Opinion
 

Is the human race still evolving?

By Joshua Curry

According to a statistic I read, about half of Americans believe Earth is no more than 10,000 years old. Anything can be argued, I suppose, but do you remember in second grade when everybody was interested in dinosaurs? Yeah, I'm fairly sure they were real.

Does this mean that a deity who relies wholly on faith to guide you on your path will throw factual evidence in your face to throw you off course? Is this when you turn the other cheek? I suspect that this timeframe may reflect the beginning of man on Earth. The human race's existence began with gardens, houses, written language and all those other inventions that the "created in his image" quote implies. 

Evolution made everybody nuts, all this talk about natural selection and mutation. I don't think it should have. Seems to me most physical evolution of the human race has ceased. There really is no reason for us monkeys to crawl up out of the sludge when we could hire somebody with a boat to pick us up and let us use their shower. Alphonse Carr, amidst the bustling Industrial Revolution, said, "The more things change, the more they stay the same." I wonder if there's a point in which things actually move fast enough to start moving back, but I doubt evolution takes a linear course. 

There have been many geniuses like Tim Leary and Aldous Huxley who thought they could spur the spiritual and mental evolution of man, but these men's visions went downhill with either their pursuit of enlightenment through hallucinogenic drugs or their egotistical dreams concerning it. I dare say they we're no closer to finding the answers than anybody else when they died. In fact, many people with such dreams have sought out this spiritual progress in the ancient practices of Zen Buddhism, among other "outdated" sources. They found that the less they spent moving forward, the more they learned about themselves. Stop and smell the garbage, in other words.

There have also been those who live by this concept of Social Darwinism. As a result of this thinking, some succeed as many more don't. I've seen for myself, at the most basic level, the effectiveness of leadership that promotes others to rise up and improve their habits so that they can succeed. Who wants a boss who is afraid of you getting into a higher position? Competition can still come into the picture without being a religion. It even works better that way.

The Postal Service, one of my favorite bands, expresses the thought, "No concerns about the world getting warmer, people thought that they were just being rewarded for treating others as they like to be treated."

There are chemicals being dumped in the ocean showing up in the autopsies of children in Arctic fishing villages. The developed world thinks that everything can be solved with a pill, from hyper 6-year-olds to depressed teenage girls to overweight TV stars. I don't think there's going to be a pill to fix what is happening to the world. I feel sorry for my generation's children or our grandchildren, whichever group ends up having to take out the trash we're leaving. More so, I feel sorry for us because we're just innocent victims of ourselves. I'm really not sure whether we need to slow down or merely catch up.

Curry, a columnist for The Daily Cougar, 
can be reached at barelyafloat@hotmail.com.