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I've never been big into Halloween... Perhaps it was too many years in church and bible school, hearing about how it was the devil's holiday... Maybe it was because most of life I was already pretending to be something I wasn't... Perhaps it was just because chocolate didn't have the hold on me that so many other children swooned over...
Regardless, I have always been fascinated, actually, by people's enjoyment of being scared. From the haunted hayrides, the corn mazes, the creepy houses, the horror flicks, the screaming and the blood--it boggles me more than fundidiots!
I personally have never liked being scared--indeed, even mild suspense can sometimes get to me, although I will state that I love a good suspense flick much better than a horror flick. My brothers would actually make fun of me when, if they happened to be watching a horror movie or show on the television, I would vacate the living room as soon as I thought something even remotely horrifying was about to make an appearance. Whether suddenly having to go to the bathroom, or making up some other such excuse, I would take that time to play the "for-once-not-being-played" Nintendo, or have the bedroom for silent reading. (We three boys shared a bedroom until I was seventeen and demanded my father build a wall in the basement at a key point in which I could finally secure my own room...)
I sometimes wonder if this is how I try exert control over my environment? Or is this me being a slave to my fears? I don't fear fear--in fact, there isn't much I do fear! I just don't like that feeling of unknowing, of the surprise that's coming, and ultimately, of the nightmarish stories my subconscious imagines in the dead of the night! I remember I once made it through (what I now realize is the cheesiest flick ever made) a whole screening of the movie Alligator, and for years afterward, I had a nightmare in which a giant alligator was coming down Toll Gate Road, trying to gobble up my family... And while I can appreciate the cheesiness of it all now, back then I was terrified at the idea of loose alligators. Go figure, eh?
I must then ask myself, why doesn't the fear of eternal damnation hang over me, or even my subconscious, to the point where I must err on the side of "caution" and "believe" just to save myself the fear of hell fire? Is it that, as an adult, I can appreciate the "cheesiness" of fire insurance for a consciousness that won't survive past my heart beat? Or, on the flip side, is it my survival instincts of self-preservation that keeps me from even contemplating the notion, much as I wouldn't contemplate watching a horror movie?
I think it must be the first, as the second, the "contemplation," has been discussed both here and on other blogs, about the ludicrousness of such a netherworld created by a being to punish beings he created and doesn't want to punish... The circular, anti-rational logic of it all, is more reminiscent of a fire insurance policy, nay, perhaps even a panic button people can hit at will in an effort to absolve themselves of misdeeds and "less than nice" thoughts or actions!
In the ultimate of ironies (much like having a spoon when all you need if a knife), one must remember two key tenants: One, that you need Jesus blood to "wash away," or "cleanse" your sins, even though through some sort of loophole, you still end up paying the price of sin (i.e, death), but end up with life "eternally" in the presence of the one who died for you; and Two, even though you have been "washed" or "cleansed" of these sins, you will still commit acts of "wrongness" or "misdeeds," and thus continually need to regret and repent of these misdeeds (although it must be pointed out, in most Christian circles, misdeeds do not end your salvation, just a close relationship with said god).
And you have to wonder (or, at least, I have to wonder) why wouldn't "salvation" erase the sin nature, thus leaving you sinless the remainder of your life? OR, barring some sort of telelogical law about such a scenario (although a study of the holy book will reveal no such block to sinless nature through salvation), why not then BAM! automatic everlasting life? Why the need to still die if Jesus truly paid the price for all our sins?
As you can see, it reduces into an acrimonious harmony of illogical thought and circular rational...
Fear, at its core, must be substantive, if it is to remain effective as a motivator (much like "justice" and "mercy" must have finite, measurable punishments for finite, measurable deeds, but that's for another time...). Fear is defined by Websters as "1 a: an unpleasant often strong emotion caused by anticipation or awareness of danger." In other words, you need a reason to be afraid, to have fear... Otherwise, your fear is considered irrational, and thus, is categorized as a "phobia." Phobia, from Websters, is "an exaggerated usually inexplicable and illogical fear of a particular object, class of objects, or situation."
