Revised Query Letter/Synopsis - Reader's Comments

This is the revised Query Letter/Synopsis I have generally included with my most recent attempts to gain representation.  For those who have completed reading the book and would like to leave comments (favorable or otherwise), do so at the bottom of the post.

Thanks,
Jon B. South

Dear (agent),

            I would like you to represent my 103,000-word science fiction thriller 3G2.

For ten years Eli Gould was certain that only he knew about his incredible powers until one fateful night when everything unraveled, and he quickly learned that it wasn’t a secret at all.

3G2 is a story with just one plot, though features four separate narratives that initially seem unrelated. As the novel progresses each of the storylines fits like a puzzle piece into the greater picture of Eli Gould, his powers, and all that are aware of them.

One story is of Dr. David Ho, a geneticist for the CIA who is quite aware that his career is likely nearing the end, after years without any meaningful assignments.  One morning he gets called into a meeting that not only turns his feelings of inadequacy upside down, but forever changes his life.  Through the doctor’s perspective, the reader learns, with the help of a brilliant researcher named Sanila Abburi, the origin of Eli’s power and the scope of the operation hell bent on neutralizing it.

Another tale follows Moussa Tchamou, a young CIA operative whose ability to elude capture and collect sensitive material has put his services in high demand.  With one initiative ending, and nothing following directly on the heels, Moussa chooses to help a friend out, against his better judgment, and it leads him to Chicago where he soon realizes the gravity of the situation. For most of the story, if not all of it, he is arguably the book’s real super hero.

The point of origin of Eli’s incredible power is explained by taking the reader through a tale of tragedy, desperation and love.  Alice Bloemfeld is held captive at Dachau Camp in the waning days of World War II.  More than eight months after being forcibly impregnated through in vitro fertilization as part of an experiment to test a doctor’s theory of gene dominance, she now must rely on that same Nazi doctor to not only protect her unborn child (Eli’s father) but also herself.

The primary narrative follows a young man with an extraordinary gift he only recently has learned to control, and not knowing the true extent of its capabilities, keeps largely to himself.  Eli Gould remains ignorant of the chain of events unfolding around him, distracted by the beauty and affection of Maura Kenny, a potential love interest. All semblances of normalcy crumble as he, as well as Maura, discover that not only is his secret out, but that his life may be in danger.

Aside from being a science fiction and suspense novel, 3G2 is also a work of historical fiction, a romantic comedy incorporating popular culture, and a brief exploration into the science of evolution, among other things.  But, most of all, it is a story of normal people, save maybe one character, and the behavior they exhibit under extraordinary circumstances.

After researching the type of projects that you enjoy representing, I feel confident that this type of story is right up your alley.  I have the entire manuscript, as well as a more detailed one page synopsis ready for your request, and will be looking forward to hearing from you in the future.

Thanks, Jon B. South

 

 

 

Debut Novel From Author Jon B. South

This is the query I have begun to send out to agents in hopes of getting my first novel published, as I complete the final edits with input from beta readers:

 

I am a first time author who has recently finished a 101,000 word science/historical fiction thriller titled 3G2. 

 

This adult novel explores the nature of a man living in contemporary society with exceptional superhuman capabilities, the origins of his power, and the forces hell bent on eliminating the threat he poses to society.

 

Eli Gould is an attorney living in Chicago who learned one afternoon ten years ago that he possessed an incredible power.  Since that day he has learned the skills necessary to be seemingly invincible under even the most dire circumstances,  but he doesn't know about a campaign older than the Cold War to eliminate the threat his power poses until late one night when those waging it manage to nearly kill him. 

 

By the end of this mystery thriller, which jumps between 1944-45 at Camp Dachau and 2004 in Chicago, DC, Atlanta and Budapest, the actions that Eli takes will make the reader debate whether he is good or bad, and the actions that normal people take to protect him might change the reader's opinion about which character is the real superhuman.

 

3G2 is part of a trilogy, made somewhat obvious by various inferences throughout the book, in addition to 3G1 and 3G3 (to be released in that order), which are both in the preliminary stages of production.

 

This novel has not been seen by any other agents, and I have yet to receive a copyright certificate.

 

There is no attachment to this e-mail.  The manuscript will be sent upon request.

