Science, Creation & EvolutionMorality and evolutionismThere is one important thing you need to know about how evolution works: Evolution does not set itself goals. "Becoming intelligent" is not a goal of life forms. Life forms on our planet are not collectively struggling to reach intelligence. Dinosaurs lived for millions of years without reaching intelligence that equals ours. You talk about 'the drive to better themselves.' This is not exactly how it works: Evolution favours those that can survive best. There are no good genes or bad genes. There are only those genes that promote the animal's survival and those that reduce its chances of survival. The gene that causes long hair thrives in arctic animals, but it reduces the chances of survival for savannah animals, because it might cause them to get overheated or slow them down when hunting prey. By the way: A gene is (to put it simply) a hereditary piece of genetic information that determines a particular characteristic in an organism. When we talk about 'survival of the fittest' we just mean 'the animal that is most suited to survive in the environment it lives in'. "To better yourself" means setting a goal and trying to reach it, but evolution works the other way around: First there is a set of genes (half from its father, other half from its mother) and then the environment judges whether or not this particular set of genes is suitable for its surroundings. Those that are most adapted to their surroundings produce the largest amount of offspring and that particaler set of genes has a greater chance of appearing in later generations. Eventually that certain gene can become a part of all the members of its species. This is how short-haired elephants could turn into wooly mammoths when the environment started to favour the 'thick-hair gene' at the start of an ice age. Asking why we have have high intelligence and monkeys have a lower intelligence is like asking why an elephant has a large trunk and a tapir has a smaller one or why a giraffe has a long neck and antelopes have shorter necks. The answer is in all cases: of all the various set of genes its ancestors produced over time, the genes we see today were most suited to its environment. At the moment there are several influencial theories that try to retrace our ancestor's step through history and try to determine what adaptations to our environment could have led to the evolutionary 'demand' for higher intelligence. |
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