Life, Purposely Driven
I recently read this article (about a week ago) at The American Scholar that runs alongside my recent post regarding the beauty in evolution. I noticed author Brian Boyd sees things through Rose-colored glasses (or, perhaps, I see things through Brian-colored glasses).
Does evolution by natural selection rob life of purpose, as so many have feared? The answer is no. On the contrary, Charles Darwin has made it possible to understand how purpose, like life, builds from small beginnings, from the ground up. In a very real sense, evolution creates purpose.
Simply put. No. Evolution does not rob any meaning from life. In fact, evolution only adds to it. He goes on:
Evolution generates problems and solutions as it generates life. Rocks may crack and erode, but they do not have problems. Amoebas and apes do. Natural selection creates complex new possibilities, and therefore new problems, as it assembles self-sustaining organisms piecemeal, cycle after cycle, by generating partial solutions, testing them, and regenerating from the basis of the best solutions available in the current cycle. In time, it can create richer solutions to richer problems.
There’s an amazing process here at work; an amalgam of cycles and paths. It’s not that simple, yet it is. I find comfort in the simplest definition of evolution as well as the more detailed elongated version.
Creationism is off-putting, to say the least. The notion that every species has been hand-molded by clay and/or dirt is an unpleasant thought to me. As a feminist, I find it even more disturbing than as a skeptical atheist. The bible makes it clear that women came after men. However, in the developmental stages, we are all basically the same until differentiation. The biblical order of things places men above women in a crude, unacceptable way. Males and females are different biologically, yet no gender is better or worse.
Evolution speaks to the equality that naturally exists, in addition to purpose.
Darwin’s explanation of evolution by natural selection shocked, and still shocks, because it appears to deny purpose. We think of purpose as something prior to decision and action: I want to raise my arm, and, unless I am paralyzed or restrained, I do. But in fact purpose emerges slowly, in the species and in the individual. My capacity to move my arm in as many ways as I can depends on things like the evolution of forelegs into arms early in the primate line, the evolution millions of years later of a rotating socket in the shoulder of great apes, to enable swinging in trees, and the further freeing up of arm movements after early hominids became fully bipedal. Babies flail their arms uncontrolledly and purposelessly for months before they can direct them in a particular way for a particular purpose.
Before me, I see an amazing process. How we have evolved from cavepeople to revolutionaries to civilized citizens – how we evolve from babies to adults – how we evolve from fearful to fearless in our daily lives. Religion is constantly evolving, as well as art.
Everything rests within evolution’s hands. Evolution is not this big scary stand-alone act, but an intertwining force we encounter in every aspect of our lives.
Related posts:
Religion is constantly evolving, as well as art.
Can’t religion just go extinct though? I mean, THAT’S part of the evolutionary process too!
LOL…hopefully soon…
RA-men