We (homo sapiens) appear to be failing a major evolutionary test.
Keep in mind that in evolutionary terms everything happens very slowly over long periods of time - millennia. As a species, we have speeded up our own evolution to some extent as we have invented ever more complicated tools that have sharply accelerated many survival processes.
We don't "control" the conditions that facilitate evolution; they are too big, too complex, too slow for that. For millions of years, all we as a species could do was experiment with survival options, develop better tools, build cultures that increased our chances of passing on our DNA to new generations.
For all those millions of years, we worked with a balance of self-interest (sacrificing the survival of others to ensure my survival and that of my offspring) and altruism (sacrificing my own well-being or survival to ensure the strength of a community that could improve the survival chances of my offspring).
Over time, the tools and techniques of altruism- the development of cooperative hunting bands, the change from nomadic hunting/gathering to nomadic herding/opportunistic harvesting to sessile agriculture and husbandry, ultimately giving rise to cities and city-states, have paid the biggest dividends in the spread and survival of our species. The more we learned to work together, the more successfully we have evolved economies that support larger populations, the better tools we developed to respond to the impersonal unfocused threats of disease and natural disaster, the better we, as a species, have prospered.
Each advance has been tested, mostly by our own self-interest mechanisms: If one group gets too greedy and exploitive of others at the expense of their survival, that group ultimately is forced to change or die. Empires rise and fall. Power moves from autocracies to oligarchies. Monarchs enable an elite class to support their rule and then are forced to share power with that elite class, which enables a merchant class to support the broader distribution of wealth they require. In time the barriers between merchant and elite classes become more permeable.
Sometimes human groups that observed existential challenges closely, learned from them, experimented with changing their culture and developing new cultural survival mechanisms survived and learned the value of change. Sometimes human groups that clung stubbornly to what worked for their ancestors rode out the existential challenges and had their beliefs in the wisdom of the ancestors confirmed. On the species level the seemingly-random successes of these various strategies improved overall survival.
But over the course of history the balance has steadily shifted towards flexibility, willingness to change, and the embrace of altruism - these two strategies reinforce one another. We build a more complex world; we need a strong, diverse, curious community that values the survival of all to successfully develop and test new ways to meet existential challenges.
And as our species has ballooned in numbers and placed ever greater demands on the resources needed for survival, the frequency and intensity of the existential challenges we encounter has grown dramatically.
Plagues and natural disasters are SOCIAL tests above all - we cannot survive them by running from them. The wealthy few building their elaborate funk holes are whistling in the dark - if the species fails catastrophically, their DNA, too, will ultimately vanish.
We have all the resources of creativity, ingenuity, access to materials, etc., to survive the current crop of existential social tests. But we are failing them, because we are falling back on self-interest and fear-based conservatism to meet these challenges.
It is not too late to turn around.
But it might be, sooner than we think.
We had a good run, I guess.
diffidently,
Bright
= new reply since forum marked as read
We haven't gotten to the point that we realize that you shouldn't make poo-poo in your nest. Perhaps in a few (million) years, an intelligent species will arrive. We do some neat tricks, but we are not smart enough to save ourselves from ourselves.
Now here is a good question; what will God do for entertainment if our species disappears? Who would sing hymns to him. (yes, we all really know that he is a him whether we admit it or not) 