Hell, or even the once-removed cousin through marriage thought of eternal punishment, is a christological phobia. An irrational fear. Inexplicable, illogical, and brought on by an exaggerated fable of yesteryears beliefs. The reason hell has lost much of its umph in driving hoards to a "saving knowledge of Jesus" isn't due to a sudden gambling urge against Pascal's Wager, but by a continuing body of knowledge which points in the direction of logic, not pointy-tailed red-horned devils on one shoulder and beatific angels on the other...
And while my primal subconscious may still be dealing with the supposedly very real threat of being eaten by alligators (or its related off-shoots), I can rest easy in the knowledge that- Alligators are real.
- Alligators have eaten people.
- Alligators do not live in northeastern Pennsylvania.
Thus, there is a basis for the fear, and my conscious realizes this. The rational, logical portion of my brain recognizes the facts, and makes a decision which supersedes the more primal nature of "fight/flight," and as long as I don't feed this "fear" with heresy, false logic, and panicky hypotheticals, I sleep easy and don't plan my entire life, indeed my every thought and whim, on the basis of fear.
And, and this I believe is most fundamental, fear, while maybe not widely recognized as such, is the sole motivator of continued religious belief, and it flourishes best in the minds of people who entertain false logic and hypotheticals...
Perhaps, as humanity continues to advance sociologically and psychologically, more people will confront the irrationality of god and his supposed eternal promises (not to mention punishments)?
It almost stretches one's faith in humanity to think so...
I have to give credit where credit is due... The guy makes me think in ways I'd sometimes rather not... All part of the super villain job, I suppose...
His recent post about wanting to argue "pro-racism," while seemingly a most gross and disturbing idea, has made me actually be brave enough to put onto this post some things that have run through my mind lately (much like Journey Woman gave me the gumption to post honestly about race in the U.S. with her post here)... I'm not saying these thoughts are concrete in any way (i.e., these are not active beliefs as such, merely speculations in the most general of senses...), so please keep this in mind before hopping on your high horse and using wood for martyrdom that someone else might need to keep warm tonight...
I've been wondering how many of our medical advances, such as vaccines and other medical "miracles," are harming our evolution as a species...
It wasn't until marvels such as antibiotics appeared that the human population has exploded, to the point where some could make a valid argument about not only how much we strain the limits of what we can do as a society, but what our planet can sustain and still be an equitable environment for most...
Granted, life and death decisions are never easy, but have we reached a point where "living," and trying to make sure everyone has the best possible odds of living, been actually retroactive in allowing the human race to achieve even greater levels of technology, life quality, and overall success?
Then we must ask, what is the goal of humanity? What is it we are trying to achieve, and why? Is it simply a better life for all? Is it just trying to reach a point where we can all "just get along"? Is it to attain some type of nirvana, in which we "ascend" to such a high level of "being" that we exceed physical and bodily constraints?
I suppose everyone has their own goals and dreams about life in general, both individually and societally--in fact, it pretty much lays the foundation for the "culture wars" we in the U.S. find ourselves in...
But at the risk of sounding "Scroogish," and openly advocating the "depletion of the excess population," while we can applaud the merits of helping the poor get on their feet, the sick get well, and the mentally and physically challenged be able to contribute both to their own well-being as well as contribute in greater numbers to society (in whatever type of scenario you can fathom), how much helping is too much helping? In other words, when does being a "nanny society" actually hinder human advancement rather than promote it?
Where is the line?
I know some of you will find this thought-process dangerous, "slippery slopish," and all around perhaps a waste of neuron activity. But I ask you, with all the bitching about health care costs (brought on by a society that wants everyone to live a GREAT life, let alone survive), the welfare system (in a society where everyone NEEDS to have more than they need), and an out-of-control youth culture (in a society in which 90% would rather blame the system than themselves for their children's behavior problems [whether that be in the form of allowing prayer and bible readings, or in refusing to let teachers do their job as they see fit]), where do you draw the line? When do we say, "I'm sorry, but these resources could be better spent on such-and-such [the smarter child, the healthier baby, the kid who didn't sleep around and destroy her chances at living a life free from herpes...] rather than on such-and-such [the retarded kid, the near-death child, the kid who slept her way through high school]."
When does trying to care for EVERYONE become a burden rather than a blessing?
