On Evolution

From the pens of others-

I don’t really think Wittgenstein happened to be a philosopher.

Michael S. Gazzaniga

Human beings inherit a propensity to acquire behavior and social structures, a propensity that is shared by enough people to be called human nature. The defining traits include division of labor between the sexes, bonding between closest kin, incest avoidance, other forms of ethical behavior, suspicion of strangers, tribalism, dominance orders within groups, male dominance overall, and territorial aggression over limiting resources. Although people have free will, and the choice to turn in many directions, the channels of their psychological development are nevertheless - however much we might wish otherwise - cut more deeply by the genes in certain directions than others.

[A]ll the ways that human societies try to change minds and to change how we humans interact with the environment are doomed to fail. Indeed, societies fail when they preach at their populations. They tend to succeed when they allow each individual to discover what millions of years of evolution have already bestowed upon mind and body.

Michael S. Gazzaniga

Neanderthals are, in fact, about twice as distant, on the average, from various extant human populations as the latter are from one another. But that exercise also demonstrates that (1) the anatomical distances among some modern races, for example, East Africans and Central Siberians, were much larger that those between Neanderthals and the modern human populations most similar to them, and (2) racial morphological distances within our species are, on the average, about equal to the distances among species with other genera of mammals, as, for example, between pygmy and common chimpanzees. I am not aware of another mammalian species where the constituent races are as strongly marked as they are in ours.

As life is larger than man, so is life wiser than are we. As evolution has made us possible, so will evolution sit in final judgment. As natural selection declared us in, so natural selection, should our hubris overcome us, will declare us out. But the stark gray morning will never come to be, for laws larger than you or me will, with impartial, imperishable, accord, at some night-court in the course of man’s darkness, condemn us as a species to extinction-or more probably will enforce on us the laws of all flesh.