Christine Kenneally, inAlthough we experience ourselves in some sense as finished or perfected, we are not in any way intended. There is no blueprint for what humans are meant to be. And as this moment is merely one movement in the past and future history of our evolutionary lineage, your life right now is merely an instant in the past and future history of the interaction of your genome and your environment...
Having evolved means that you are less a creation than an accretion. You are a piled-up assemblage of systems and organs (some of which work better than others) and because of this, focusing only on sameness or only on difference doesn't take us very far...
If there were a moral to the story of evolution, it would be that meaning is something that happens after the fact. There is no rhyme or reason to the mutations that occur over the evolution of a species. Within the constraints of what has so far developed, genetic mutations are random; it is what the creature does with them that makes them meaningful. Evolution is the opposite of destiny, and because we are creatures of both biological and cultural evolution, where we are going is really obvious only in hindsight.