As I said, these aren't concrete beliefs, in that, this isn't something I'll be advocating anytime soon on your local New York street corner... But they *are* questions that I feel merit a look-at, and was wondering what you think, dear reader?
... the "prophets" over at Gracehead...
Some dude named Timothy (among others...) thinks god speaks to him (in KJV English no less!), deletes anyone's comments who even remotely might even sound like it might possibly be a disagreement, and all around shows none of the grace his web site claims...
Oh, and there's at least 20 followers who regularly comment and worship Timothy like he's the next David Koresh...
So treat yourselves to something really horrific this Halloween holiday--check out the cult at Gracehead...
Thanks to Steve at Stupid Church People for informing us of this very dangerous on-line cult...
Need I mention that the whole concept of "races" is really quite illogical? The term itself, races, implies a special separation that simply doesn't exist! And while various groups of humans sub-evolved and adapted to their climates, the DNA itself that we all share is 100% the same--superficial distinctions like the amount of melanin in one's skin, the shape of one's eyes, or the texture of one's hair are simply like the various colors a Great Dane comes in. Nothing more.
That said, knowing that what we all are, despite our various superficial variations, why is race such a primal motivator for much of our country's--dare I say, much of the worlds?--issues and problems?
Being that human beings are illogical and irrational even on our best of days, I am reminded of a cover on a magazine one year... I wish I could remember the magazine, or find a copy of the cover, but, in essence, it showed over fifty squares that just showed patches of skin, and asked in bold letters, CAN YOU IDENTIFY WHICH RACE EACH SKIN BELONGS TO?, or something to that effect...
Of course, I couldn't. One shade led gradually to another shade which led gradually to another shade, showing the myriad of colors present in each and every "color" of human skin, much like paint chip samples in WalMart.
It was eye opening...
Sometimes you feel the racist inside, screaming at the people of color on your television speaking of the unfair system, the unfair balance, and how inequality isn't there, and it screams, "Get off your lazy asses and get a job!!" Or, "It's all in your head! Reverse racism!!" My mind knows this is a lie, a lie of comfort that says, "It's their fault." Or, "It's them, not us--full of excuses." A lie meant to sooth the primal part of me that fears difference, that fears anything remotely unfamiliar.
In these times, I am so ashamed of myself...
Anyone who says racism isn't alive and well also hasn't been watching their television. What one stupid white kid in the town of Jena did in a moment of heated fear, by hanging a noose from a tree where one black student had expressed an interest in sitting with his fellow human beings, has started a chain reaction: a Home Depot in Illinois, Colombia University in New York, the University of Maryland, a police station in NY, two Coast Guard locker rooms, in a North Carolina high school, a South Carolina high school... The list could go on... And who knows how many person's of color haven't reported finding nooses, fearing for their safety...
I have to wonder, how many more empty nooses will we find?
We Yankees like to think we're above all that--or, at least, most of us do. I'm sure there are a few who openly wear their racism like a Boy Scout badge... I am related to at least one that I know of. But when we hear of racism, we automatically think of the South. After all, we reason, they're the ones we had to fight to free the slaves in the first place. But the truth is, where the South was quite open in their hostility for blacks, we Yankees just hid it better, and blamed them afterward for being unable to make a living like we could--in our country, in our culture, in our lives and at our behest...
I have no idea what it feels like to walk into a room and count how many other whites are present. I just assume they'll be more like me there. It never even crosses my mind to think I may be a minority, until it is night time, I am in the city, and I think I may be lost. Cliche? Part racism, part reality. And the reality was created, for the most part, by inherent racism.
I know I personally like to think, perhaps wrongly as Journey Woman hinted at, that this whole "racism" thing is in the past--an original sin that, while there are some ramifications, it's nothing of consequence and mostly atoned for, and everyone just needs to get over it... This is the racist in me.
I don't know what it's like to worry about finding a noose on my front door, except from what I fear from mostly my fellow whites in regards to my sexuality--and, while there are parallels, isn't the same at the core... (I can hear the right-wingers now, yelling, "See? We told you it wasn't the same, but you insisted! No marriage for you!"--I'll take care of y'all later...)
I challenge all of you to take a quiz: A quiz that pits what you think you know about skin color, and what it means about a person. At PBS, there are twenty-five people, and five "race" categories--you have to match the person to the race with which they identify. I got five right--and none of which I expected to be right about... The quiz is here.
