As I write this, much of the East Coast of the United States is under invasion. Well, it's not really an invasion, I guess, because the invaders' ancestors were here long before William Bradford and company laid claim to Ply mouth Rock.
Some are terrified, others amused, but few in the Washington, D.C., area are oblivious to the 17-year cicadas that have emerged for their brief moment in the sun. They appear by the millions after having spent nearly two decades underground. You can't help noticing them crawling slowly along the sidewalk, their beady red eyes staring resolutely up to ward the trees where they belong.
Rare is the person in the D.C. area who has not had one of the two-inch critters buzz haplessly up and land on his or her clothing or perhaps on a bare arm. On a warm day you can't look anywhere outside without seeing several cicadas in flight, so it was inevitable that cicadas would become intermingled with my meditations on other subjects.
These insects may be very proficient at some things, such as counting off 17 years without ever seeing the light of day. But they are not proficient at flying. They have to climb up on something before they take off, and even then they more often end up on the sidewalk than in the treetops, where the mating goes on.
Watching a cicada fly, I began wondering why the process of natural selection had not somehow brought about better flight characteristics for the poor bugs. It stands to reason that only the better flyers ever get up to the trees where the mating happens. And you never see a good flier helping a clumsy one make it to the top.
What all this has to do with AIDS is this: The cicada flew past while I was pondering the fate of the world in the wake of the burgeoning AIDS epidemic. George F. Will pointed out in a recent column that in the United States "AIDS still is and probably will remain predominantly a disease of homosexuals and intravenous drug users. It will decreasingly afflict educated, information-receptive homosexuals."* Will noted that probably half of the drug addicts in New York City already are infected with the AIDS virus, and that heterosexual transmission is increasing primarily among those who have sex with addicts. The implication is that it is primarily the ignorant, the immoral, and addicts who will die from AIDS.
A purely pragmatic reaction to such data would be to view AIDS as a purifier. If we would simply let AIDS run its course, the ignorant and immoral would be wiped out, leaving alive a stronger, more sapient breed of Homo sapiens. To work to stop the epidemic would seem counterproductive.
Here is where the creationist's and the evolutionist's viewpoints diverge--and here is why it is so important for us to know whether we believe in Creation or evolution as the origin of the human race.
One reasonable corollary to the evolutionary hypothesis is that natural selection should be allowed to progress unimpeded if the human race is to be kept strong. But Creation's corollary is that God is concerned with every man, woman, and child created in His image. If God believed in simply letting nature take its course to bring about the perfection of humanity, He would have just let Adam and Eve die, and would have started over again. Instead, He left heaven and came to minister to publicans and sinners.
The human race advances only through becoming more like our Creator, not through behaving like bugs that can let their weaker comrades die unattended on the sidewalk. --Kenneth R. Wade.
*"AIDS: The Real Danger . . . ," Washington Post, June 7, 1987.
