Re: Endgame (Was RE: [asa] Jerry Coyne's ...)

From: Murray Hogg <muzhogg@netspace.net.au>
Date: Fri Jan 30 2009 - 20:28:57 EST

Dehler, Bernie wrote:
> George: " Why are you so sure that what's needed now is better brains? "
>
> The brain is what makes humans the dominant species. Bigger brains wins over muscles- there's no animal alive that can beat humans in a fight (put 10 tigers and 10 people in a sizeable jungle to fight it out, and the humans will win). CS Lewis kind of talks about this in the last chapter of "Mere Christianity."
>

<cite>
Now it seems to me that most of the popular guesses at the Next Step
are making just the same sort of mistake. People see (or at any rate they
think they see) men developing greater brains and getting greater mastery
over nature. And because they think the stream is flowing in that direction,
they imagine it will go on flowing in that direction. But I cannot help
thinking that the Next Step will be really new; it will go off in a
direction you could never have dreamed of. It would hardly be worth calling
a New Step unless it did...

...if you care to talk in these terms, the Christian view is
precisely that the Next Step has already appeared. And it is really new. It
is not a change from brainy men to brainier men: it is a change that goes
off in a totally different direction-a change from being creatures of God to
being sons of God. The first instance appeared in Palestine two thousand
years ago. In a sense, the change is not "Evolution" at all, because it is
not something arising out of the natural process of events but something
coming into nature from outside.

C.S. Lewis, "Mere Christianity", (Glasgow: Collins, 1977 reprint), 182-83.
</cite>

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Received on Fri Jan 30 20:29:12 2009

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