I don't know if it will be as eye opening for you as that magazine cover from the forgotten past was for me, but I remember that being the moment that I stopped swallowing the easy answers that both my mind and society came up with for why people of color still suffer in our country...
And started looking for the truth as to why they DO still suffer inequality...
I don't have all the answers. I know I still have a racist in me that screams to come through--we all do, no matter what color or creed we may be--that's the ironic thing about racism--it's color blind in the opposite way in which it effects all of us...
Perhaps Journey is right, and speaking about her anger and my fear and guilt as a society is part of the healing process--or maybe it prolongs the suffering--who's to say?
What do you say?
Well, perhaps it is. I promised Journey Woman I'd post about my honest for-real-and-for-true feelings about race (and although I'm not sure she'll hold me to it it!), I have much more to say than I thought I would--but then in turn, my mind wanders a horrendous amount on to tangents and thus, I end up having to do things like this for the off-shoots to be extracted from the main post in an effort to- keep the forthcoming post on-topic,
- clear my mind of the tangents,
- and express things I normally don't think of expressing
and thus, the Procrastinator's Post is born...
First, about the banner at the top: "Embrace Diversity." I'd like to say for the record that there is a vast amount of distance between embracing diversity, and tolerating stupidity. Just because you believe a pink unicorn saved your grandmother from cancer last Christmas after promising to never miss praying naked in the woodsy hallows on sacred unicorn holidays does NOT mean I should automatically give your belief system due respect and credit, and thus allow it to be embraced as valid in this reality of ours. This, of course, does also in turn NOT mean I believe all people of faith are stupid--in fact, many people of faith have brought brilliant and enlightening things to light, have done a lot of good for mankind in general, and don't hoard their faith to their ass, trying to suckle life from the Dying Babe of Fairies! However, it must be said that an embracing and celebratory nature of DIFFERENCE does not equate a celebratory embracing of ALL DIFFERENCES.
Second, two plus two will ALWAYS equal four. I don't care how much you pray, have faith, sacrifice time, and do good works in an attempt to prove to the world that Genesis is a historically accurate and literally true account of where life--and its subsequent diversity--came from. Math doesn't lie. Math is a universal truth. Two plus two will always equal four, I don't care how much you want it to be five, or negative seven, or ten to the six-hundredth power.
This all started with what can only be called the DUMBEST magazine in the entire world being located in my parent's bathroom, called Answers (put out by the notorious psuedo-science group, Answers in Genesis). In this episode of Answers, they claim that tigers have claws and fangs NOT because they eat meat (even though they do), but because before the fall of mankind, when every creature was supposedly a vegetarian, the tiger ate plants that were really tough to chew through... Of course, that's never minding the fact that they don't have molars for chewing plant fibers, that they've been around for nigh on two million years (NOT four thousand) eating the flesh of other creatures, and ignoring how a human sin could possibly effect a tiger's dietary habits...
Need I mention that they also claim that somehow, in 4000 short years, micro evolution is the reason there are so many big cats that all descended from two semi-large cats that Noah had on board his tugboat?
This would be a prime example of stupidity that need not be celebrated under the umbrella of diversity.
There... I feel a bit better. Now I can concentrate better on what might be a pretty lengthy piece about race in America.
And thank you for your support.
In this episode: Spot has some questions...
Click on the pic to enlarge.
Previous episodes:
1. Ham's Abomination...
Let me start off by saying: If you aren't watching Pushing Daisies, you are missing one hell of a brilliant show... Fantastic, even...
So as we travel and discuss the not-so-meritorious merits of "creation science" and how it fails in comparison to even remotely give a satisfactory answer to the most basic questions even a two-year-old could think of on a bad day (such as, "Where did all the skeletons and fossils of non-homo sapiens come from?" and "What other explanation can you provide for why 99% of the world's marsupials are in Australia?"...), and dealing with such claims as "All you need is faith!" (when having such won't get your teeth clean in the morning, let alone use evolutionary-proven biological sciences to create a vaccine for the flu every year) and "I have all the proof I need!" (which would negate the fact that you are using faith at all...), it's always nice when science once again shows how evolution is the only way to explain the diversity of life we have here on this rock.
