)

Rescue me from the mouth of the lions; save me from the horns of the wild oxen. (Psalms 22:21)

Yet both then and now the wildest of the wild animals — the species that poses the greatest threat to us — is our very own.  We are our biggest enemies.  Scratch that: “they” are our biggest enemy, those other groups of our kind, yet strangers unto us, that stand in our way.  ‘They’ can want what we have; they can hurt us, even annihilate us.  And so you will find much material in the Old Testament about identifying the dangerous others and achieving protection and respite from them.

Rise up, O LORD, confront them, bring them down; rescue me from the wicked by your sword. (Psalms 17:13)

How we hate those that threaten us.  Religion provides an antidote to this type of psychological threat.  Religion assures us that a supernatural agent that can help us.  Our god may even harm them, if not obliterate them in this life or the next.  Isn’t that good news?

—

(1) Cheney, D. L., & Seyfarth, R. M. Baboon Metaphysics: The Evolution of a Social Mind, University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 2007, p.60
(2) Asimov, I., Asimov’s Guide to the Bible: The Old and New Testaments, Wing Books, New York, 1969, p. 305

Next I ask, what species on ‘the other side of the fork’ has recently dined on you? Any mosquitoes (of which there are a whopping 80 species in Florida)? Tics? Of course, had a lion or some other large predator recently dined on you, you would not be reading a computer screen right now. On the other end of the spectrum, every inch of your body is at this moment veritable Petri dish for assorted bacteria and fungi.

In terms of dangerous predators, new research has found a correlation between phase of the moon and lion attacks on humans. In a title suggesting woo of the lunar variety, I learned –

The full moon indicates impending danger from lion attack, a University of Minnesota study shows

Wow! Funny thing, I’ve never seen the following: Pisces — today is a bad day for walking on the African savannah at night.

Guess what, the moon isn’t a sign of something about to happen, but rather a source of indirect light, which hurts the lion’s ability to sneak up on prey. Thus, following the full-moon phase, lions are much more likely to engage in hunting behavior. They are more likely to be very hungry. When hungry they hunt and often succeed, whether that success involve the demise of a wildebeast or one of us.

And no, the lions don’t attack humans to teach us about their violent nature.

[O]f nearly 500 lion attacks on Tanzanian villagers between 1988 and 2009. More than two-thirds of the attacks were fatal and victims were eaten.

Yes, the humans were eaten to a degree that was terminal. Every once in awhile one of us will simply come up on ‘the wrong side of the fork.’ And in that I find a huge insight about the meaning of existence.

Like all human beings, I have a tail-bone. This nub of a tail I have bashed and fractured more than once. What is the purpose of this undeniable feature of the human body? To remind us that we didn’t evolve from a life-form with a tail? If the tail-bone isn’t necessary–and it is much harder to argue for its necessity than to point out that it may be less than necessary–why include it in the design?

Can you claim that there is a supremely intelligent designer and at the same time recognize that many design elements aren’t so intelligent? If the human being, to use a single example, were in fact perfectly designed the unemployment office would be crowded with orthodontists–to single out one profession profiting from the imperfectly designed human form. Chiropractors and optometrists would be there as well.

Intelligent design cannot explain why the many kinds of American sparrows (all small, brown birds)–savannah, chipping, marsh, song, house, fox, Lincoln–are each a different species, and yet the beagle, the bulldog, the Shi-Tzu, and the greyhound are all one species. The theory of evolution (i.e., natural selection) answers this problem easily. Dogs have been selectively bred over the past few thousand years and the resulting kinds have not remained isolated populations for enough time, and the necessary selective pressures applied, for them to become distinct species. That is why a one-hundred pound Rottweiler will attempt to mount a ten pound Chihuahua.

In a similar vein, true-believing proponents of intelligent design cannot provide a non-convoluted answer as to why human beings seem willing to drop their pants at so much as a wink from the opposite sex, despite the fact that the god of these believers wants his children to refrain from all but marital procreative sexual activity (and even then, there should be no giggling involved).

When I was a child a number of seriously religious adults taught me that sex is a dirty thing. Why were we designed to want to get dirty? The real answer–we are driven to get our genes into the gene pool; those and their genetic material that aren’t driven, disappear. Give 200 points to the theory of evolution. Maybe the creator god will do better in the lightning round.

Any contestant on Jeopardy knows that dinosaurs and human beings did not walk the earth at the same time. If they had, it probably would not have been for long. A large carnivore could easily have snapped off our heads for a between-meal snack. Delicious: hard and crunchy on the outside, warm and noodle-y on the inside. Only after a rogue asteroid (they’re all rogue, aren’t they?) slammed into our planet, and the slate of megafauna wiped clean, were mammals, and eventually Homo sapiens, able to “populate and subdue the earth.”

Human ascendancy to the top o’ the heap was contingent upon a god knocking down the number ten pin after having been blindfolded, spun around, the laces on his rental shoes tied together. High five, big guy, a perfect toss! Without the supernatural intervention of a wayward hunk of rock, there would probably be a brontosaurus in the White House. Okay, that’s silly. Subtract the asteroid impact and there would be no White House. Maybe there’d be a Yellow House. As much as we may want it to be the glorious case, the human animal did not pull itself up by the bootstraps of some divine inevitability.

Here’s the problem: Our self-consciousness provides us with the feeling of importance. This is true for individuals as well as groups. How many times have you, when in line at a supermarket waiting to check out, viewed the other shoppers as being in your way? Those shoppers, however, were on their own way. Individually, we each reside at the center of a universe. As groups, whether they are exclusive and small or inclusive of all human primates, we likewise consider ourselves to be at the center of it all. The pampered poodle being pushed in a cart down the canned-goods aisle? Just a prop for our amusement. The live lobsters in a tank crawling over one another in the seafood section? Nothing more than edible do-dads to be taken or left . . . by humans.

That person who can look in a mirror–preferably the full-length variety while buck-naked–and not see a relatively hairless primate is blind to the essential element of who they are: an animal. Sure, we are fairly intelligent animals, thanks largely to cultural evolution. (We are also the ones who invented and implemented the measuring of “intelligent.”) But in the unflattering light of nakedness, ours is a species whose design manifests evolutionary processes much more than intervention by the divinely perfect.

Need I say more than “male nipples”?

The sago palm is locally extinct. And by locally, I mean my neighborhood and beyond. Thanks to the the lethal cycad scale disease that swept through our area. Or maybe that’s “no thanks.” Why did the sago palm suffer? The cycad scale prospered. Darn. No win-win here.