A science writer at Discover magazine has managed to escape from the clutches of evolution and lived to tell us of it. This Bridget Alex has discovered humans—not her, but humans—have evolved to believe in gods. But, somehow, she did not. Therefore she is not human.
Or if she is, I don’t know if that means evolution is broken or she is some sort of genetic mutant who has evolved not to believe in gods. Since God exists, and since this Bridget Alex has evolved out of believing in this part of Reality, both theories are plausible.
On the other hand, if evolution can cause what we think, or is skilled at tricking us into thinking that what is not so is so, then how does this Bridget Alex know that what she believes is Real? What she believes may be an evolutionary fraud, a genetic trick designed to give her a breeding advantage for the strangely overly sexualized-yet-non-sexual American savanna in which she resides. She may be programmed to spout atheistic nonsense to lure a beta-boy into her bed, a soy boy who will encourage her not to abort her nascent offspring.
Evolution can be cruel.
Incidentally, why is evolution causing so many ladies to kill their own children? We are told evolution provides survival skillz. Yet slaughtering your own selfish-gene carriers would appear to be the opposite of survival.
On the other other hand, that killing is a pattern I noticed, and this Bridget Alex says humans evolved to notice patterns, many of which turn out to be false. Not the patterns she notices, of course. Evolution gave her a pass. So she says. But my patterns are suspect. So it could be injecting drugs to prevent conception and slitting the throats of the wee mites who make it past those chemical gates is providing a survival advantage I cannot see, since evolution isn’t letting me grasp the correct pattern.
I’ll let the true scientists, the folks who know evolution has let their minds alone discover truths, even though it’s evolution that provides the feels about truth, and so nobody would ever know they aren’t being fooled by some impish genes, answer this.
Isn’t science grand?
Bonus Saturday post! This originally ran 30 October 2018.
Is Stupid a stage of adaptation just prior to extinction? Can a mammalian species or sub-species with a brain adapt itself out of neurological existence? Is homo sapien an endangered species endangered by its own evolutionary adaptation? Have chimps through evolutionary pressure become too smart for party politics? For their survival have jackals adapted beyond the DemocRat Party?
Intelligence may turn out to be an evolutionary dead end. We realise that the pleasure of sex is evolution’s way to get us to propagate the species. So we figure a way to have the pleasure without the consequences. Then we die out.