A QUESTION ONLY YOU & TIGER MOM CAN ANSWER

So what do you think about when you're not thinking...?

For instance, when you're brushing your teeth? taking your pills? combing your hair? driving in traffic? These are automatic actions which require only a minimum of cognitive activity. But surely some something is happening in your consciousness. [Consciousness -- A whole other issue science and philosophy are vigorously debating]

Survival....! According to the Darwinian construct, most everything species do is due to their programmed instinct for survival. And in the case of another non-thinking activity -- sex -- the survivability that comes with pro-creation.

None of this is intended to minimize what we do as human beings. When looked at in a certain ambitious way, this Darwinian point of view can be understood as actually maximizing what we do. In historical point of fact, this is exactly how Darwin's great work was used here in the early 20th C to design a bold new concept called eugenics. Americans no less than Margaret Sanger, Woodrow Wilson and Oliver Wendell Holmes embraced eugenics as a way of improving and purifying the human species.

Eugenics took a bloody turn on the road of progress in the 1930s when Adolf Hitler convinced 60 million Germans there was something like a "super race." Only you had to work on it. In effect, you had to speed up evolution. [Gestapo head Heinrich Himmler succinctly called Nazism "applied biology."]. Hence the camps, the ovens, the Aryan breeding, and all the ugly rest.

Like Galileo and Newton before him, Darwin changed our world. Forever. We could no longer understand ourselves as simply breathed into life in some Mesopotamian Garden 4000 years ago. [Well, maybe still in the gardens of some literal fundamentalists]. But for the rest of us, we have arrived at an oblique understanding that we, like everything else on this planet, evolved over long long stretches of cosmic time.

Prize-winning Genome Director Francis Collins has argued -- right along with the Vatican -- that God and evolution are not mutually exclusive. The trip-wire here is when the evolutionist may want to play God by manipulating the process. Considering the many human flaws and defects between you and me, this manipulating thing might be something to think about the next time we're not thinking. That is to to say, who and when among us will someone offer another Hitlerian twist to Darwin?

Maybe like today's Tiger Mom who has decided that parents are obliged to take Darwin (and their kids) by the hand, and push them forward even faster than they may be thinking about while brushing their teeth and combing their hair...