I was sitting tonight watching a program on National Geographic Channel (I tend to watch a lot of that, a lot is in English, and even if it isn't, it's hard to misinterpret a Lion running down a Gazelle.) Tonight's special was about human evolution, and how the theories had changed, even since I was in college. The prevailing logic for most of the 20th century followed that the chain of human evolution was linear; one species gave way to the next, ad infinitum, till we reach the "top" of the pyramid, which is supposedly us. The new dynamic tells us that many species of bipedal hominids existed together, frequently in the same areas. How they got along with each other was a matter, of course, of what one or the other, or both, wanted. Success as a species is never necessarily a matter of size, the dinosaurs tell us that. Surviving requires you to use your intelligence, and adapt, and live as a part of a society. Important lessons, even at a personal level. Success requires that you go into places you've never gone before, and be, perhaps, what you've never been before. It would almost be an irritating thought, were it not so true. Success DOES mean that you need to adapt to your situation. And recognize that evolution is never necessarily always upward and outward, getting bigger, stronger, and faster. Sometimes you do get bigger, sometimes you need to be smaller to cope. And nothing, of course, stands in the way of what we call fate, or luck. Also noted was the fact that a reduction in stress alters your brain chemistry. All of which, of course, begs the question....will I be a different person when this is all over? Better adapted, and better able not to simply be extinct? I'm inclined to think so, and think so for the better; of course, the learning and adapting can never stop. And we keep coming back to that luck thing then.....
And personally, I don't necessarily believe that we, Homo Sapiens Sapiens, are necessarily the end of the line in terms of human evolution; there are simply too many mysteries, and too many strange things about the human body that we don't understand, or that just plain don't belong. The best examples, of course, are the human appendix, and "goose bumps." The appendix, by the standard logic at this point in history, is supposedly the evolutionary remains of another stomach that our ancestors had. Goose bumps were a mechanism to raise the skin when our bodies were covered with more hair, so that air could get trapped between the hair and the skin and act as a sort of natural blanket. Or so I've heard. Anyway, neither one is functionally what it once was, so who's to say that God doesn't have something else in mind? Inevitably, He can do as He pleases, pretty much. I'm tempted to think that adaptation and extinction, or apocalypse, occur on a more personal level these days. The Great Flood of Noah, and Sodom and Gomorrah were His responses to massive wrong; He has better aim than that, if it's just you. Think about it. Please.