Thanks, Andrew.
I was thinking of the shelter of eaves/overhanging tree canopies as well as of the elevation secured by of floors/trunks.
"still live within lumber", perhaps? "still inhabit lumber"?
I'll think about Evolving as a title. I'm currently leaning toward the stuffier Counterpoints to Human Evolution, but I might change my mind.
Other titles I considered:
Oh, Evolve! (a bumper sticker I often saw in Berkeley in the 1980's. That's more contemptuous than I want to be, though.)
Monkey Business (a reference to what one of John Snopes' high school students said to a reporter in 1925, after testifying to the grand jury about Snopes' teaching: "I believe in part of evolution, but I don't believe in the monkey business." I don't want to start with an epigraph, but I do plan to discuss the Snopes Monkey Trial later in the piece, re the self-appointed defenders of freedom of religion and freedom of speech who somehow keep bringing us things like book-banning, "Don't Say Gay" legislation, and the censorship of "Critical Race Theory".)
After Gibbon (playing off the ape-related name of the eighteenth-century English author of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. But I don't agree with his thesis, namely that empires decline and fall when too much peace and luxury—and perhaps Christian teaching—makes their citizens insufficiently bellicose. My own definition of what makes a society great doesn't include the martial glories of empires/authoritarianism.)
|