I don't believe in evolution. I don't mean evolution as a scientific theory. I refer to what C.S. Lewis termed the myth – that is, the idea that things do not merely change but improve, that certain creatures are "more evolved" and therefore better, progressing somehow to a far-distant perfection. Belief in this myth is not confined to those staunch defenders of science who deride creationists who refer to evolution as a theory but never seem to get angry when one does the same for gravity. I have heard the doctrine repeated by many actual scientists, who divide nature into the "primitive" and the "highly evolved." Only grudgingly do many admit that it is somewhat strange to refer to a creature as a "lower" form of life when it has, in fact, thrived unchanged for millions of years.
The idea of evolution as improvement requires at least as much of a leap of faith as believing that an angel named Moroni led Joseph Smith to gold plates explaining a new faith, or that a carpenter who was executed as a criminal by the Romans was actually the son of God. If you truly believe the myth, a chicken is superior to a Tyrannosaurus. While I suspect there are more chickens in the world than there have ever been Tyrannosaurs, I also suspect that, if given the choice, few would decide to be chickens.
Despite the strong evidence of their dinosaur ancestry, chickens are rarely the subject of discussion among believers in the evolutionary myth. Instead, it is humans that tend to be the main article of faith. Humans, it would seem, are the pinnacle of life as we know it, the top of this planet's evolutionary pyramid. This is due to our superior intelligence, which is only improving as time goes by, despite the fact that we appear to breed indiscriminately and are no longer being culled by tigers at a rate that significantly affects the gene pool. To know that this is true we need only think of how superior we are to those ape-men who built the Parthenon, or navigated the Pacific in log canoes, and, more particularly, how much cleverer we are than our parents.
The argument for intelligence, I presume, is that intelligence makes us more fit for survival. However, if a human were placed in an arena with a black mamba, very few would bet on the human. Of course, the response is that such a scenario ignores the obvious advantage of technology; armed with a weapon, the human would triumph. But is this a weapon of the person's own making? I know that I would not wish to go into combat against a mamba armed only with a pointy stick. If it's a gun, or even a sword, then what is being tested is not the human's fitness for survival but the fitness of certain of its ancestors. Undoubtedly, the chicken would defeat a human if it were allowed to enter the arena armed with the panoply of a dinosaur.
Of course, arena combat may not be the best way of judging the fitness of humanity as a whole. The only thing that is important is the survival of the species, and the only value that the individual has is in what it may contribute to the species. A monarch butterfly dies, but, if the bird that devours it becomes ill and avoids such meals in the future, the ends of butterflydom have been served.
However, if survival of the species is the touchstone, then the cockroach is a creature far superior to man. Yes, we have brought forth great civilizations and splendid technology, while the cockroach has limited itself to bringing forth more cockroaches. Neither civilization nor technology, however, is of great benefit to our species. While it is postulated we might be able to save ourselves if an asteroid threatened to strike our planet, or when the sun eventually goes out (the latter being a fate that even the cockroach would be unable to avoid), we have also managed to invent a number of things that are likely to kill us all before any such eventuality.
Moreover, very little of humanity's intelligence and effort is directed at the survival of the species. We are far more interested in ensuring that old men can get erections than we are in developing antibiotics, and, when called to task on this, we make half-joking, half-sanctimonious reference to the free market. I would not be surprised if our species' fate is to rot away inside a virtual reality, too busy indulging in unoriginal perversions and acts of simulated bravery to bother with procreation. Somehow, investing in more cockroaches begins to look like the wiser option.