 

Thank you for your consideration,

Jon B. South

3G2: The First Edits

This post is specifically for those lucky few who have been given the first draft of my full length novel "3G2" for comments and edits.  Please leave any comments regarding the novel in the comments section below this post.  If you have scanned the book with your comments or edits written on the pages, then that can be e-mailed to jonbsouth@gmail.com

Thank you for being a part of this project!

Conservatives Contradict with Marriage Views

Marriage is a funny thing.  It's especially funny when you try and imagine all the millions of people in this country who are basically living as if they are married without ever actually getting married.  The reason for this ambiguity is because marriage, like many things, has become an institution of government.  Besides what the talking heads will tell you about who defines marriage, the fact of the matter is that the government defines marriage, which is why we are involved in this whole quandary about who can get married to whom.

The contradiction arises out of the non-stop banter from the right wing about what government should control.  According to many prominent Republicans government should have no control over our guns and should give up the right to tax our income.  They are adamant about these intrusions into our personal affairs but yet are completely mum when it comes to government intrusions into our sex lives.  In the same vein of abortion rights, the truth is that Conservatives are not for smaller government unless the government is up to something they don't agree with. 

Gun Control: Big Government; Abortion Control: Righteousness; Higher Taxes: Big Government; Institutionalized Marriage: Tradition.

See the contradiction?

If Republicans, Tea Baggers, or whatever these morons representing morons call themselves nowadays really wanted to make an argument that wasn't mired in hypocrisy, they would advocate for the absence of government from the social construct of marriage altogether.

There is no reason for government to be involved in marriage anyway.  There would be no issue today concerning who can and cannot get married if all the benefits of being married were available to any pair or group of partners who are making a life together, regardless of how their relationship is defined.

And to call marriage traditional anyhow is a complete crock of shit.  For tens and tens of thousands of years before any semblance of monogamy existed, male and female humans banged multiple partners in territorial bands much like apes do today. 

The reasons for this behavior: Pro-creating was essential to a population struggling to survive and; Men died at much younger ages than women, resulting in grave sexual disparities (a big part of the reason the species has evolved a fertility rate that favors male children, even though women maintain a consistent 51% proportion of the world populous).

But it wasn't just polygamy that was the norm, many people also got it on with same sex partners in between their soirees among the opposite sex. 
Even among some of the most endangered modern species, there exists homosexual behavior.  Although it is hard to objectively categorize animal sexualities because they all seem to be pansexual, it can be said that certain animals of each species tend to prefer homosexual behavior. 


Now that's tradition!

Save the Planet? Save the Humans!

Save the Planet! My grammar school teacher implored us before delving into epically boring instruction regarding reducing, reusing and recycling.  That was the 80s, and for more than two decades after that lesson I believed that by being green I was helping to save our beloved planet earth.  Eventually, though, I learned that it was not the earth which needed saving, it was us.

The earth, regardless of what your Sunday School teacher taught you, was not placed in the sun's orbit for humans alone.  As hard as it may be for the millions of narcissists that inhabit this planet to believe, the planet was here for billions of years before we arrived and, barring some monumental advances in technology, will be here for several billion years more after we are long gone.  Humanity poses no risk whatsoever to the survival or long term health of this planet.  We are nothing but a virus, temporarily perturbing our host, but bound to be a forgotten memory shortly after our demise.

Now, environmentalists, don't fret.  My self-centeredness may seem to come at the expense of the movement for environmentalism, but, quite the opposite, it is the best argument for preserving the natural wonder of our planet, considering that our survival as humans is 100% reliant on maintaining the environment. 

Being a pessimist at heart I realize that it is only a matter of when, not if, this planet will no longer be able to support our species.  No one wants to go back to living in the horrible pre-Industrial Revolution era, except the Amish, and that is exactly what it would take to reverse the systematic destruction of this planet being carried out by the human species.  But through changes in behavior and advances in technology we can lengthen the duration of our stay in this ecosystem before we turn it over to cockroaches and rodents.

 

Remember, the planet doesn't need saving and it was (or is) terribly ignorant and narcissistic of you to believe humans would be capable of saving it if it did.  We need saving.  We are killing ourselves (and millions of wondrous creatures at the same time) and we are the only ones who can save us from ourselves.  Don't worry about the planet.  Be Green to Save the Humans!

I'm Racist, You're Racist, Everybody's Racist!

Now, don't get all up in arms, telling me about all the black friends you have (or white, if you're black) or how your nanny was Hispanic or whatever.  By definition, the fact that you categorize people based on race, which, if you were raised in, well, the world, you do, makes you racist.  Here you have taken a thing which actually does not exist, being that the categories of races used in common vernacular are social constructs which may be easily usurped by modern convention, and utilized it to form predispositions about others based purely on appearance.

