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Scanning through Sunday’s paper, I too was excited to find yet another article that related to this class.  This time it was David Brooks’ op-ed piece, “The Age of Darwin.”  However, after reading the column, my initial excitement quickly faded.  His initial point, “Once the Bible shaped all conversation, then Marx, then Freud, but today Darwin is everywhere,” is very observant.  In fact, after discussing and connecting evolution in our class for almost an entire semester, I feel that Brooks’ statement is actually very reflective of my own personal awakening to the dominate presence that the topic of evolution holds in our modern world.  And yet from the conversations in class, I cannot help but be skeptical about nearly every subsequent claim Brooks makes concerning the process of evolution.  In his praise of evolution, Brooks’ proclaims that evolution, “holds that most everything that exists does so for a purpose. If some trait, like emotion, can cause big problems, then it must also provide bigger benefits, because nature will not expend energy on things that don’t enhance the chance of survival.”  This argument seems not only overly simplified, it simply does not hold up to either biological or anthropological reasoning.  Having just read the book, “Unnatural Emotions” by Catherine Lutz, I feel that Brooks’ equating of “emotion” as simply a trait is just false.  And biologists would agree.  The fact of the matter is, emotion is socially constructed.  And not only that, in biological evolution, only the genetic components of variation can have true evolutionary consequence.  Again, in his claim that, “nature will not expend energy on things that don’t enhance the chance of survival,” I wonder what he means with his use of the word “things”.  Populations?  Individuals? It makes a difference.  While trying to write a short sweet piece on the “grand narrative that explains behavior and gives shape to history,” Brooks further complicates the “meaning” of evolution and provides his readers with misleading examples to explain the significance of evolution in our current society.