Evolution is an unintelligent designer. It improves the biological world simply by making mistakes. The mistakes that have superior survival rates become next year's model of a species. Any system with chaotic input will have less chaotic output once you add the element of continuous energy over time. The ordering of matter we call life is like an eddy in the stream of energy we call sunlight.

There are limits on what it can do, however. Whatever improvements it makes have to be survivable as it is making them. It's like ship-building on the high seas. You can rebuild the ship one plank at a time, but not more than that.

Twenty years ago, the anthropologist Harry Shapiro told me that once a primate fails to stand upright it can't go down that path again. It's already passed the fork in the road. He thought that a knuckle-walker like the gorilla would probably never stand upright in the millions of years to come simply because to try a different fork you'd have first to evolve backwards.

Humans have developed cerebral capabilities that go beyond anything the other animals can do. We write symphonies, for example, and become computer nerds. It would take hundreds of millions of years for anybody else to get such abilities, if ever.

Natural selection will continue to guide evolution on this planet as long as some individuals are more likely to breed than others. But this idea used to be controversial. People used to think that civilization had put a stop to human evolution. Our eyes no longer need to improve, for example, because we can make eyeglasses that artificially correct their defects. But lately people are thinking that the idea of survivability has simply taken a different form in the 21st century. The contributions of people who don't reproduce will be cultural and not biological, but that's okay because, as Thomas Huxley stressed, cultural evolution can accomplish important things that biological evolution can't.

For example, Mayor Bloomberg has recently ordered all city agencies to make their internal databases available to the public. And it turns out Obama had already done something similar. So if there's a nation-wide database of accredited universities and contact information, then I can send them news about the Rosenfels Community on a regular basis automatically. I can't imagine how biological evolution could accomplish anything similar. I think Bill Clinton had the first government website, firstgov.com, built and subsequent presidents have made dramatic improvements to the way our government releases pertinent information on the web.

During my lifetime, Americans have been pressuring the government to be more open about what it does. Various "sunshine" laws have gone into effect, including the Freedom of Information Act that allowed me to learn about how the FBI followed Paul when he dropped out of society. In the McCarthy era, the FBI had files on everybody. They never went after Paul, but actual communists — like Laurie Bell's dad — were thrown in jail for years.

Paul's mom was a committed communist, by the way. But that was in the early years of the 20th century. She used to have many events at their house in which famous socialists and communists were invited to speak. Paul met many of these people as a child and regularly marched in May Day parades. He and his sister Edith really believed a new and better world was coming. For them the moral collapse of communism was a great disappointment. I don't know exactly when this happened, but most American communists were not fools and by the time Stalin's crimes were revealed they were already disillusioned.

I haven't bothered becoming an expert on recent history because Paul always warned me not to live in the past. Instead, I try to focus my thinking on the future, especially the future of the Center. I agree with Thomas Jefferson, who said, "I like the dreams of the future better than the history of the past." On the other hand, I agree with Ralph Waldo Emerson, who said, "I hate quotations." It's quite a dilemma.

But it's undoubtedly important to live in a country where the press is free to raise questions and challenge authority, even the yellow journalism exemplified by Fox News. Some people who grew up behind the iron curtain didn't learn about Stalin's crimes until the early 90's, 40 years after Krushchev had denounced him. If you don't have a free media you're really fucked. Your head will be full of lies about almost all of mankind's history.

The internet is helping a lot. People compare their notes about what lies they were taught in school. There's even a book called by James Loewen that every book club should read. Of course, the sad truth is that schoolteachers were lied to as well. In fact, many of these lies did not start as falsifications but wishful thinking. When native Americans began to die out because they had no defenses against the new diseases the first Europeans were introducing to the New World, Christian missionaries assured them that this was simply God's way of cleaning out the vermin for good white people.

No "fourth estate" is perfect, but I see wonderful things being done by American journalists all the time. For over a hundred years we've had a very strong public committment to "muck-raking". Americans love it when a crook like Richard Nixon is brought to his knees and dragged through the mud.

When people from oppressed cultures come here it can take a few years of living in America for them to see how profoundly different our cultures are. But most of them, over time, are able to let go of the cynicism that had darkened their spirits and start to love the world once more.