(Remind me one day to post about chimerism...)
Beyond chimerism, into heretofore unfathomable real-life revelations about DNA swapping and genome sharing, a bacteria comes to light that not only fuses it's DNA to it's host, but this once-independent-minded little creature actually has it's DNA passed on with it's hosts, and can be recreated even after antibiotics are used to kill it. From the article:
[...] The bacterium invades a member of a species, most often an insect, and eventually makes its way into the host's eggs or sperm. Once there, the Wolbachia is ensured passage to the next generation of its host, and any genetic exchanges between it and the host also are much more likely to be passed on.
Since Wolbachia typically live within the reproductive organs of their hosts, Werren reasoned that gene exchanges between the two would frequently pass on to subsequent generations. Based on this and an earlier discovery of a Wolbachia gene in a beetle by the Fukatsu team at the University of Tokyo, Japan, the researchers in Werren's lab and collaborators at J. Craig Venter Institute (JCVI) decided to systematically screen invertebrates. Julie Dunning-Hotopp at JCVI found evidence that some of the Wolbachia genes seemed to be fused to the genes of the fruit fly, Drosophila ananassae, as if they were part of the same genome.
[...]
Werren and Clark are now looking further into the huge insert found in the fruit fly, and whether it is providing a benefit. "The chance that a chunk of DNA of this magnitude is totally neutral, I think, is pretty small, so the implication is that it has imparted of some selective advantage to the host," says Werren. "The question is, are these foreign genes providing new functions for the host? This is something we need to figure out."
[...]
Before this study, geneticists knew of examples where genes from a parasite had crossed into the host, but such an event was considered a rare anomaly except in very simple organisms.
Well, slap me silly and call me Daisy Duke! It's almost a shame evolution is false, else this might help explain further and different ways we might utilize genome-sharing and distribution to find cures for all sorts of chromosomal disorders and inherited diseases!
But, since evolution is so "false," and such a lie perpetuated by demons and Satan to steal glory from sky god, I guess we'll never know what potential this knowledge could have lead to, eh? I suppose we'll just have to keep praying for miracles in an age when all the answers are right there--and being ignored in an effort to perpetuate dead traditions...
I was feeling a bit creative and decided to use my energy in such a way as to bring amusement to the masses... No, not the Catholic kind...
I don't know how often I'll do these comics, but just for shits and giggles, introducing Something Like That...
If you click on the pic, it should enlarge into a new, readable window...
So my father said it again: the reason he can't possibly accept evolution as a working law to the diversity of life upon earth is due to a singular passage in his holy book, which reads as such:
Genesis 1:24: And God said, Let the earth bring forth the living creature after his kind, cattle, and creeping thing, and beast of the earth after his kind: and it was so.
As you can see, his main point of contention is underscored--that is, "after his kind."
It's hard to argue with a man who thinks that "after his own kind" means animals can adapt, but not evolve... And, instead of going into a long dissertation about how adapting is just evolution on a small scale, and that, after enough small adaptations, you end up with a completely different looking animal... And that, throughout the whole process, the creature never once didn't produce not after its own kind... After all, it's own kind kept changing!
You know what? Dissertation will now commence!
Add to that the fact that no creature that produces sexually ever produces it's "own kind." It may be seen as a matter of semantics, but every creature born through sexual reproduction is an "average" of the two creatures that mated. Further, many creatures reproduce across their kinds (though it is by no means the "norm"), thus further having to stretch a literal interpretation of Genesis. Take for instance the wholphin, the liger, the zorse... And while one can twist and squirm and claim "adaptation" over "evolution," it still negates an "of their own kind" clause, most especially in the case of the liger (and occasionally some wholphins)! Two completely different species with completely different amounts of chromosomes have mated to produce a creature that is neither tiger nor lion, but the female liger (and female tigon) are able to mate with both of its parents species--further strengthening evolutionary models of natural selection and the tree of life, and further crumbling a book (and subsequent faith) which claims Mind before Matter...
My father also said something to the effect of "if all diversity evolved, why are there still some creatures who haven't?"
But before I could even begin to adequately explain, he shut me down with a "No!" and the continual shaking of his head...
