Somewhere recently I heard or read or saw or something something about whether humans were still evolving. Unlike many of my colleagues, you see, the fact of evolution isn’t a question. Those bozos with the Intelligent Design disease have no standing in reality.

They would, of course, if they could admit that perhaps there is some power far greater than us, and that if there were, that power likely is the inventor of evolution. I mean, come on, what brilliant method of creating life on a chaotic planet. But that’ll never happen, and I digress anyway. So soon after starting …

So someone asked if human beings were still evolving, and the answer, of course, is a resounding yes. We’re not seeing so much physical evolution, of course, but those things seem to take millions of years for the most part, so that’s not at all surprising.

But we are seeing, and have seen for millennia, mental evolution on a grand scale.

Back in the day, when we were first standing up and looking at the world around us — and above us and below us — it was damn hard to understand, and understandably so.

My cat, who has lived his entire life indoors, thinks he wants to go outside and see what that’s like. But on those occasions when he escapes, he manages about four steps past the door and looks up. He freezes. Cannot move. I catch him and bring him back inside. That look up — at the sky — I can imagine the only thought going through his little cat brain is OMG WTF WHERE’S THE CEILING????

In our early days, we humans likely had similar reactions to what we were seeing. We coudn’t explain night and day, rain, thunderstorms, volcanoes, tides, rivers, trees … well, we coudn’t explain much of anything. Hell, it’s pretty doubtful way back when that we had any inkling of procreation.

So we made up stories. We could see, clearly, that there was something going on that was beyond both our understanding and our ability to duplicate it. Somewhere along the way, “that’s just the way it is” had to change, humans being curious creatures who need explanations.

The stories we made up changed through the years. Various groups of us, living in different places, had different stories to explain the same things. In Egypt, the sun was the eye of Ra. In Greece, it was Apollo and his golden chariot. Some Hindu myths regard the sun as a King who rides seven horses.

Now we know, of course, that the sun is a big flaming nuclear fusion reactor, and some of us humans know a lot more about it.

As human knowledge evolved, our stories had to evolve too. Knowledge was quite often met with derision, of course, as it is now. Hard to change those old belief systems, y’know.

Our ability to figure out things kept getting better though, and through the centuries we’ve been able to explain a lot more things in our physical world than we could back when we barely had language. So the stories, the myths of our history, gradually became more ethereal — and much harder to prove or disprove.

We learned to write, and recorded what we learned. We learned to photograph, to record sound, to record moving pictures. And we learned to manipulate all that so that it was no longer proof of anything either, at least in certain hands.

And all the while, we were also learning more about ourselves and the world we live in — even the universe we live in. In the last 3,000-4,000 years, we’ve learned an awful lot. I daresay an ancient Greek would be awfully confused if she suddenly dropped into downtown Manhattan, or even an empty field in Iowa.

What kind of stories would she need to make up to explain airplanes? Or television? Or buildings obscured by clouds?

Hopefully, some elitist academician with a working knowledge of ancient Greek would come along to help her out.

But who’s helping those of us humans who were born here and now to understand the changes we’ve been going through? Some of us were lucky enough to get the help we need, but others are still lost in the mindset of a century ago — or even further back in our history.

Facts mean nothing to far too many people. How many people still believe Saddam Hussein had a hand in 9/11? Probably about the same number who believe that Barack Obama was born in Kenya or is a secret Muslim.

Not to mention those who believe the earth is only about 6,000 years old. In fact, somewhere else I read that the earth’s birthday was last week sometime. My colleagues spend far too much time coddling these folks, pretending that their quaint and horrifically wrong beliefs somehow are pertinent to our lives.

Pretty much like the jurists who believe the Constitution is a static document, meant to be taken literally and interpreted only based on its specific content. As if the founders believed the world would never change.

Of all the people in this country’s history, those founders knew about change. They were children of The Age of Enlightenment. They wrote that document so that it could be changed, could be reinterpreted to better fit in an ever-changing world, with the ever-changing and ever-growing knowledge base of the humans who would live under it.

So now, here we are, still evolving, and still fighting those who believe evolution itself is a fantasy. But here’s the thing: Those people are really afraid of change.

Barack Obama, who turns out not to be the agent of change some hoped for — not yet, anyway — scared the bejesus outta those folks with all his talk about change.  That’s gotta be the scariest word in the English language.

Change. It’s the only thing that’s certain, when it gets down to the wire. We humans are still evolving, still changing. What we believe is changing. And what we’ll accept for ourselves is changing.

For some of us, accepting being second class citizens is out. Permanently. Having executives make billions while the bulk of us struggle to pay the rent or mortgage — gotta go. Destroying the planet so those executives can make all that money — no. Bigotry, hatred, war — ain’t gonna study that no more.

We are opposed, fought tooth and nail on these changes. Someday, we’ll fight change too when it’s too fast for us. But for now, we’re on the side of new, bright beginnings.

Change. Not to socialism. To something new. Something we’re in the process of inventing, creating, evolving.

Not easy. Nobody said it would be. But worth it, oh yes.

We’re in the process of becoming who we are meant to be, and there will always be those who would prefer we didn’t. It’s just too frightening for them, opens too many doors to too many places they’re afraid to go.

They’ll either follow or they won’t. The choice is theirs.

For us, though, the choice is made. We go through the doors, forward into the future.

And what we do today will then be history.