I don't mean to imply that because you're a big time racist you also actively discriminate based on race.  There are probably more than a billion racists in the world who work every day towards the elimination of race based discrimination.  This doesn't take away from the fact that they're all quite racist, even more so I'm sure, because they are so heavily involved in race related issues. 

For example, if a white woman on a bus keeps an eye on a black man sitting nearby because she fears he may snatch her iPhone, she is no more racist than he is for paying her no mind because he assumes she will sit quietly and keep to herself until her stop.  Regardless of the consequences of these inferences, the fact that they are made based almost exclusively on racial appearance makes both parties equally racist.

Right now you may be asking yourself, "If everyone is racist then why do we still have to talk about race?"

Personally, I choose not to talk about race with people who are unwilling to admit their inherent racism because that conversation is pointless.  It is only when you admit that you're racist that you will finally be able to fully comprehend how much race based discrimination still continues on in every aspect of culture and civilization.  Only then does the conversation about race have any meaning and we can finally begin the multi-generational journey towards a truly post-racial civilization. 

Either that or a compulsory globe-wide inter-breeding program. 

A Brain With A Speaker

There is one unique difference between human brains and the brains of all other animals in this small corner of the galaxy: a capability for conceptualizing the non-existent.  Using this very particular skill our species has developed culture, civilization and essentially everything that it means to be human.

But, how did this happen?  How did we make the jump from having brains that could solve puzzles to brains that could imagine puzzles for solving? 

Obviously the first place to look is the human brain.  It is visibly obvious that the brain of a human is larger, especially in the front, where the most critical thinking takes place, than the brains of our nearest primate cousins and our evolutionary ancestors.  In the time since the shared ancestor of humans and chimpanzees went extinct, the ancestors of modern humans, the hominids, have evolved with a steady rate of brain growth, each time one species making way for another with a considerable mental advantage.  Right up to the end when physically modern humans outlasted and outlived the entrenched Neanderthals of Europe, it was communication which drove the growth of the brain.

Those humans which eventually took Europe from the Neanderthals did so by developing a complex and binding cultural identity, primarily through early religion, which put up a united front against a fragmented Neanderthal population.  Language, the ability to communicate in order to form large, more complex and adaptable societies, made the process of natural selection consistent and predictably in favor of big brains plus one other physical feature: sharp tongues.

Anthropomorphism is all good fun, until somebody actually thinks that an animal with a human brain would be able to talk.  If you switched the brains of a dog and its owner neither of them would be able to say a word.  The dog brain in a human body wouldn't think in words, let alone know how to annunciate them, while the human brain in the dog's body would feel like a recently mute person, totally incapable of phonically conveying the concepts it has envisioned.  The human brain will no doubt soon realize that it takes more than a brain to be able to talk.  The human brain requires an exceptional set of tools to get across to other brains some of the thousands of ideas that flow through it every hour.

But the brain didn't ask for these tools.  The tools came first.  The nasal bark of the dog or meow of the cat severally limits the range of communication these animals are capable of, but don't fret, they're not capable of having very complex thoughts anyhow.  Without the tools for speaking, cats and dogs have never been able to develop brains big enough to form words and ideas, because, like all things evolution, the two occur in tandem.  Even today as we speak, our brains get ever so slightly larger and our mouths (or abilities to use a computer) become ever so slightly better at getting all that large brain info out.

Making the transition from being animals that used our mouths primarily for talking instead of fighting, killing, and eating, had nothing to do with communication at all.  Instead, like most great strides of evolution, it was an environmental change that became the catalyst to begin the human journey.  A large forest, saturating the plains of Eastern Africa for millions of years resulted in a boon of tree living primates which had first evolved in the earlier, more sparse forests of Africa.  There, in that epoch, a great variety of primate species evolved, filling the massive forests to their brim.  Eventually, like all good things, the party came to an end and the forest returned to its standard size.

Many of the new primate species just as quickly went extinct, quickly gobbled up by predators while roaming the plains for new habitats.  Others established dominance over the forests and eventually evolved into modern apes.  The ancestors of humans, though, managed to largely bid adieu to the forest while still surviving.  These new primates, the earliest hominids, were still adept to climbing trees, but had also learned to use their hands for other things, like pulling insects out of the ground, or cracking open large nuts, or scavenging the carcasses left behind by large predators.  This new system worked and the hominid brain was fed well, especially by protein from the marrow and brains of animals left behind by lions, tigers and bears (I know there aren't bears in Africa) that couldn't get to it with their clumsy paws.