Despite the fact that evolution happens most times in small, local steps as necessity, chance, and environment dictate--say, that fish with the stronger fins able to flop to the next puddle and survive until the rainy season as opposed to the others whose fins weren't as strong and couldn't make the land crossing... This process ensures that only those stronger-finned fish will pass on their genes (DNA), as well as the learning process of moving over land to reach a more suitable area. The same type of fish on the other side of the forest had no such need to "walk" to another body of water, and thus will change and adapt only as much as it needs to--and thus, separated by maybe only a few hundred yards, you may have the beginnings of speciation occurring and, given a bit more time, other environmental factors, and other causes such as disease and predation, you may end up after only a few hundred years with two completely different looking fish that had the same genetic base--and further, may now not be able to interbreed with one another, thus ensuring that both branches of this tree will survive and continue to grow more branches. Of course, branches that haven't had enough time can still intermingle--maybe due to lack of similar mates, or some sort of quake that separated one from the rest--and some of those changes may then re-enter the original gene pool, but certainly not enough to ensure that all the guppies (or what-have-you) will have super-strong fins, and perhaps may even be bred out of this population as the need isn't present! But trying to explain all this to my father as he continues to state "after their own kind" as if it were some type of magical spell to ward of the real world not only seems an exercise in futility, but ultimately an exercise in patience for people who want to remain willfully ignorant... (sorry, Dad...)
Sigh.
Thus, while my father (and others...) insist on an out-dated mode of thinking which involves a "Mind before Matter" telelogical law, as soon as Darwin put forth Natural Selection as the algorithm by which all life (including man) came to be, Matter no longer needed a Mind to have initiated the movement of energy through life. Such a revolution in societal perspective rarely happens, but when it does, it takes a few years and generations before truth can actually be accepted as truth.... Enter the first proponents of ID, who started trying to chip away at the profound truth which Darwin uncovered mere months after his scientific discoveries were uncovered...
More often than not, then and now, they often end up reinforcing the tenants of evolution and natural selection, thus dooming themselves to a never-ending battle against basic facts of life...
But to get people such as my father to understand the basic premise behind how evolution works, I came across a great passage in Darwin's Dangerous Idea, in which author Daniel Dennett has hit upon the perfect analogy to explain why evolution producing life isn't just the mere ramblings of those blinded by Satan and his evil cohorts, but indeed the only possible scientifically-backable position we currently know about and can utilize! Here are some excerpts:
Any elimination tournament produces a winner, who "automatically" has whatever property was required to advance through the rounds, but, as the coin-tossing tournament demonstrates, the property in question may be "merely historical"—a trivial fact about the competitor's past history that has no bearing at all on his or her future prospects. Suppose, for instance, the United Nations were to decide that all future international conflicts would be settled by a coin-toss to which each nation sends a representative (if more than one nation is involved, it will have to be some sort of tournament—it might be a "round robin," which is a different algorithm). Whom should we designate as our national representative? The best coin-toss caller in the land, obviously. Suppose we organized every man, woman, and child in the U.SA. into a giant elimination tournament. Somebody would have to win, and that person would have just won twenty-eight consecutive coin-tosses without a loss! This would be an irrefutable historical fact about that person, but since calling a coin-toss is just a matter of luck, there is absolutely no reason to believe that the winner of such a tournament would do any better in international competition than somebody else who lost in an earlier round of the tournament. Chance has no memory.
[Emphasis through underlining mine.]
Imagine the Earth in the very early stages of its development--radiation, the sun, chemical reactions happening right and left... And fundamental Christians going to tell us it's easier to believe god sneezed and created life than that, at some point, those billions and billions of chemical reactions eventually crossed some type of relational threshold that we consider to be "life"? Really?
