Evolution's Highest Accolade

Evolution's highest accolade, taking evolution as the wellspring of atheistic philosophy, is 'I survived', or perhaps, 'I survived and reproduced'. Can you see what an absurdly trite sort of triumph that is, how, if I may throw in an oxymoron, dully tawdry? Can the highest reach of civilisation merely be its own continuance?

Supposing you manage to spread your seed all over the world - perhaps you could be the main contributor to the world's largest sperm bank. Have you won? Is that it? You managed to get your genes firmly into the future, so are you a real winner, ready to receive evolution's highest award?

Survival of what? That is the question. What is the use of having millions of children if you don't get even the least pleasure from them? They're dished out in test tubes, perhaps, or you finally end up dead and you don't even know that they exist?

Merely surviving is the triumph of the zombie. Zombies are programmed to survive physically, and that is really their only goal. Evolution has pulled us out of the primal sludge, but it was all preparatory to "Let there be light!" the inception of consciousness, and never let us forget that contemporary zombies are still living in that dark primal sludge.

Now we have a new criterion: that which leads to the nurturing and survival of consciousness itself. It is a new type of survival which sometimes runs in an exactly opposite direction to zombie survival.

Consciousness survives on love, on altruism, on risking one's physical life for what one knows is right and good, while zombies survive on selfishness and greed. If your only ambition is physical survival, you may be led to do things which kill the spark that was really your only hope. I don't need to give you the obvious biblical quote.