I’m reading Living With Evolution by K. D. Koratsky. It’s heavy reading and reminds of university textbooks that threatened to put me to sleep while words blurred and paragraphs become forgotten broken records.
My usual reading time is a half hour or so before sleep and I was getting nowhere.
Then I came up with a tactic that worked.
In the morning when I peddle three miles on the stationary bike during daily exercise, I read from Koratsky’s book and what he says is riveting even if it is like slogging through thick oatmeal.
Koratsky has done his homework and the in-depth weaving of details covers the beginning of life billions of years ago and builds to today.
Too bad for the devoutly religious, who firmly believe that the universe and all life started about six thousand years ago with the wave of God’s magic wand.
It baffles me how people hold onto such beliefs. It must be fear and/or denial.
There is too much evidence that says otherwise, and Koratsky’s book spells it out in excruciating detail.
In addition, idealists who believe humanity can evolve into a peace-loving global community where no one suffers or goes hungry while crime is nonexistent and everyone is having fun is in for a BIG disappointment.
In chapter five, Koratsky writes about what happened after North America and South America bumped into each other millions of years ago and fused.
South America has been isolated for millions of years and there hadn’t been much of a challenge for the species that developed there so they had not evolved.
However, life forms in North America had been forced to evolve to survive contact with Asia and Europe and were stronger because of it.
Evidence shows that life from South America couldn’t compete with life from a stronger North America and was all but wiped out.
What I read caused me to think of the West’s invasion of China, which started with the Opium Wars early in the 19th century.
Then for more than a century, the Chinese struggled to survive as the British Empire, the French, Germans, Portuguese, Russians, Japanese and Americans poured in and waged war with Chinese Culture threatening it with extinction.
To survive, China had to evolve or be swallowed by Western culture becoming a second class citizen.
After the Communists won the struggle against Chiang Kai-shek’s nationalists in 1949, the metamorphosis began. Under Mao, China wove a cocoon around itself cutting off the world with the bamboo curtain.
During the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution, China went through drastic and painful changes to evolve into a different civilization—one strong enough to survive in a brutal, complex, competitive modern world.
Some will disagree. He or she will ask, “How can the horrors that took place in China under Mao be called part of the evolutionary process of survival?”
However, once you read about how species that cannot adapt with drastic environmental changes perish, the skeptics might understand what happened.
Evolution and Mother Nature do not care about humanity or how many suffer.
When the global environment changes drastically, death, destruction and extinction are a byproduct and humanity is not exempt from that process.
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Lloyd Lofthouse is the award-winning author of the concubine saga, My Splendid Concubine & Our Hart. When you love a Chinese woman, you marry her family and culture too.
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Posted by Lloyd Lofthouse 
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