Soon a wide variety of primates evolved living outside of the forest and newer species became less adept at climbing trees and more so at using their hands for other, more human things.  This shift completed the long transition from the traditionally quadruped mammal to the fully bipedal hominid, an animal that essentially ceased use of its hands for the purposes of locomotion.  The gait of the biped became remarkably different than that of the quadruped.  Rather then continue to hunch over, as its primate cousins had done for millennia, the hominids began to stand up straight, taking a big step towards developing a speaking brain.

The hair on top of your head is the remnant of nearly an entire body's worth of long, thick, hair sported by the first hominids.  Like their forest dwelling cousins they required the fur to protect from the overbearing African sun when the cover of trees wouldn't do the job.  It only seems logical then that those primates which left the forests to roam the plains would become much more hairier, after being exposed to that much more sun.  Yet, instead the opposite happens, hominids become less and less hairier than their cousins (even though modern humans of all types have just about the same number of hair follicles as chimpanzees) because they unwittingly begin to use another tool for fighting exposure to the sun: they stand up.

If you take your dog for a walk on a nude beach in the blazing St. Maarten sun, at the end of the walk your naked body will have been exposed to 30% of the amount of sun to which your dog was exposed.  Don't worry, you're dog will be fine because of two systems it has evolved to fight all that exposure.  The first, of course, is a body full of dark fur that absorbs most of the light's rays, leaving the dog's epidermis relatively safe.  The second is all that panting.  Dogs, like almost all mammals, don't sweat to cool down.  Instead they use their mouth to create a sort of natural radiator, regulating the temperature of the blood right at that critical point before it heads to the brain to perform its most important work.

In order for this radiator to be effective, the animal must have a sizable snout, a protruding nose that can hold a reserve of cold water, blood and mucus (slightly colder than your dog's nose) which brings down the temperature of all the blood flowing through the carotid rete, the pathway through the back of your mouth for blood headed towards the brain.  Humans, who are even stingier than radiator-bearing mammals about the temperature of the blood en route to the brain, sweat, in order to maintain our blood temperature system-wide.  Not only does sweating make a good alternative to the radiator but it also works much better.  Humans can walk exponentially further with our bipedal gait through the hot sun, without a need for water or the shade, than even our primate cousins, let alone other mammals.  It took a combination of not only the adaptability of the human brain but also the walkability of the human gait and cooling system to inhabit nearly every corner of the globe.

There the elusive connection between the choice to leave the forest and walk on two legs and the ability to speak is made.  It all comes down to sweating, which we can do because we stand upright, and allows us to use our mouths for complex communication rather than as the house for a large radiator.  Once hominids developed the physical tools to relay complex ideas it was only a matter of time until their brains became bigger and thoughts became more complex and ideas began to form about things that did not exist, or at least not yet.  It is at that moment when the mouth becomes a speaker for the brain that the brain begins to develop all sorts of new and imaginative things to broadcast.

Everything But Math Is Fiction

... and even math is, to some degree, a fiction, because we must utilize our made-up language in order to conceptualize it.  For example, π is a real thing.  Amazingly, the circumference of any circle (which is also a real thing) can be found by multiplying half the diameter by π.  But the number 3.14159 and on and on and on is complete fiction.  In fact, it is such fiction that it doesn't even accurately represent the real thing it is intended to symbolize.  Accurately representing π through language is impossible.  We can only create the idea of π rather than actually conveying its true meaning (something impossible to comprehend), and in the same way, this is the problem with all language, and consequently, all of reality.

Language and culture occur simultaneously.  While all things are not literal, in that they are not represented through language, all things are perceived in a literal fashion, through language.  For example, when someone invents something, especially something that is really popular, their concept of what has been invented will always be different than the general consensus of what has been invented.  The language that society adopts is different than the language the "inventor" envisions being used.  Part of this phenomena stems from the fact that things are not "invented", but rather evolve into being as a byproduct of the existence of the conscious mind, and the other part stems from the fact that perception and culture also evolve, and, like physical objects, they are not created by any individual, not even the person accredited with "inventing" the perceived object.

