kapelian's blog

Daniel Dennett speaks in his book about the one thing that makes humans so different from chimps and gorillas that make us so different from them – our culture.  In all parts of the world new cultures and rules around them emerge.  The culture in each society makes the societies different.  And as these cultures interact over time, they change, adapting ideas from one another and changing the ideas of the humans who live in these societies.  One way to see the shifts in these cultures today is to see whats on TV or in the theater – or in this case, the cartoons.

Origin of Species written by Sir Charles Darwin was a book that reshaped the thoughts of a generation, giving a completely new story as to how life on earth as we know it came to be. Darwin mainly uses examples of flowers, bees, and pigeons in his writing to support his theory, but he implies that all species, including humans undergo this process.  Pope Benedict XVI has outright stated that the thought of humans changing in a pattern that is completely random, that our species came to be by chance, is the most disturbing thing about this story.  Not that Darwin implies all species come from one common ancestor, but  that becoming human and our continuous evolution is unplanned.  Why is the fact that human evolution random disturbing?