The difference between humans and other organisms is that humans, having discerned something of how evolution works, are now able ...to confront their choices consciously. That is not the same as saying that we can now control evolution. I don't know how much of a difference it is in effect: we may be able to perceive our choices and still be unable to choose and act. By overpopulating the planet as we are now doing, for example, we are making an evolutionary choice just as unplanned as that of our hominid ancestors when they began cracking antelope and other hominids over the head with sticks. Nevertheless, we do differ from the first hominids in our having some notion of the implications of our behavior.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Why should all the major religions of the modern world include a crucial encounter with wilderness--Moses, Jesus, and Mohammed in ...the desert mountains, Siddhartha in the jungle? And why should the predominant modern view of the origin and development of life have arisen from the five-year wilderness voyage of a Victorian amateur naturalist named Charles Darwin? There evidently is more to wilderness than meets the eye--more than water, timber, minerals, the materials of physical civilized existence.... Placing Darwin in the tradition of Moses and Jesus may seem heresy from both the Judeo-Christian and scientific viewpoints, but I think the roles played by the three figures have been similar. They wrenched their respective cultures out of a complacency that amounted to self-worship and thrust them in new directions that (if not always entirely beneficial) enlarged the human perspective. Moses forced his society to accept a unifying law; Jesus forced his to accept the unity of all humanity; Darwin forced his to accept the unity of all life. I doubt whether any of the three would have been able to influence his society if he had not been fortified by a season in the wilderness.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »