Week 2

1.  Thoughts on Evo Devo

I love archeological findings, including findings of human skulls and bones which might help us to understand our ancestory.  As I read those articles, a few questions came to my mind:  firstly, what distinguishes one specie of humans from another?  In the first few articles we read, they talk about how Homo erectus and Homo habilis lived about 2.5 - 1.6 million years ago, later we read that in 2003, a hominid skeleton that lived just 18,000 years ago was discovered, obviously a different species of humans.  So I googled "hominid" and discovered that there are as many as 21 different species of hominid and that the earliest man roamed earth as early as 6 - 7 million years ago.  It seems like the bone structures, brain size, number of teeth present, etc are what distinguished one specie from another.  But is it possible that may be more than one species existed at a time and they cross-bred?  And that our so-called mutations or a new specie was actually the result of cross-breeding?

On this subject of evolution and with dooms day on the back of my mind, it seems like those so-called primitive men who roamed the surface of the earth a few million years ago with a small brain-size managed to leave nature pretty much intact and that millions of years later, we, the supposedly intelligent specie are able to enjoy what they left behind.  Yet, with a few decades, the intelligent specie, with a larger brain-size somehow managed to whack nature out of balance with possibly irreversible consequences.  And the primitive people already knew about being respectful to the old and how to take care of them millions of years ago.  Smaller brain size may be, but definitely a bigger heart than modern men.

Thoughts on Darwinism

I haven't made up my mind about whether we came from evolution or creation, but Darwinism made me think of cockroaches.  They existed as early as 350 million years ago and there are as many as 4,500 species of cockroaches.  Researches have shown that cockroaches easily co-operate and oragnize themselves to perform very complex tasks such as resource allocation.  May be it's this working together and living in peace with each other that they've managed to survive all this time.

In the past, species went into extinction due to events that were beyond their control.  Today, the human race is in dire danger because of our own actions.  We have to recover our unity with nature in order to survive and even evolve into higher beings.  We can no longer see nature as an endless reservoir of resources that we can exploit.  As a Taoist would say, we have to be one with nature in order to obtain optimal health.  If nature is diseased, so would we.

3.  Comment on "Why Darwinism Matters"

A very interesting article and very disturbing to read that rape has been rationalized by scientists as an evolutionary adaptation, a strategy for maximising reproductive success.  By inference then, we can go around and rationalize just about any irrational, immoral behavior because according to these scientists, "any behavior that survives today must have conferred some evolutionary advantage, otherwise it would not have been preserved by natural selection."  Does this mean that we can do just about anything so long as it is to sustain the human race, then it's justified?  What kind of a world would it become then?  

In a society where we value scientific evidence and undervalue spirituality, our values have become distorted.  In a society of punishments and rewards, we are taught to blame others when things go wrong in order to protect ourselves.  Even in this instance, we are trying to rationalize something as immoral as rape and see it as man's adaptive reaction to evolution?!


We pride ourselves in advances in technology, in the wealth of knowledge we possess, yet I wonder if all this knowledge is making us a better race?  Or just a tool for us to rationalize every unreasonable behavior as something outside our control and that we are simply victims of our circumstances.   Why bother take responsibility for our actions, blame others and the environment, it's so much easier and according to these scientists, "the logic is inescapable."