What was 'natural selection' thinking when it not only stripped homo sapiens of his nice fur coat, fangs and claws, spring-loaded muscles, and acute senses and instincts but also the ability to survive by hunting and gathering as did his ancestors? Why did evolution deem it necessary that for man to survive he had to displace other living things and destroy their environment, and in doing so threaten not only his own existence but that of every remaining creature? Did evolution provide a 'self-destruct' gene in man?
First of all, let's be clear on something: the current ecological destruction of nature through man is not a directly evolved trait. It's the consequence of one such trait. We did not evolve to destroy the environment any more than bunnies evolved to destroy the Australian ecosystem; it was merely a result of the continuation of our society and our strong brains.
Now, why don't we have fur coats, fangs, claws, or the like? This is actually a problem dealt with in a field known as "
evo-devo". The selection pressures are numerous, and trying to piece it together from paleontological evidence can be tricky. With the fur, for example, it's known that as our ancestors shifted from the jungle to the Savannah, thick fur coats became more and more of a detriment to survival and were therefore selected against.
Another issue worth noting is that most genes do not just code for one protein. This can lead to some interesting interplay where one gene causes both a negative effect and a positive effect. It's widely hypothesized that the gene responsible for homosexual behavior in mammals is by the same token responsible for an increased sex drive and more aggressive mating habits - a clear survival benefit in most cases, even if it causes homosexuality, a clear negative selector, in some small portion of the population. If I had to guess where the extra muscle mass went, I'd hazard that it played some part in that. But then again, I'm really just taking shots in the dark here; I am not a biologist and evo-devo is a complex and difficult field.
I sort of anthropomorphized them into consciousness.
Yeah... That's a really unclean and non-useful way of looking at it, though. This habit of anthropomorphizing things shoehorns the process into humanish ways of thinking, when it's really nothing like that.