If this is hard to understand then just think of any everyday object like a bicycle.  The bicycle was not invented by any single person.  Even the archetypes of the modern bike assembled in Europe at the beginning of the 19th century were not invented by single persons.  Long before then the wheel was invented, later the ability to form wood and steel, and so on.  The only way a bicycle could have been invented by an individual was if it was assembled in a prehistoric cave somewhere, long before any of the many parts of a bicycle had previously been innovated.  Even then, after the inventor releases the bike into society, it is lo longer his own, as it will undoubtedly be subjected to a perception makeover at the behest of public demand.  Yet, at each of these junctures when an individual had been credited with inventing the bicycle, the accolade was temporary, and the general consensus of what a bicycle is evolved into something far different than what the alleged inventor's concept of a bicycle was, without implying that the two perceptions ever could have been one in the same.

Now, if it is this difficult to reach an agreement about what a physical object really is then how difficult do you think it is to reach an agreement about what really happened over the scope of our shared history?  Historical events are not objects, yet because we must resort to language in order to convey the concept of historical events, they are subjected to the same parameters as physical objects.  On top of that, because we cannot ever reference historical events, considering that only very recently has it become possible to document events with audio and video technology, like we could a bike or any other physical object, language is the only tool we have to understand historical concepts.

Therefore, we must admit that all history outside of math is fiction.  Limited by human language and subjected to cultural perceptions, history told even through first hand audio/video accounts (the physical event) does not align with the histories perceived by the involved agents or the history that will be decided by general consensus, just as the concept of a bike constructed by a mechanic doesn't align with the concept held by the individual to which it is sold.

Human beings are social animals.  All of society is culture.  All of culture is language.  All of language is fiction.  The only non-fiction that exists is math, but even math cannot be factually portrayed by fictional language.

One in a Billion

Imagine that you were instructed to try and hit a target on a dart board.  Now consider if the size of the target was only big enough for a single dart to hit and only one billionth the size of the whole board.  Statistically you'd probably have to throw at least a half billion darts before you would even have a chance to hit the target, then you'd have to throw two billion total darts before you were likely to hit the target twice.  One last thing before you're done.  You also need to hit that target a billion times before any significant change will happen.

That is evolution.  It is not intelligent or designed.  It is random and quite stupid, but amazing and beautiful all at once

Evolution All Around You

The other day I was waiting at the bus stop for, what else, a bus, and I couldn't help but notice the deep grooves that had occurred in the asphalt right at the spot where the driver's side front tire of the large vehicle came to a stop so many times each day.  "That", I proclaimed inside my brain, "is evolution!"  The small changes made to this section of concrete would not be visible to any person, even if they stood there, watching, for days or weeks.  It would take months or years before you'd truly begin to see the grooves that are so deep today. 

This is just a rather simple explanation of how evolution exists around us everyday.  It's the beginning of an object lesson that could go on nearly for eternity.  Evolution is not only the way in which humans or animals or life came to be but how everything has come to be.  All anyone has to do to witness the evidence of evolution is to observe and analyze the world they live in.  Soon it will become clear that everything evolves, everything is subject to the mechanism of natural selection and nothing comes into existence through a single "design".

After you're done staring at the street then look up into the sky.  There you can't see (but I promise it exists) the billions of practically lifeless planets with extreme conditions that scientists are nearly certain could not be inhabited by intelligent life.  But for every one of those planets there are more than a billion more that we can never observe, and there were and will be billions more before the end of time and space.  Based on that we can infer that there also are billions of other universes that do exist and have existed or will exist which humans will never be able to fathom let alone prove.

The universe and universes evolve so slowly, so inefficiently but on such an epic scale (all entirely relevant to us) that we have for our observation the remnants of the "losers" (or future winners) of natural selection floating around us. By exploring the cosmos we get to learn the incredible number of misses natural selection endures for every precious hit.  Exploring the cosmos also makes it easier to try and comprehend on how big a scale, in matters of space and time, the course of evolution is operating.  We are just one species hoping to survive to the end of an infinitesimal epoch on a pre-teen planet that lives among a sea of trillions of floating objects made up of infinite numbers of matter variations. 

The universe is 13.77 billion years old.  Modern humans evolved no more than 300,000 years ago.  Mathematically speaking, there have most likely been at least a million different planets and millions more different species in existence with similar or greater intelligence than humans in just the last two or three billion years of this universe's existence.  On earth alone there will certainly be at least thousands more species of equal or greater intelligence than us before this planet finally dies in about 40 billion years.  I wonder sometimes what they'll say about us.

