Evolution is the creation-myth of our age. By telling us our origin it shapes our views of what we are. It influences not just our thought, but our feelings and actions too, in a way which goes far beyond its official function as a biological theory.
Interpretation
This quote emphasizes the profound impact of evolutionary theory on our understanding of humanity and its influence on our thoughts and actions.
Mary Midgley highlights the significance of evolution not just as a biological concept, but as a narrative that shapes our identity and worldview. By providing a sense of origin, it profoundly affects how we perceive ourselves and our relationships with others, ultimately influencing our emotions and behaviors in ways that extend beyond mere scientific explanation.
In practice
During a lecture on life sciences, this quote could underscore the philosophical implications of evolution.
When some portion of the biosphere is rather unpopular with the human race-a crocodile, a dandelion, a stony valley, a snowstorm, an odd-shaped flint-there are three sorts of human being who are particularly likely still to see point in it and befriend it. They are poets, scientists and children. Inside each of us, I suggest, representatives of all these groups can be found.
Hubris calls for nemesis, and in one form or another it's going to get it, not as a punishment from outside but as the completion of a pattern already started.
Flashbacks rarely involve language. Mine certainly didn't. They were visual, motor, and sensory, and they took place in a relentless, horrifying present.
Human history can be viewed as a slowly dawning awareness that we are members of a larger group Groups of people from divergent ethnic and cultural backgrounds working in some sense together [is] surely a humanizing and character building experience. If we are to survive, our loyalties must be broadened further, to include the whole human community, the entire planet Earth.
How many things there are concerning which we might well deliberate whether we had better know them.
I was a little drunk. Not drunk in any positive sense but just enough to be careless.
The laws only can determine the punishment of crimes, and the authority of making penal laws can only reside with the legislator, who represents the whole society united by the social compact.
...he did not want me to seek the whys, because there are some things that happen for which we can formulate no whys, for which whys simply do not exist and, perhaps, are not necessary.
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