Adaptation

 Adaptation

I closed last week’s writing with “gratitude can . . . become a way of living.  We practice, evaluate, adjust, and practice some more.”  Instead of “adjust,” I wish I had written “adapt.” 

So, up front . . . I want everyone who can, to read this book,  The Tree of Knowledge: The Biological Roots of Human Understanding by Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela.  Only a few other biologists have so significantly influenced my thinking.  Even fewer have so equipped my biblical interpretations or my assumptions about humans who try to follow the example and teachings of Jesus of Nazareth.  

To understand the authors we need to consider their description of biological evolution.  In short “survival of the fittest” can be better described as preservation of adaptation.  

Since Charles Darwin, most have understood “survival” as a species “winning a competition” with a rival or especially as it has been used by Social Darwinism’s commentators, “dog eat dog.”  The authors, Chilean academics present preservation of adaptation as a better shorthand because they see evolution less as a contest between rivals and more as a cascade of multiple outcomes when diverse and unpredictable elements and players are involved over time.  

Instead of Neanderthal vs. Cro-Magnon: Match of the Epochs they see ice ages, diseases, droughts, genetic mutations, floods and more; each taking a part in staging an “evolutionary drift” in the adaption of all life.  Those that “survive” are the ones that have a persisting capacity to adapt to a “world of changes” outside their control.  Another shorthand: think of species diversifying like a snow melt running and branching out down a mountainside instead a single “king of the mountain” nearly frozen on a snowy peak.

If you’re still reading, I thank you.  All before is to say that I feel confident in presenting gratitude as including, perhaps depending on our ability and willingness to adapt to a world that is not under our control.  Adaptation is how our species got here in the first place.  It is what will keep our practice of gratitude viable through victories and defeats, good days and bad days and even through those days we forget to pray like deacons.  

Adaptation and gratitude are mutually effective in furthering each other and in staging our roles as recipients and practitioners of grace, forgiveness and reconciliation.  Practicing one helps us to practice the other.   So we wake up in honesty to remember how we have survived and in humility to look ahead in hope that we may adapt with a world being set free to evolve and change.

FrDann