On September 11, 2001, religious extremist executed a coordinate attack on the United States using commercial aircraft. There has already been much documented about events leading up to the attacks and the events that followed the attacks. Many people died and were injured on this day, and ten years later, the emotional scars of the survivors continue to testify to the pain and suffering despite the passage of time.
Darwin's theory of evolution is about natural selection and survival of the fittest; individuals with the strongest genes and the most resources will stand a better chance of finding a mate in order to pass their genes on to the next generation. Those encompassing the least desirable traits will not breed. Abnormal traits of evolution that appear on the scene either serve as an advantage or as a disadvantage, and both make one stand apart from their peers. This "standing out" either makes mating with them either more attractive or less attractive. The abnormal trait, e.g., the opposable thumb, sharper claws or a stronger shell, gets passed to the next generation when it appears to add a survival advantage. Abnormal traits stop "dead" when it seems to add distinct survival disadvantage.
Our present generation is standing on the shoulders of those who have come before us; we are the best that evolution has to offer up until this point in time. Today's human being is the best human being produced from nature through the process of natural selection. The reason that you are reading this blog is because your parents mated and created you; the reason they mated was not only because of their "love" for each other but also because each of them perceived the other as being an "advantageous" mate (in terms of offering more wealth, better health and power, and better care for future potential children) when compared to the competition. In other words, you are the product of your parent's best mating choice, and there were lots of factors that went into that choice. Events such as these have happened like this for millions of years, and have guided the course of the development of modern humans.
Each generation is supposed to be evolving beyond that other previous generation, even if this evolution is microscopic. We're all supposed to be getting "better" one natural selection at a time, one generation at a time. But is this really the case?
And now, let's return back to Sept. 11, 2001 and factor in the events from September 11, 2001 into the grand scheme of natural selection. Those responsible for the attacks represented the best that evolution had to offer at that particular point in time. No -- I'm not talking about moral choices at the moment. I'm talking about pure physical realities that have developed throughout evolution to produce modern humans. The terrorists were "modern" human in the sense that they were the result of millions of years of evolution from their ancestors.
However, given the events of Sept. 11, 2001, we must weigh that personal religious fanaticism and personal ideation have the potential to influence the broader scope of physiological evolution. Those responsible for the attacks traded the possibility of casting their genes into the next generation for ensuring that others were removed from this world, and their victims would cease to be able to create additional future offspring. Personal choice influenced both personal evolution and the evolution of other people. Millions of years of evolutionary processes halted because of extremism.
Despite evolution being responsible for better fine tuning our "collective" survival as as species on planet Earth, we have the ability, individually, to toss millions of years of evolution away in the blink of an eye -- all for the sake of personal religious belief. As a species, we have not evolved beyond the the confinements of our original evolutionary processes. We still kill one another. We still rape one another. We still steal from one another. And it can be argued that we do not "love" one another. We have not evolved beyond evolution it would seem -- or rather, evolution up until this point in time has led to the possibility that personal conviction can alter the evolutionary course of hundreds, if not thousands, of other people.
When people are murdered or when people choose to sacrifice themselves for cognitive or religious ideation, they erase all the effort that their ancestors endured to ensure their posterity.
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