This BLOG writing isn't a rant.  It a record of serious thought and soul searching about my personal biases...

WHAT EVOLUTION MEANS… TO ME

How I am affected by it

I am, we all are, the still-in-progress result of evolution.  The scientific theory of evolution accounts for the development of life on Earth…and it is reasonable to assume that if biological populations are found to exist on other planets, their beginnings and development “out there” will be found to be the result of evolution.

The earth has been circling the sun for the 4.6 billion years.  For the last 3.6 billion years, simple cells (prokaryotes) have been on earth.  For the last 3.4 billion years, cyanobacteria have been performing photosynthesis.  Multicellular life has been present for the last billion years.  Simple animals appeared around 600 million years ago; mammals for the last 200 million years; birds for the last 150 million years; 130 million years ago, flowers; 60 million years, primates; and for the last 200,000 years, anatomically modern humans.  

O.K., O.K., O.K! I know something about what it means, in terms of evolution, that I pee standing up…, and how I grew to be six feet, two inches tall before old age started to shorten me.  I even know vaguely about how I came to be a “white man” with opposable thumbs and hazel eyes.  I am a believer.  Evolution is the explanation for what I am… at least for what the basic model of the person whom my parents gave the name Luther Jerral Miles was at a point of conception and now at age seventy-eight is still in the process of becoming. Since the moment of my birth until now the basic model of ME has been in a process of being “tricked out” considerably to include all kinds of attitudes, appetites, and attributes.

I have a pretty good idea how some of who I am and who I am becoming got layered on top of and incorporated into the basic citizen identified in the office of the San Diego County Registrar of Voters as Luther Miles, Democrat, 4th Supervisorial District, 53rd Congressional District, 79th Assembly District. I became a Democrat in an extended family with some other good, solid Democrats and lots of Republicans in it… actually, a liberal Democrat in an extended family with lots of moderate Republicans and a few conservative Republicans and probably even a few of those who identify with the Tea Party.  How did it happen… not to them, but to me?  Did evolution have anything to do with it? 

Did you notice in the previous paragraph how I used “good and solid” as adjectives to describe myself and other Democrats in my family… and how, I didn’t include any affirming adjectives, except “moderate” and “conservative” with members of the other party.  In this November issue of The Atlantic Monthly , Robert Wright reports on a recent wave of research suggesting “that our moral impulses have a firm biological function.”  In other words, I am a Democrat because my being one puts me into a group, and needing to be part of a group is a biological predisposition for individuals of my species. I wasn’t predisposed to become part of a particular group, but being “in group” was important.  Way back before any of my most recent ancestors in North America decided to join a political party and to identify with the other people in a political group, other much more distant ancestors realized the benefits of cooperation… within groups, and surviving long enough to procreate, they passed along to subsequent generations the inclination to be group related.  We are actually pretty good at getting along with one another in our own group, and at supporting the basic ethical rules that our group has established. The problem comes when various groups live in close proximity to each other, as in the present era with electronic media and ease of travel .   People in any group are likely to know what the basic values, what is considered unacceptable and what is thought to be moral, of his/her own group… and of other groups. Because the different groups (Muslims, Jews, Christians, Democrat, Republicans, etc.) have incompatible visions of what a moral society should be,  they fight.  Wright says research shows that most groups suffer from a deep bias— a tendency to overestimate their group’s virtue, magnify their grievances, and do the reverse with “the other group.”  Evolutionary psychologists claim a predisposition to developing group bias seems to be built into our species by natural selection… a particularly disturbing reality when we are trying to find common ground that might lead to peace.

Way back in time when there were relatively few people of our species sparsely populating a few areas of Earth, humans learned that three or four fellow hunter-gatherers could cooperate on a hunt to kill an animal that one individual couldn’t kill by himself. The tendency toward cooperation was passed along through natural selection until it became innate in the human species.  Group to group cooperation has to be learned because it is experienced as counter intuitive. We intuitively want our team to win, our tribe to be victorious.  Also passed along through natural selection is the impulse to expect the judgements of those in the group to which one belongs to be moral and just and the judgements of those in the other group to be immoral and unjust. 

Every now and then in the history of our species, an individual has appeared who has addressed the problem of group bias.  Jesus was one such person. He urged his followers to see the world from the point of view of others… to treat others the way they would like “the others” to treat them. It’s easier said than done because people in one group are easily convinced that people in “the other group” have contempt for their values. Some native American cultures placed value in learning to “walk in somebody else’s shoes.”

I’ve obviously got a lot more thinking to do. Although I don’t know him personally, I find myself not liking Ted Cruz… I admit to not liking him personally, to not wanting to like him.  If he moved into my neighborhood, I’d not like to welcome into it.  So, as I said, I’ve got some serious thinking to do. How much of my reaction to him and to others (I was going to say, “of his ilk,” but thought better of it,) is just ugly, embarrassing bias, and how much is reasoned response to political ideas which I find almost totally disagreeable and even dangerous?  I am a group person.  My biases are subtle… but they are there.