Evolution’s Act-of-God clause

“Our time bomb is mysticism. Its delivery system is language. And its hiding place? The
unfathomable coils of our DNA.” I first wrote those words in 1997 simply because the
process of evolution dictated them. At that time I had no inkling of the immediacy of that
prediction nor did I foresee how this lethal evolutionary mechanism would be launched
on a global scale.

Adaptive specialisation in any species is a two edged sword. Disproportionately
productive in their birth environment, specialisations usually become lethal handicaps
when conditions change. A peacock’s tail is the standard illustration for this crucial
evolutionary principle. The peacock-tail of our species is our predisposition to
mysticise—to assign peculiar, even supra-natural, significance to people, events, places
and things that matter most to us. As the late Carl Sagan wrote: ‘We’re significance
junkies’.

-Reg Morrison