Evolution is a unique characteristic of living things. The forcefulness of its pull has no limit in the way it can shape the structures of biological ecosystems. To evolve, as it were, is a requirement of organic life – a necessity that arises from the natural order of life, death, and the need to ensure the continuation of the Earth’s gene pool.

One could point out how evolution resembles a function – a telos of the very nature of organic life. One could then postulate that this necessity comes from a religious origin; that this was “implanted” into organisms or that it was designed by a divinity. Clearly, evolution is not a manufactured product of thought but, rather, a fundamentally organic process.

Moreover, to say that evolution is a function of life is not the same as saying the purpose of, for example, a mouth is to chew. The mouth is the result of evolution – a byproduct of the process of natural selection whereby organisms with a feature similar to that of a mouth passed on their genes to a greater extent that those that did not. This physical attribute allowed for far greater reproductive success but does not have a purpose. Nor was the mouth “designed” to do anything in particular. We could, after all, inject all nutrients directly into our stomach or, even, our blood bypassing the need for a mouth.

However, there is no way to bypass evolution. The need to survive comes out from the dynamic disposition of the universe (insert yin-yang joke here). Even modern-day man, with all his unprecedented capacity for cooperation and his unparalleled intelligence, is at risk of death and, therefore, is still subject to the dictatorship of evolutionary need to procreate and further dilute the genetic pool.

Humans are, to a great extent, – but not entirely – different from all other biological life because we utilize external agents as tools in our survival. Unlike the flower or the bee, man has begun to absolve the ever-present dread of death through the manipulation of the organic and inorganic world. The Earth’s ecosystems have become our playground. Man has unknowingly sent entire species to mass extinction and actively prevented others from the very same fate – a fate that results from the evolutionary domain that all life rests within. We choose to will evolution as we please – as it benefits us.

This unabated control of the external world is by virtue of man’s creativity. He creates marvelous, intricate, and stupendous objects from basic materials and has propelled himself into a setting of biological incongruity. Man’s relationship to the external world has become far more intimate and multi-faceted than we have seen in any other organism before.

It is my belief that mankind has surrendered its evolutionary objectives to technological advancements which are then controlled by the collective will of men. The human species will continue to participate in natural selection but both selectively and unwillingly. We can literally look into a microscope to see how we are evolving and decide, based on the facts, whether the end result is, based on opinion, either good or bad. We can also force ourselves to evolve much in the same fashion. We have entered the realm of artificial selection – a biased approach to selectively intruding on the evolution of ourselves and of all living things.