Admit it. You have committed the evolutionary sin of feeding ducks. Not content to let them forage for their own food you toss them processed bread. Your indiscretion goes even deeper because, annoyed by the bigger, stronger louder ones, you direct your food distribution campaign to the smaller, weaker ducks. Didn’t you get the natural selection memo? You have just violated evolution 101 and showed compassion for a Darwinian invalid. How dare you? You may set the evolution of ducks back several thousand years by your careless concern for those scrawny little quackers. Shame on you!

Why do we feel a twinge of guilt when we walk by a homeless Vet and don’t slip him a couple bucks? Why are we riveted by the stories of children being pulled from wells or miners rescued from a collapsed mine? We even set up organizations to help the poor, addicted, and diseased even when they may be solely responsible their own unfortunate situations. Caring for the poor, handicapped, and disadvantaged makes no evolutionary sense, yet we seem incapable of looking the other way when we see their number come up in the natural selection lottery.

We know there is something special about our fellow man that goes beyond mere survival skills. We have a soft spot for other image-bearers, especially when they struggle to be the most-fit survivor. We not only extend our altruistic acts to our fellow human beings but also to evolutionarily inferior members of the animal kingdom threatened with extinction. We try and redirect beached whales out to sea, save Sumatran tigers, and breed Giant Pandas. Man’s altruistic behavior is one of the most difficult attributes to explain away by purely materialistic evolutionary forces. It sure seems like we spend a lot of time and money helping the evolutionarily unfit.

If you worship evolution, you had better turn up the volume of your praise band because you will need to drown out the screams of its victims. Thankfully, most people treat evolution like an amulet to ward off depressing thoughts of original sin, but don’t actually worship at its shrine. Instead they turn away from the altar of natural selection, leave the evolutionary sanctuary, and offer loving kindness to a world full of endangered species. If you are a compassionate atheist, then God bless you, but I hate to tell you it didn’t come from your evolutionary journey.