Not Far Removed from Primordial Ooze

Everyone believes in evolution, just not in the same evolution. Take an isolated idyllic island where lives a society of peaceful native islanders. One awful day, through a strange quirk of winds and currents, a temporary land bridge to a close-by island appears. A pack of fleet-footed predators come across. Mayhem ensues. The slowest islanders are eaten first then those not so quick. Eventually a fragile balance is reached. The surviving quickest islanders breed and produce quick offspring. The predators evolve similarly. Regression ensures neither species break the sound barrier.

That in a nutshell is evolution of the kind which you would have to be plain obtuse not to accept. It is explicable to such an extent that it is a wonder that Charles Darwin was needed at all. Thus the less-than-amazing ups and downs of the British peppered moth versus its black cousin depending upon the environment. Or, equally unamazing, the less body-armoured stickleback fish in freshwater, where there are fewer predators, than in saltwater. There must be countless like examples.

The difficulty comes with changes in species. Dogs can be bred with quite different appearances as we know. But they remain dogs. Are there circumstances where a dog can become a cat, or some such? Seems unlikely. Anyway, don’t want to get into stuff beyond my ken. I was struck by a passage in a wonderful book by Tom Wolfe The Kingdom of Speech, in which he discussed the wrangling between Darwin and British biologist Alfred Russel Wallace. Apparently each had independently arrived at the theory of natural selection. Inspired, it’s posited, by Thomas Malthus and his book Essay on the Principle of Population (1797).

Malthus wrote dismally about population always running up against a shortage of food. Hence “the dismal science”, namely economics. Malthus took too little account of the free market and man’s ingenuity but that is by the way. The salient point so far as evolution is concerned is that man, animals, plants taken as whole are neither exploding in their numbers willy-nilly nor dying away. A self-regulatory global system — natural selection — is indefatigably at work finding a way through.

Homeostasis rather than chaos is the normal natural state of affairs. Incidentally, free-market capitalism is the analogous economic system to the natural order. It keeps a balance between the use of resources and their availability. Resources can only run out under command and control economic systems. Capitalism is God-given, in other words.

According to Wolfe, Wallace saw limitations in natural selection. Why is man relatively hairless if descended from an ape progenitor, and accordingly burdened with having to put on artificial coverings? Natural selection is not supposed to makes things tougher. Darwin apparently countered with sexual selection. Early humans fancied coupling with the less hirsute. Could be, maybe? While artificial chest hair for men had a limited run in the seventies, the greater attractiveness of the less hirsute goes way back. The Ancient Romans plucked out their bodily hair and, supposedly, even used professional hair-pluckers in public bathhouses.

Why abstract thinking. How did that evolve? Sure it’s useful in the modern world but how useful would it have been to stone-age man? Natural selection doesn’t work to create changes in advance of their need. The islanders in my opening didn’t start running faster in anticipation of the arrival of fleet-footed predators. Of course atheistic evolutionists twist and turn to explain everything in evolutionary terms. Don’t mention the Creator. I did above but I think I got away with it.

Finally this brings me to my dénouement. To wit, the evolved brains of politicians. Joe Biden pointed to several parts of the Special Counsel’s report in which it said that he did not wilfully retain particular classified documents. He knew that other parts of the report dealing with other documents had said that he had wilfully retained and disclosed classified materials. He said that no top secret material had been retained. Such documents were found. He said that everything was in locked or lockable cabinets. A photograph showed records lying in a dilapidated cardboard box in his garage. Everyone has the report and the photograph. Everyone knows that Biden is lying. Biden knows that everyone knows he is lying.

Take Albanese. He is able to skirt over “my word is my bond” and with unbridled chutzpah accuse Dutton of lacking integrity for not opposing the revised tax reductions. Try to get you mind round that. Can’t, can you? That’s the clever part. Politicians have “evolved” on a side track. But how? They couldn’t have developed Machiavellian instincts in anticipation of men organising their affairs into societies. Perhaps they were created? Though in this case clearly by Diablo rather than God. Or, can a species of natural selection account for it?

First, recall Marcus Aurelius (Meditations 5:17): “To pursue the impossible is madness: and it is impossible for bad men not to act in character.” Suppose you were bad. Can’t become good. How to survive and thrive in society full of goodwill? The answer: You might call it ‘creative natural selection’. Divide society. Cast some men against others, and work the frayed unity for all its worth for you own benefit.

The bourgeois versus the proletariat had a ring to it in Marxian circles. It’s a short leap from this to fighting Tories. Of more recent manifestation, we’ve had Clinton badging a section of the US population as “deplorables”. We have divisive affirmative action under the banner of  ‘diversity, equity and inclusion’; non-whites versus whites; indigenous versus non-indigenous; LGBTQ rights; and, the current daddy of them all, multiculturalism. Go back, this is not a divisive thing which fits just the one side. To wit: Menzies’ forgotten people, Howard’s battlers, Hockey’s lifters and leaners. Can’t expect people who encourage and live off division to have any compunction about bare-faced dissembling. It’s the nature of the evolved beast. And national unity? Bah humbug! Nearly all of the current crop of politicians would become extinct.