Page 4 - DARWIN AND THE HUMAN FUTURE

Clear enough. He was moving on from the fascination of prehuman evolution in Origin of Species to the world of that hypothetically more advanced creature— homo sapiens sapiens, that isus, our selves. But what else might lie within the rest of Darwin?That night I couldn’t sleep. I lay there hounded by the feeling that while the world was falling apart all around us, not only within our own group but everywhere, science was only nibbling at the task of building an adequate evolution theory—and thereby a guide to the future open to our shaping.Could there still be anything in Darwin bearing on this increasingly crucial task?I had then a brilliant, rare, and hard to find computer disk with practically everything he’d written still almost wholly untouched.Why not take a look?I told myself I would look further into it in the morning. But still I couldn’t sleep.At last in desperation I got up, put the disk in, clicked to The Descent of Man, and hit Search to see what Darwin had to say about the first thing that came to mind.What should it be?Survival of the fittest, of course.What did Darwin have to say about what over 100 years has worldwide become, for millions of us, the quick answer—and complete answer — for what drives us in Darwin’s great theory of evolution.4