How Evolution Chose Civilization

HOW EVOLUTION CHOSE CIVILIZATION

with Will Dvorak


Civilization as we know it today with all its warts, pollution and species extinction tendencies, is a result of Earth’s evolutionary history. Willy nilly, it’s in our laps and we have to deal with it. We, as tree hugging, nature loving environmentalists, recoil from the realization that Gaia in her cosmic wisdom may be using evolution, neoteny, natural selection, domestication of plants and animals, and human technological wizardry to engineer the sixth major extinction event of earth’s biotic history in our times. We have been schooled in an anthropocentric world view that preaches that evolution is always progressive and upward with the human species and civilization as its crowning and most glorious achievement.

Now, environmental science is measuring a less glorious result. Human ingenuity may have overshot the earth’s bio-systems’ ability to recover enough to sustain most mega fauna which are dying off at record rates. A major trimming back of complex organisms and their supporting ecosystems seems to be under way. All this is another attempt at grasping the big picture, i.e., what is really going on here on planet Earth.

Join us and hear what Will has to say about evolution choosing civilization and participate in discussions about this controversial subject!


The Eternal Child
by Clive Bromhall

The Covenant of the Wild: Why Animals Chose Domestication
by Stephen Budiansky

Before the Dawn: Recovering the Lost History of our Ancestors
by Nicholas Wade

The Origin of Species
by Charles Darwin


Humanist Hall is wheelchair accessible around the corner at 411 28th Street

$5 donations are expected.