Childhood

As humans, we do not naturally see ourselves as a product of continual change. Most of us think we are direct descendants in a lineage of ancestors who were also human. That’s why we feel a connection with the prehistoric artists of the Niaux caves. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cave_of_Niaux However, thirteen thousand years is just a blink of the eye in evolutionary terms. If we go back far enough, we find that life was literally much simpler. I can know this on an intellectual level, but I cannot easily accept that all living organism have evolved from the same origin. I simply cannot see how I am related to the furry green mold growing on the cheese in my fridge. The full implications of evolution are rarely considered because we cannot conceive what it really means. Our physical resemblance to chimpanzees may make it easier for us to understand that we share around 98 per cent of our genetic makeup. Much harder to accept is that we alo share 50 percent of our genetic makeup with a banana. I amy feel that some of my fellow humans have the intelligence of a banana, but to fully accept that all life is related by the same basic genetic building blocks is beyond belief., no matter how simple or complicated an organism can be, all life forms share about one thousand genes. As I write, I am contemplating the bananas in the fruit bowl in front of me, which for some strange reason suddenly seem less appetizing.

Why do we misunderstand natural selection, and why does creationism do so well in a Christian fundamentalist environment? The answer is that our minds are naturally inclined to a creationist view. After all, creationism was created by the human mind, whereas evolution by natural selection is a fact that was discovered. Without the Book of Genesis, there would have been some other creation story. The Incas, the Egyptians, and the Aztecs all had exotic creation myts, and that probably goes for all extinct civilizations. Every culture has a creation story because humans are naturally inclined to understand the world in terms of patterns, purpose, and causality. Everything about evolution runs counter to how our natural mind design makes sense of life on an earth made up of different animals and plants. We are not naturally inclined to a theory that is nonpurposeful, nondirected, and yet capable of all the extreme diversity of life forms. To top it all, we are then expected to believe that we are related to bananas. Page 60-61