Aggression

Aggression is built into most of the animal population. This includes the human population where aggression is programmed into our nature. We talked in class about whether humans are innately aggressive in nature and I agree that while aggression is in our nature it is not the nature of humans. We have aggression to help with competition and use it as a reason to actually try and do better. Aggression fuels competition, maybe not as much today but definitely back in our more primitive times it was how our ancestors survived.

Today while aggression does not rule our everyday lives it does help in the capitalistic society as it helps to fuel the competitive nature of business as our country has been set up. Not every human shows aggressive tendencies and many are completely passive. This is neither a good or bad thing it just helps us to need one another. If we were all aggressive by nature then we would either not have gotten this far with technology or we would have used technology in a way that destroyed us all. Overall aggression is a useful tool in many environments but a lack of aggressiveness means nothing as to the quality of that human therefore aggression is not the nature to describe human nature.

Evolution

Humans are beings of nature. After we are born how much we change our features through medicines, plastic surgery, wheelchairs, crutches etc. we are still created through the combination of the male and female DNA. Every time that a sperm meets and egg there is variation that occurs and makes that new life special. We all have unique combinations of DNA and are all vessels through which new traits can arise. No we do not allow the weak to die as they would in a less technological society. We have people with traits that would be undesirable in the 'wild' but we can still overcome it. Maybe this is making us more susceptible than were we to allow nature to kill off people with traits that are not useful in traditional sense but we have brought ourselves up on this pedestal so as long as we have the technology we will try and save every life we can.

Evolution still happens whenever there is an exchange of genetic material to create a new life. Until we are able to create life without the help of organic genetic material we will be subject to evolution. It may be different from Darwin's perspective of evolution but it is still happening. Evolution is a very slow process and many suggest we are drawing from the same pool of genes as our ancestors were, dating back to just before the agricultural revolution.