Darwin For Sissies, or Whatever Happened to Survival of the Fittest?

Evolutionists used to be hard-boiled theorists who maintained that
nature, including man, was based only on the impersonal + time + chance.
They coolly asserted that the fittest survive, that some species die off
and others thrive because of natural selection. All enduring creatures,
great and small, have mutated and adapted to their environments.

The new breed of evolutionists is just as firm on these "orthodox"
positions, but insists on blatantly interfering in nature. They justify
their propping up endangered species who can't cut the mustard by citing
a natural transcendence...something that sounds very similar to the
Christian transcendence they have despised to much in the Christian
"myth." Face it: the new evolutionist is a blubbering sentimentalist.

Tune in to just about any animal program and you can see: a National
Geographic wildlife special, Nature, Animal Kingdom, NOVA, a documentary
on Jane Goodall at the Gombe Stream Chimpanzee reserve in Tanzania, or
just about any Post Tarzan era animal flick will do. Hear how over
millions of years these endangered animals have evolved, and that we
mustn't let them simply die out in an epochal fortnight.  Hear how mans
conquest of nature is an immoral act. Watch noble and enlightened
conservationists on a romantic rescue effort to save pandas, elephants,
blue whales, snail darters, Bengal tigers, rhinos, baby seals, saving
everything but the human fetus. (People needn't apply for protection
because they are, after all, doing all the environmental damage, and
there are too many of them anyway.)

These week-kneed evolutionists, apparently in need of a cosmological
crutch, have discovered pantheism. They've replaced monotheism and the
'antiquated' creation model with a romanticized nature. Specialists, they
project human feelings  and thoughts onto nature. Cynthia Moss has lived
with elephants since 1972, and has written the recently published
Elephant Memories: Thirteen Years in the Life of an Elephant Family. Moss
offers revealing insights like, " Elephants are experiencing joy," and,
elsewhere, the elephant "mostly dreamed, perhaps of vast swards of sweet
new grass and clear, cool hill streams." She believes that elephants may
have intimations of mortality. Even the reviewer at Newsweek, her former
employer, confesses that elephant mysteries "sometimes entice Moss into
an anthropomorphic twilight zone."

Moss is wholly sentimental. Touchy-feely evolutionists like here deduce
thusly:  since humans are only animals, animals easily attain human
status. Albert Schweitzer developed a system of ethics called "reverence
for life" which required a profound respect for the lives of all other
beings. One of his coworkers observed that the more reverence he had for
"life,' the less he cherished people. The tsetse fly buzzing into
Schweitzer's African hospital and threatening the life of a recuperating
patient has just as much right to live as the human.

When we hear evolutionists talking about morality, it is, shall we say,
"a leap of science."  Does the impersonal  + time + chance evolve into
right and wrong?  Is swatting a tsetse fly or clubbing a baby seal really
murder? Evolutionists cannot grin and not in agreement with Ogden Nash:
"God made the fly and then forgot to tell us why."  They must conclude:
"Chance made the earth, so it has no inherent worth. "  If poachers
slaughtered all the remaining elephants for their ivory, the serious
evolutionist would be forced to admit, after his immediate emotional
reaction, that under the rule of survival of the fittest his tears are
irrational.

The sentimental evolutionist, however, justifies his mourning by
preaching about the "chain of life."  If the California candor dies out,
he reasons, the ecological balance, you know, the ecosystems, will get
screwed up. We won't survive if nature doesn't survive. The condor is a
part of nature, a part of the whole, is part of us. We must save it to
save ourselves.

Doctor Doolittle is in need of a refresher course in elementary
evolution. We will survive without the condor because we can adapt.
That's the evolutionary challenge. And who needs the condor anyway?
Remember the Cambrian disasters? Some "500 million" years ago the
trilobites disappeared from the sea and the world didn't end in a
whimper.!  Time called the Permian cataclysm of "248" years ago  "the
biggest of extinctions;" up to 90 percent of all marine life died. Nobody
knew they were even gone until the 20th century. The late-Cretaceous
event of "65 million" years ago finished off the dinosaurs and many
groups of species. The evolutionary process includes incredible
destruction and waste, but, says hard-liner physicist Richard Muller from
the University of California at Berkeley, "in wiping the slate clean,
these catastrophes opened up ecological niches and prevented stagnation."

Some species can adapt, some can't. Tough luck.  That's natural
selection. The California condor is butt ugly, feeds on carrion, has a
cue ball head atop a Modigliani neck, and vomits whenever it is mildly
frightened. This is one bird that is clearly a result of the impersonal +
time + chance. Why get choked up about its demise? Why work for 61 and a
half hours with a pair of tweezers to aid the baby condor out of its
shell, into an incubator, and out of the endangered species column? Its
time is up. Better luck in the next Big Bang. The universe is going to
collapse on itself eventually anyway, and the sun will burn out sooner or
later. Have a nice day, that's the important thing. Nature knows what it
is doing.  Don't be a busybody.

One group of environmental meddlers recently received a sentimental
ovation from life. The George Miksch Sutton Avian Research Center near
Bartlesville, Oklahoma has been responsible for hatching 99 Southern bald
eagles. "We'll be running an eagle factory here," says Director Steve
Sherrod. Cost: $500,000 a year. These benevolent birdbrains have devoted
their lives to building up the numbers of this waning species and for
half a year they perform the basic function of eagle parents.

"People ask me why we are doing this," says Sherrod. "It's simple. We
consider eagles as works of art that can never be replaced. It's like
someone slashing a Rembrandt. Once the birds are gone, they're gone. This
it will be too late."

The Rembrandt analogy is the old watch and watchmaker trap. Evolutionists
need to beware of design/designer reasoning. Obviously these sentimental
conservationists have been subverted by creationists. Each Rembrandt
painting, remember, was made or "created" by a painter, for a purpose,
with pleasure, exnihilo, in the likeness and image, to some extent, of
the painter.

If you are a hardline evolutionist, the eagle was not make. It evolved
out of chemical reactions to chance. It has no raison detre, and no
inherent beauty or purpose. If the golden eagle can soar for long periods
searching for a prey and can spot a hare from a distance of 6,560 feet,
it is not a timeless treasure or a work of art. It is merely an empirical
fact. If the eagle species perishes, this, too, is as plain a fact as the
nose in the middle of your face. We are, aren't we?..all brute facts of
no intrinsic aesthetic worth.

The evolutionist who believes nature, and man, is purposeful, moral,
inherently beautiful, and important will find himself at odds with every
jot and tittle of evolutionary theory. The evolutionist who holds out for
intrinsic beauty, truth, purpose, and compassion, even though his theory
has prescribed moral relativity, blind chance, and savage instincts, is
like an atheist who, although he doesn't believe in the existence of God,
goes to church "religiously" and does "Christian" things because it makes
him feel good.  It may look nice, it may feel nice, but his behavior is
inconsistent. The poor fellow is unable to live as he believes, and can't
truly believe as he lives. In the same fashion, the compassionate or
sentimental evolutionist is nothing more than a scientific oxymoron.

So why should an evolutionist save condors, elephants and eagles? After
all, is he his brother's zoo keeper.

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Attributed to a Mark Rentz, no date given.
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