Evolution, comfort, Mrs and Mrs Darwin in grief

Last post was about evolution and how accepting it might be a liberating thing, might help us accept the impossibility, the outrage, of our own mortality.

But it's not always easy, is it? Even in the abstract. 

I think way back I posted a clip of this song, performed and co-written by Karine Polwart. I thought I'd pop it up again - it still works powerfully on me. The setting is Mr and Mrs Darwin grieving for the death of their daughter. 

I won't put up the clip of KP singing it, because you might just want to regard it as a poem as well as a song, it seems that strong and true to me.

We all look for comforts and supports; Darwin builds his own cathedral....

We're All Leaving

There is thunder on the skyline
And it tears her breath away
Like the twilight steals the day

A father's kind hand could not command her
To return to him once more
Like a soldier from the war

We're all leaving
Even the ones who stay behind
We're all leaving in our own time
We're all leaving in our own time

Each night surrenders to a morning
But beneath the April sky
He can hear an endless cry

On smiling fields there's a battle raging
And for every bloom he knows
Another flower never grows

We're all leaving …

And he has no Ark to bear him from this Flood
Just a broken vessel wrought in flesh and blood
Though the riptides pull him under
He will not cease to wonder
At the beauty, beauty, beauty, beauty

He brings her mother to the church door
And while she prays for what will come
He walks those woods alone

And there he builds his own cathedrals
And on every whirring wing
He can hear the whole world sing

We're all leaving …

Words & Music: Karine Polwart (Bay Songs 2009) & Dave Gunning (SOCAN)

Evolution and mortality

Pretty big title, hunh? Just one point, though.

Someone was writing on the BBC website recently about human day/night rhythms,  and putting forward the theory that artifical light disrupted the rythms with which homo sapiens evolved. Seemed plausible. Then s/he used the phrase ..."than evolution intended."

Noew I'm no evolutionary scientist, but that's bollocks, isn't it? Evolution doesn't "intend" anything. It simply happens.  It has no agency, intention, or identity. And if "intended" was just a metaphor, it's a seriously misleading one.   It's an easy error to make, though. One way we understand our world is to give human traits to nonhuman forces. The wind sighs in the trees, etc. But evolution can't intend, any more than gravity or electricity can, I guess.

So -what? Why does this matter? (Well, to me, anyway.) Because it can be really liberating to accept that evolution is a fantastically complex but entirely arbitrary set of interacting processes.

Death and life, generations, are part of evolution, which depends of course on generations of creatures - generational succession is evolutionary, evolution is generational. So all creatures live, die, and evolve. Even us. So that's one thing I can stop worrying about!

Evolution links us to the entire planet and all its life forms. We sit, as it were, in the midst of evolutionary change. We belong in it, it is part of us, we are evolving.

I think we can accept this whatever religious or non-religious beliefs we have, whatever the stage of spiritual journey each of us is on. 

(Sorry to all those who refuse to accept the idea of evolution - now that refusal really is a bit of a watershed! Flat earthers.... welcome to their beliefs, but please don't foist them on our children.)

All hail the mighty Darwin and all those who work away challenging, modifying, adding to his work. And happily, evolution also resulted in a very nice, humane sort of genius, to boot!

Well, that remains to be seen. But misunderstanding or misrepresenting evolution won't help us!

Polwart's Darwin

Quote from the sleeve note of the CD "Darwin Song Project, Shrewsbury 2009":

"Darwin's daughter Annie died in 1851 at the age of 10. Not only was it a massive personal blow, it cemented in the most painful way possible, many of his ideas about the cruelty and struggle at the heart of natural selection. Many of the song's images are taken from Darwin's own writings."

We're All Leaving

There is thunder on the skyline
And it tears her breath away
Like the twilight steals the day

A father's kind hand could not command her
To return to him once more
Like a soldier from the war

We're all leaving
Even the ones who stay behind
We're all leaving in our own time
We're all leaving in our own time

Each night surrenders to a morning
But beneath the April sky
He can hear an endless cry

On smiling fields there's a battle raging
And for every bloom he knows
Another flower never grows

We're all leaving …

And he has no Ark to bear him from this Flood
Just a broken vessel wrought in flesh and blood
Though the riptides pull him under
He will not cease to wonder
At the beauty, beauty, beauty, beauty

He brings her mother to the church door
And while she prays for what will come
He walks those woods alone

And there he builds his own cathedrals
And on every whirring wing
He can hear the whole world sing

We're all leaving …