#anarchy evolution

I have never given in to nihilism, as did some of the other punk rockers I knew. I never subscribed to the philosophy that "everything sucks, so why bother." People who think that self-destruction is the only logical response to a world without God are not noble realists-they are misguided at best or, more severely, mentally ill."

This brief overview of Bad Religion’s origins can’t help but sound familiar to me as someone who has studied evolutionary biology. Evolution happens when populations of organisms take advantage of what, seen in retrospect, are tremendous and usually unexpected opportunities. Populations of organisms have no conception of opportunity, as we did when we started our band. But in the course of natural history, seemingly small innovations can sometimes have global repercussions. For instance, more than a billion years ago, one single-celled organism began living inside another single-celled organism. This mutualistic relationship was so successful that today the cells in every multicellular organism are descended from this innovative ancestor. Sometime before 375 million years ago, a species of fish began to spend more time on land, possibly in search of prey or to escape the dangerous predators of Paleozoic seas. That fishlike vertebrate was the ancestor of every four-limbed land animal that has ever existed, including us. Beginning around 100,000 years ago, a small group of gracefully built, exceptionally brainy humans began to expand outward from their homeland in eastern Africa into territories occupied by other groups of humans, including the Neanderthals in Europe and a species of humans named Homo erectus in Asia. Today all humans are descended from that small group of eastern Africans while the Neanderthals and Homo erectus died out long ago. At each transition, the ancestral populations anticipated nothing about the consequences of their actions. They were simply reacting to the environmental conditions of the time. Yet they set in motion profound changes that remade the world.

I don't believe, for instance, that evolutionary biology or any scientific endeavor has much to say about love. I'm sure a lot can be learned about the importance of hormones and their effects on our feelings. But do the bleak implications of evolution have any impact on the love I feel for my family? Do they make me more likely to break the law of flaunt society's expectations of me? No. I simply does not follow that human relationships are meaningless just because we live in a godless universe subject to the natural laws of biology.

Life is never static. Despite catastrophic tragedies, life has persisted in evolving new varieties of unimaginable forms. I find comfort in the narrative of evolutionary history.

As I’ve said, I’ve never believed in God, which technically makes me an atheist (since the prefix “a” means “not” or “without”). But I have problems with the word “atheism.” It defines what someone is not rather than what someone is. It would be like calling me an a-instrumentalist for Bad Religion rather than the band’s singer. Defining yourself as against something says very little about what you are for.

Creativity is a challenge. It requires us to be fully human -- autonomous yet engaged, independent yet interdependent. Creativity bridges the conflict between our individualistic and our sociality. It celebrates the commonality of our species while simultaneously setting us apart as unique individuals.

Life is a work in progress, and recognizing errors can lead to correction. We should enjoy and make the most of life, not because we are in constant fear of what might happen to us in a mythical afterlife, but because we have only one opportunity to live