Dennett continues:
[...] In contrast to tournaments of pure luck, like the coin-toss tournament, there are tournaments of skill, like tennis tournaments. Here there is reason to believe that the players in the later rounds would do better again if they played the players who lost in the early rounds. There is reason to believe— but no guarantee—that the winner of such a tournament is the best player of them all, not just today but tomorrow. Yet, though any well-run tournament is guaranteed to produce a winner, there is no guarantee that a tournament of skill will identify the best player as the winner in any nontrivial sense. That's why we sometimes say, in the opening ceremonies, "May the best man win!"—because it is not guaranteed by the procedure. The best player—the one who is best by "engineering" standards (has the most reliable backhand, fastest serve, most stamina, etc.)—may have an off day, or sprain his ankle, or get hit by lightning. Then, trivially, he may be bested in competition by a player who is not really as good as he is. But nobody would bother organizing or entering tournaments of skill if it weren't the case that in the long run, tournaments of skill are won by the best players. That is guaranteed by the very definition of a fair tournament of skill; if there were no probability greater than half that the better players would win each round, it would be a tournament of luck, not of skill.
And thus, there are many species who not only aren't the "best" adapted, there are some who were well-suited to environs whose branches were cut short regardless. Thus, random chance plays a huge part in which species have changed, which have survived, which have died off into evolutionary dead ends... A lot of ID proponents like to imagine that all creatures were formed thus, and have so remained, and therefore cannot account for not only a lot of the fossils in our past, but a great deal of the geology, biology, physics, and other sciences in which evolutionary law has been strengthened. They are forced to think up arguments against such facts and truths, and then find the necessary data (albeit, ill-used data) to back up such fantastical claims--unlike traditional science which simply takes the facts and truths as we know them, and see what answer we end up with.
To continue with Dennett's analogy:
[...] Skill and luck intermingle naturally and inevitably in any real competition, but their ratios may vary widely. A tennis tournament played on very bumpy courts would raise the luck ratio, as would an innovation in which the players were required to play Russian roulette with a loaded revolver before continuing after the first set. But even in such a luck-ridden contest, more of the better players would tend, statistically, to get to the late rounds. The power of a tournament to "discriminate" skill differences in the long run may be diminished by haphazard catastrophe, but it is not in general reduced to zero. This fact, which is as true of evolutionary algorithms in nature as of elimination tournaments in sports, is sometimes overlooked by commentators on evolution.
[...] We can now expose perhaps the most common misunderstanding of Darwinism: the idea that Darwin showed that evolution by natural selection is a procedure for producing Us. Ever since Darwin proposed his theory, people have often misguidedly tried to interpret it as showing that we are the destination, the goal, the point of all that winnowing and competition, and our arrival on the scene was guaranteed by the mere holding of the tournament. This confusion has been fostered by evolution's friends and foes alike, and it is parallel to the confusion of the coin-toss tournament winner who basks in the misconsidered glory of the idea that since the tournament had to have a winner, and since he is the winner, the tournament had to produce him as the winner. Evolution can be an algorithm, and evolution can have produced us by an algorithmic process, without its being true that evolution is an algorithm for producing us. The main conclusion of Stephen Jay Gould's Wonderful Life: The Burgess Shale and the Nature of History (1989a) is that if we were to "wind the tape of life back" and play it again and again, the likelihood is infinitesimal of Us being the product on any other run through the evolutionary mill. This is undoubtedly true (if by "Us" we mean the particular variety of Homo sapiens we are: hairless and upright, with five fingers on each of two hands, speaking English and French and playing tennis and chess). Evolution is not a process that was designed to produce us, but it does not follow from this that evolution is not an algorithmic process that has in fact produced us.
I happen to believe that this is the main contention in the on-going "argument" between those who accept the valid science behind evolution, and those who wish to make up fantastical numbers and "science" in order to find another way to explain everything: WE ARE NOT SPECIAL, as in, we are not blessed in any particular way by any particular deity, nor are we the end-all, be-all of the evolutionary process. Especially considering like many other things in "life," we are but an accident (albeit to us a happy one) in a never-ending process... It's not only a bit humbling, but also a bit of a bummer, especially if you are looking forward to the never-ending praise orgy in the afterlife...
And while we could sit here and bemoan the fact that there isn't any "specialness" about us, and that, with or without us, life will go on in some form or another, I bask in the randomness of it all, the meaningless of it all.
While some (like my father) seem to think that even just wanting to enjoy life is somehow "a meaning" that I am "desperately seeking," I am content in the fact that, while I may not be special, I am evolved enough to appreciate truth when I see it, facts when they are presented, and have the wherewithal to take my chances in the skills and luck that produced me, even if it was...
A happy accident...
