The title of this post is based on a famous misquote. It originates from Rodney King on May 1, 1992, during a desperate television plea for calm in the midst of the violent Los Angeles riots in 1992.
I see this iconic quote as being relevant to the whole of humanity since not being able to get along and settle disputes peacefully with each other seems to be our biggest handicap in being able to live in peace and harmony with each other in a world-wide society that recognizes the benefits of having a common interest that must always take priority.
The problem – of course – is that human beings are not built that way: compromise isn’t always on the menu and some people are absolutely hell-bent to get their way regardless of the consequences.
Which leads me to say that conflict is part of our genus and necessarily so because it is the inevitable outcome of evolutionary forces which force us to continually challenge the status quo. It seems that without such challenges their can be no advancement towards the goals that evolution has in mind for us – whatever they may be.
In the end all conflict is about the competition between ideas about who or what we are and where we are going with this as an evolving species on planet earth.
Now, if we only knew what the objectives of evolution are and I bet there are several, i.e. this is about more than our successful adaptation of changing environments: I see that that as a means towards an end.
Darwin didn’t believe that evolution has an objective, instead he described evolution as a blind unguided response to local environmental pressures.
But clearly – evolution is about much more that, as it continues to drive us beyond mere survival to levels of behaviour that clearly risk the very concept of successful survival when we risk our own extinction. From an UN report:
Science indicates that while human extinction is not an immediate, guaranteed certainty, our species faces unprecedented existential risks. These vulnerabilities stem from rapidly accelerating global shifts, many of which are driven by our own technological, environmental, and societal choices.
As well, I don’t believe that being able to fit trillions of MOSFET transistors on a single memory chip is the eventual outcome of “blind unguided responses to local environmental pressures” without denying that such responses aren’t a critical part of the evolutionary process. Clearly, evolution pressures are more complex than that.
And yes, evolution is still at work today:
(From an article posted by Science Literacy Project/Genetic Literacy Project – JUNE 12 – 2026)
(A landmark study published in Nature last April has complicated that narrative.) Drawing on ancient DNA from nearly 16,000 West Eurasians spanning 10,000 years, Harvard geneticist David Reich and colleagues found evidence that directional genetic selection is not only widespread but accelerating. Rather than stasis, evolution has continued to act on hundreds of genetic variants associated with traits ranging from disease risk and body composition to complex behavioral measures, including intelligence.
While the paper itself is technical and cautious, its implications are explosive. Importantly, the selection identified in the study occurred within populations inhabiting distinct ecological and cultural environments, suggesting that recent human evolution has been shaped by local selective pressures rather than a uniform global process. That, in turn, raises the possibility of ongoing regional divergence between different human groups. This has already dragged an older, more troubling word back into the discussion—“race”. This is not the sloppy popular notion based on skin colour or a rigid biological essence. Human genetics substantially overlaps among groups, rendering classical racial categories obsolete. But this provocative research does underscore that many human differences may not be simply skin deep.
For decades, the prevailing view held that while societies have transformed, the evolved architecture of our species has remained fixed since long before the first cities were built. The late paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould put it like this in 2000: “There’s been no biological change in humans in 40,000 or 50,000 years. Everything we call culture and civilization we’ve built with the same body and brain.” …
However, the Reich study suggests that the Holocene—our current geological epoch, which began approximately 11,700 years ago at the end of the last Ice Age—has not been a period of stasis at all. It has been a furnace of differentiation. Natural selection has been more pervasive, and more recent, than the Gouldian consensus allows.
(Abbreviated within the context of my post)