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Posted: Tuesday, September 9, 2014 2:01 pm

Evolution has no predetermined path. Life adapts and survives and passes survival skills to offspring. Organisms inherit or learn traits that protect them from more aggressive organisms. Weather, environment, physiological errors or diseases can cause developmental deviations from what we callthe norm. The survival instinct is a fickle and ruthless force. Groups of humans may take up bad ideas that spread like a virus through their ranks.
War has been the traditional process for conquering competing tribes, stealing females to increase the winner’s line-up of descendants and appropriating land or resources to extinguish competing ideas or beliefs. Peace gives way to war drums. Young men follow their urges to fight and conquer. That has goosed humanity along a tenuous evolutionary road.
For thousands, millions, of years, our ancestors also developed qualities and talents that allow us to accommodate to changes and to improve the general state of humanity. Social contracts (written or unwritten agreements between rulers and their subjects or citizens) allow rulers to stay in power while ostensibly accommodating the needs and the desires of tribes, citizens and nations. When social contracts fail or are ignored, chaos ensues and civilization falters.
Despite the largely positive influences that religion has on humans, we have clear contemporary examples of religious power gone awry in radical Islam. The Middle East is threatened by a malignancy whose followers believe that Allah expects them to kill and destroy the rest of the world to create a worldwide caliphate to repress women and to rule by brutal religious law. Radical Islam is a death cult that afflicts the Taliban, al Qaeda and now ISIS (Islamic State of Iraq and Syria). They hope for a base from which to project Islamic theocratic power across the globe. Terrorism may be a temporary wrinkle in human evolution, but it is a chronic threat to rational civilization.The valid complaints of terrorists are obscured by their bloodletting.
Peaceful Muslims dither rather that purging their own faith of terroristic misfits. Meanwhile, we can be certain that religious vandals will attempt to strike our nation again. The evolution of terrorists has halted. Terrorists want to regress to what they believe life was like in the seventh century. They offer nothing but strife and suppression for their imaginary worldwide, Islamic caliphate. A rabble of misfits is eager to be martyred in a cause they only vaguely understand.
Killing terrorists sometimes seems simpler than expecting them to change. Terrorists are up a blind evolutionary alley with no survival values. They may die. They may fold. They may disappear into their burrows, but they threaten us. Evolution does not propose that civilization will always prevail over primitive witlessness. It is a dark time. Unbalanced international competitors want to kill us.

This is no time for us to elect more national leaders who are not capable of making decisions that put country before ideology. It is obvious that a strategy of cutting taxes and fomenting more war is not working anywhere. We need statesmen and women, not ideological tub-thumpers whoquibble with each other about how to obstruct our own president. That is not a winning strategy against the darkness in the Middle East or against the problems on our own doorstep.