Evo devo

Are we evolving? To fail to change is to die, as any dinosaur can tell you. Any genetic changes in our bodies would probably be too slow for us to detect until we have been keeping records for another ½ million years or so. Our body still wants to walk miles in the sun tracking antelopes and eating large amounts of grains and raw vegetables for every precious bite of meat. Our mind no longer wants to do this, it wants to have pizza delivered. So our minds must be changing faster than our bodies. If we are evolving culturally--which I hope is the case because if we aren’t, we’re doomed—where are we going? Are there such things as mutations in cultural values which would endow the possessors to out-survive the holders-on of the old culture? Maybe that is what we are seeing now with some people perceiving the failure of our suburban church-going lawn-mowing mall-shopping culture and rejecting it in favor of alternative agriculture, alternative energy, alternative medicine. Interesting that the label “alternative”, connoting a choice, is stuck onto things that are really the only rational option in the minds of the culturally mutated. There really is no choice, humans must evolve. But the fear of change, so Republican, so High Church, rules many people and they huddle within their comfortable subcultures. Humans are hard-wired to believe in something; it is unfortunate that with many the wiring is of the old school, lead soldered type that makes re-programming almost impossible. They will cling to their beliefs until they die because for the conservative, preserving those beliefs is all that counts.

Personally I get bored doing the same thing more than three times in the same way—memorizing catechisms about what I should believe doesn’t sit well with me, it is not in the least satisfying to mindlessly repeat mantras. I cannot understand why so many people feel comfort in treading and re-treading the same worn paths as if their tired group and their old beliefs were the be-all and the end-all. People talk about the comforting nature of rituals and I just cannot understand. To me a ritual is interesting only once, the first time, in an anthropological sense, and to participate more than that makes me feel silly. Each to their own, I guess. So have I mutated away from the Dominant Culture? If so, will my biological evolution play along with my adventurous drift away from the well-trodden path? Hard to say—as E. O. Wilson, wearing his sociobiologist hat, said: “Biological evolution keeps cultural evolution on a short leash.” Meaning that you get too crazy and you won’t have kids. Or your kids will grow up so prickly neurotic that they won’t breed. So the Ted Kaczinski’s die out, thankfully, but maybe so do the poets the outsiders, and the weird dreamers, the Jim Morrisons. The backslapping guys on the golf course and the sherry-tea ladies at the art center will all have scads of grandchildren and there goes the Earth. Alea lacta est.