Annals Of Darwinism And The Myth Of God’s Creation–Which Is The Bigger Scam?

There are pictures circulating on the Internet of impossibly bedecked creatures – far too intricately designed either to secure a safe niche in a competitive natural environment or to attract a mate.  Insects that mimic flowers and flowers that have feelers, faux mandibles, and lures ; fish with adornments, attachments, trailers, and incidentals.   Surely something far simpler, more elegant, and less showy would do the trick.  On the contrary, nature seems to have its own particular designs.
Who, for example, does not wonder at the periodicity of the seventeen-year locust, an insect which lives below ground for years, comes up after seventeen, mates, dies, and leaves its offspring to burrow back down into the earth from which it emerged to hibernate for another seventeen? And why seventeen and not sixteen, or twelve?

Darwin teaches that such incredibly profuse, elaborate, and seemingly silly and unnecessary mutations are in fact part of Nature’s ineluctable design.  No ‘one’ decided to make insects, fish, or fowl so outrageously festooned.  They evolved through an incremental process of evolution, survival of the fittest, adaptation, and survival.  The seventeen-year locusts have an evolutionary advantage because no other species of locust has chosen that particular periodicity.  It, apparently, is worth the wait.  No finery, no frills, no exaggeratedly showy dress and behavior is irrelevant or unnecessary.



Yet there are not a few people who at least once in their lives have questioned Darwin.  Surely such operatic excess cannot possibly be necessary, nor such a profusion of peculiar and particular niches essential for survival.  Surely the Madagascar Archangel Moth need not be so obvious.

Yet Darwin insisted that such fanciful and dreamy notions of ‘purpose’ or ‘divine intervention’ are no more than signs of human intellectual flaccidity – a lack of the intellectual rigor, objectivity, and an inability to think beyond the here and now; to conceive of nature as a complex system of organisms interrelated with no purpose whatsoever, with no pre-ordained plan, with no rhyme or reason whatsoever.  He would have been thunderstruck at the naivete of New Age apostles of universality, commonality, and belonging.  Get over it, he would say to the idealists who search for meaning.
Hard as it is to stomach, Darwinism postulates that there is no value in nature nor in the universe.  All is subject to randomness and to the forces of natural selection, an indifferent, valueless process the only rationale for which is the survival of the fittest.

Neo-Darwinian conservative apologists applaud Darwin for his perspicacity; but airy-fairy progressives, otherworldly idealists who have assumed, on the basis of no empirical evidence whatsoever, that the world is not random,; that human activity can actually influence positive, conclusive change for the better; that good and goodness are possible; and that we are not all billiard balls clacking against each other in a universally timeless game of chance, object.

Everyone else says, ‘Hmmm….” when seeing extraordinary caterpillars, tricked-out moths, and fish of impossible colors and striation.  Randomness cannot possibly account for such diversity.



The idealism gets worse. When faced with the peculiarities of the human race – not its race, ethnicity, or gender, but infinite physical, mental, and psychological expressions – idealists will be thankful to Darwin and God for enabling such diversity.  Others will wonder why such freaks of nature – dwarfs;  hairy, full-breasted, passive-aggressive creatures of indeterminate sex; eight-foot tall robotic geniuses; tiny gnomes; and reptilian Amazons – were born, and what earthly purpose they serve.

Either Darwin or God had it wrong.  Given God’s infinite power, why would he have ever permitted such anomalies?  And if Darwinism is indeed the anti-God, secular, amoral, objective force  that it has been touted to be, why should there ever be side shows? Why should we have to suffer through generations of hopelessly deformed personalities to see some improvement in the human race?

The ordinary gym is a good laboratory for both points of view.  There, on display, are all the physically odd, eccentric, side show remnants.  The irony of it all is that they primp in front of the mirror as though they were Errol Flynn, Brad Pitt, or Marlon Brando.  Why on earth did God choose to let such aberrant, deformed, and irrevocably ignorant beings exist?  Why has Darwinism not provided for some inhibitory mechanism that would prevent such unnecessary excess?

The Barking Scarecrow is anorexic, loud, and needy. She barks instructions about proper positioning on the adductor machine, the best posture for working abs, lats, and tris; the shortest route between Falls Church and Montgomery Village; how to test for doneness on a roast chicken; and the number of miles she has logged for the week.

