Evolution: The missing link

There’s a piece I think that might be missing in a lot of people’s thinking about evolution.   It has something to do with pleasure, with the joy of life, even with the joy in the pains of life.

The mechanics are simple enough to be graspable, yet also infinitely complex, as intertwined as the double helix of our DNA.

But the DNA is only part of the answer of evolution. The real miracle is that we are not only alive, but we are conscious of our life. And in us, our drive to live, to procreate, to pass our lives to new lives, is a conscious drive. It is the hope that allows us to survive. That’s the part that is sometimes forgotten when we think of ourselves as reducible to chromosomes in a world of survival of the fittest.

It isn’t God that’s missing in a narrow view of evolution. It’s ourselves.

Essays on creativity, community, social change, and the search for meaning