The above graphic, courtesy of the VisualCapitalist.com, tells you of a violent and persistent battle between humanity and various killer plagues. Human beings have always had a disproportionate impact on nature, at first more likely to cause the extinction of various species from over-hunting, later from destroying habitats and pollution. And nature, call it God if you like, has always pushed back. If disease were not sufficient to contain human beings, a species with no senior animal predators, nature turned us on each other. Wars. Crimes. Genocide. A growing belief in some tribalistic religiosity that that “non-believers” must be exterminated. We called it “man’s inhumanity to man,” but we certainly imposed the value system on every other life form on the planet as well.
Indeed, even in some of our most basic religious scriptures are rife with descriptions of how earth’s resources (including nonrenewable resources) are there for the taking, although some updated interpretations (particularly of the Bible, as reflected in recent papal encyclicals) suggest that environmental responsibility is a necessary adjustment to religious interpretation. Is there a bigger force at work, particularly here in the United States, where education is easily accessible but where deep evangelical forces are fighting back against science and medicine? This is increasingly relevant as man-induced climate change, an evolution if you will of man’s discovery of the use of fire way back when, seems to be defining a particularly challenging future for life on earth. Speaking of evolution…
Ever since the famous 1925 case of Tennessee vs Scopes (now known as the “Scopes Monkey Trial”), evolution appears to have won out over the demands of Christian fundamentalists that creationism is the only legitimate explanation of the earth and mankind. Still today, there remains a vast swath of fundamentalist Christians that adhere to creationism as the only explanation. “Scopes was found guilty and fined $100 (equivalent to $1,500 in 2020), but the verdict was overturned on a technicality. The trial served its purpose of drawing intense national publicity, as national reporters flocked to Dayton to cover the big-name lawyers who had agreed to represent each side. William Jennings Bryan, three-time presidential candidate and former Secretary of State, argued for the prosecution, while Clarence Darrow served as the defense attorney for Scopes. The trial publicized the Fundamentalist–Modernist controversy, which set Modernists, who said evolution was not inconsistent with religion, against Fundamentalists, who said the Word of God as revealed in the Bible took priority over all human knowledge. The case was thus seen both as a theological contest and as a trial on whether modern science should be taught in schools.” Wikipedia.
Could evolution explain the severe polarization we are experiencing in the United States where COVID vaccines are both obviously highly effective and easily obtained – but for religious reasons, unbridled fear based on disinformation and conspiracy theories or some thoroughly unsupported “constitutional” theory of individual liberty – millions of Americans remain unvaccinated? As populist governors seek to blame just about anything other than a plague of unvaccinated hordes – from a very small number of undocumented border-crossers even to those who are indeed vaccinated – for the variant Delta outbreak, is evolution culling the herd? Why are people so willing to risk children, still not eligible to be vaccinated to justify their own choice, to avoid both getting vaccinated or taking simple mask/social distancing preventative measures?
Are Arizona Governor Doug Ducey, Texas Governor Greg Abbott and poster-boy for anti-scientific reality, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis (among other red state leaders), simply the accelerants, the instruments if you will, of evolution? In recent history, science contained HIV (it took decades, and the disease is still here, but…) and clearly can grapple with the novel coronavirus (and so far, its variants), so people who oppose science and its proscriptions (and hence vaccination) – generally religious fundamentalists, less educated, more gullible persons and political idealogues – seem to have been targeted by nature for infection by the highly contagious and ultra-virulent Delta strain of the virus. Why them?
If nature culls herds to improve the quality of the survivors, a basic tenet of evolution, has nature determined that our species is better off without that self-defined spectrum of vaccine skeptics and opponents of preventative masking and social distancing? Every single state that has lifted restrictions, even going to the point of forbidding full implementation, has experienced soaring infection and mortality rates among the unvaccinated. Hospital capacity, even for those with non-COVID hospitalization needs, has accordingly been stretched to the limits and beyond. It may be a politically charged and unfortunate observation, but ask yourself if this is simply nature’s determination of who lives and who dies? There are indeed very many good and decent people who are voluntarily offering themselves and their children to nature’s cruel sacrifice.
I’m Peter Dekom, and if maximizing survivability through vaccination vs facing horrific medical risk is indeed a choice, those who cannot make the choice supported by science just might be cooperating with nature’s consistent evolutionary process.
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