It is hard to feel sorry for this barking, insufferable woman especially when she is sitting on the bicep machine, positioned at the top of the stairs, disconsolately waiting for someone to talk to.  She struts like a model on a catwalk, but with an exaggerated jock-walk without an ounce of feminine allure, sexuality, or grace.

The Creep is scary.  At least 6’5” and scowling he reenacts the torture chambers of the Inquisition between the stationery bikes and the rank of television sets.  He straps himself in rubber tubing, tying his legs together, immobilizing his arms, and restricting movement of his chest and torso.  He always wears a black hoodie, pulled over his eyes, black sweatpants, and black athletic shoes. He grunts like an ox and moans like a cow.  He prances back and forth, then sits on the treadmill, staring out over the elliptical machines, rowers, and pulleys. He, like the others does not seem overtly psychotic; but his behavior is marginal. He never talks, is solitary and weirdly predictable, to be given wide berth.

Perhaps in any randomly selected group of 100 people there are  many who fall into the dubious category. It is hard to tell, because once one eliminates the obviously deranged – the man who wears a multi-colored beanie with a plastic propeller shouting about the Second Coming; the woman who covers her head in tinfoil to deflect alien radio waves; the woman who dresses all in black, wears mascara, and does martial goose steps on Connecticut Avenue, careful to miss every other line in the sidewalk – everyone is a bit ‘off’.  Somehow in the anonymous and yet personal, half-naked and buck-naked environment of the gym, those on the mental margins may be less visible and harder to ignore, but they are  just as freaky, weird, and undesirable as ever.



There are those who fit only on the margins, peculiar enough to be noticed but not so distorted in looks or behavior to cause alarm.  The Contortionist was one such character.  Ordinary in appearance, middle aged, middle class, only slightly out of proportion (a head too large for its frame, too stalky on a long neck, and unusually mobile), and well-within the spectrum.  His behavior was equally unremarkable – moderate, respectful, considerate and in no way offensive – and it was only when he began his elaborate warmups in front of the large floor-to-ceiling gym mirror did one take notice.  As he shook his limbs, twisted his head, and bent his torso, and pranced and danced to loosen his ankles and metacarpals, he looked like a skeleton in a danse macabre, all joints and bones rattling and shaking without ligaments and connective tissue.



There was nothing particularly frightening about him, and despite his awful dance he seemed harmless enough; but as he went through his routine, methodically stretching each joint in his body – first his fingers and thumbs, then elbows, wrists, neck, pelvis, femur, shins, ankles and toes – his body seemed to disappear and only his skeletal bones remained, loose and jangling, his joints forced into oblique and radically acute angles.
 
This was only a prelude, however because when he raised his legs, first the left then the right high up on the exercise bars, his body returned but only in a freak show form.  He became a contortionist – a fakir, a side-show freak with disjointed joints, India rubber tendons and ligaments all stretched to the breaking point – and before he was through his legs were high above his head, crossed, and bent backwards in a tortuously distorted deformation.  He looked like a giant spider in a web, a spider man, an elegant, balanced creature but an insanely contorted man.

He was hors-série, the square peg, the one-in-a-thousand bits pulled from the assembly line.  It wasn’t so much what he did, nor how he did it – circus contortionists have stretched their bodies to far greater limits – but why he did it.  What made this otherwise ordinary man climb the monkey bars and stress his joints to the most exaggerated obtuse and acute angles?



Where did he begin and where did he end? What was up and what was down?

One is between a rock and a hard place to sort this all out.  Neither option is good.  Either we live in a randomly-sorted universe where the survival of the fittest produces the most impossibly remote mutations, leaving the rest of us to put up with the idiots who survive and who never reproduce; or we live in a divinely-ordered universe, created by God Almighty with some unknown and strange purpose, one which allows for the most alienable, supernumerary offspring.  What’s a mother to do?

Enjoy the ride is the answer.  Whether it is a Barnum & Bailey side show, American politics, or simply life in the aisles of Walmart, Target, and Wegman’s, anyone who is not delighted with the way the world works needs to think twice.  Everyone from the hairy lady of Borneo to the two-headed fetus from Chad, or the political grand guignol, auto-da-fe of Washington is worth the price of admission.  Only the most missionary, purposeful, idealistic true believers in goodness are unmoved.  The rest of us are having a grand ol’ time.