Evolving into more intelligent designers.

• Author: Stair, Peter
• Position: Recent battles over evolution

The recent battles over evolution in the classroom reveal that many people in United States still view evolution as an unsatisfactory, even ungodly, worldview.

That's a shame. Evolution grew out of the kind of peaceful, naturalistic observation that we associate with reverence and appreciation. And as an explanatory world-view, evolution can be immensely illuminating. It may even be essential to our survival.

Many believe that evolutionary theory denigrates humans, by describing us as a kind of monkey or as merely another species among millions. But the development of life on Earth provides a profound origin story. The shapes, colors, sounds, conflicts, and harmonies of the life around us are in a continual dance of change. As self-conscious primates, our brains are perhaps the most complex organization of matter in the known universe. And, using them, we have probed into the fundamental nature of our universe and had a try at designing an entire planet to our liking. Scientifically speaking, we are amazing.

But our successes have also posed a great challenge, which we are just now becoming smart enough to realize. As a species just 250,000 years old, we are bringing about the end of the 65-million-year Cenozoic Era.

In this context, it's clear than achieving "sustainability" will require much more than phasing out fossil fuels. Unfortunately, while we drive other species to extinction, we are losing a great library of sustainability instructors--other species that have sustained...