We've been around for a few hundred thousand years and so has perhaps our most identifying trait.  That is why the origin of language is so hard to define.  It is also why language existed for exponentially longer periods of time than English as something many people would not even associate with spoken words today.  But even from what we do understand about the history of language we can see proof that language has evolved and not only that, but that it has evolved without any single driving force or design. 

Every language today, regardless of how young or old, has evolved from the same utterances spoken in East Africa hundreds of thousands of years ago.  As humanity spread across the globe, so did language.  Language adapted to its environment and to any new obstacles it faced.  Many more words and languages have been discarded than are in existence today and some hold on by the thread of cultural identity for their survival.  As time goes on the ones that survive for even a short period are those that are the most effective, the most adaptable or simply the ones which can best fill a specific niche.  There is no design, and no superior being, each language happens naturally and every language (including English) becomes inferior or irrelevant over time.

Language can evolve quickly because it is not a physical thing.  Physical things have been known to evolve much more slowly, but that trend has changed significantly since the Industrial Revolution.  Like the Cambrian (an epoch of great variation in the evolution of life) did for life, the Industrial Revolution led to an exponential increase in the number of new physical objects that humans could use to make their lives apparently easier and more comfortable.  Often history prefers to attribute each of these objects to a single inventor, but like language, no single person has ever invented any physical object in the history of humans. 

Even objects that seem to almost blatantly have a single designer can always be attributed to scores of minds that existed at the time of its "creation" or in the centuries of logical thought that had previously elapsed.  When he "invented" his engine in 1893, Rudolf Diesel didn't have to first design the wheel or the cylinder.  He didn't have to develop a method to cast iron or drill for petroleum.  Regardless of whether Rudolf Diesel lived or not,  a device would have come into being to fill the same mechanical niche that the Diesel engine continues filling (however inefficiently) to this day.  Innovations are not the inventions of individuals but the inevitable fillings of voids created by our ever evolving environment by the amalgamation of ideas and innovations from an innumerable assortment of minds.

That leads us to the greatest evidence of evolution before our eyes of them all.  Fully aware of how few Americans, or humans in general, to be fair, ever ponder the cosmos or etymology or even contemporary history, I present to you an opportunity to understand the nature of evolution by doing what you are forced to do every day.  The human environment is about 99% society.  Society is a product of evolution.  Society, and when I say society I mean everything physical or metaphysical that is uniquely human in nature, evolved along with humans.  Humans could not have evolved into the beings we are today without society as we know it today, evolving right alongside us.

Skinny jeans are a product of evolution.  No one invented skinny jeans, no one declared that skinny jeans are the hottest trend and no one will be able to save skinny jeans from their inevitable extinction.  That is evolution.  Everyday, all around us.  Society, skinny jeans and all, exists to fill a niche and adapts as quickly as the environment that is a result of it.  Society does not create the environment and the environment does not create society, they each adapt to each other mutually like a flu virus and an immune system.  Their only drive, their only purpose, is survival.  The skinny jeans will appear to hold on for as long as they can but one day, without notice, flared jeans may one day take their place, imploring us all to ponder why we ever wore skinny jeans in the first place.

Purpose is the purpose of society.  As humans evolved the ability to comprehend our own existence a great niche was created.  This niche was the necessary (far more necessary back then than now) distraction from the, for all accounts, pointless nature of human existence.  Out of this void grew the great and unfathomable complexity of human society.  Every aspect of it exists to distract each and every one of us from the fact that no true purpose can ever be known, no origin can be discovered, to distract us from our absurdly small existence in the scope of all things, let alone the scope of what has just come into being by the expansion of countless universes since I began writing this sentence.

While some may find this depressing, personally, I find it amazing.  This apparent nihilism is not a reason to shut our eyes.  That's what people do when they say that we were designed by some unknown intelligence.  Instead let's ignore the artificial distraction that has evolved alongside us.  Let's do the unthinkable and buck evolution (which is not what we'd be doing, we'd merely be evolving further) and proclaim ourselves no longer in need of the adaptation to ignorance that is society.  Let's exist not for now but for tomorrow.  We are capable of passing down so much more than genetic material to our progeny.  If you really find evolution to be so offensive than stop letting it determine who you are by going through life semi-conscious and start evolving on your own into the person you know you can be.