I was rambling around the house trying to mentally outline a column about tax policy when my wife asked me to fill the dinosaur feeder in our back yard.  Actually she called it a bird feeder but we’ve only recently learned that birds are evolutionary descendants of dinosaurs, so we haven’t adjusted our language.

Thinking about how dinosaurs became birds is easier than imagining the how American tax code could evolve into something as practical as a chicken, so I changed the subject and my day is already better.

For the dinosaurs, the transition took a long time – something in the neighborhood of 150 million years is a widely accepted estimate.  Dinosaurs didn’t need to elect a congress to create their future, they just adapted as best they could to changes in their environment, including the evolution of other animals and plants, and let nature take its course.  Judging from the number and variety of them now having brunch outside my window, the dinosaurs may be slow, but they have been successful.

We humans haven’t been around nearly as long as the dinosaurs, or even as long as the birds.  We’re evolutionary newcomers but most of us think we’re superior to the creatures sharing our back yards because we have sophisticated languages that we can speak and write to convey complicated ideas to future generations.  Our “superiority” has produced science, literature, mathematics, religion, art, music, clothing, big buildings (and the American tax code).

Along our evolutionary way, we created customary ways of doing things that allow our descendants to survive and thrive.  We build homes to shelter them.  We feed them, teach them, and keep them safe as best we can.  As I look around in my yard, I can see squirrels and dinosaurs (ok – birds) working at those same things.  It seems that evolution or creation (or God if you prefer) built the desire to do those things right into our DNA.  We are here today because our ancestors, going back millions of years, had successful families to care for their young.

As I watch the dinosaurs in my yard, they seem to be fully occupied in the present, the recent past and the near-term future.  They are building nests that will be temporary, eating, and enjoying active sex lives.  The squirrels still seem to be digging up some of last year’s acorns.  Mostly they are living in the present but any observer can see their values – the sense of right and wrong that will assure the success of their families and their coming generations.  Evolution rewards such behavior with survival and adaptation.

We humans expanded mutual support beyond family into neighborhoods, villages and cultures.  We specialized, filling particular roles that help the whole group.  Ants, bees, beavers, wolves, buffalo and others did that too and it worked for all of us.

With our long-term social memory, passed down by word of mouth and later in written form we humans are able to record our values as stories, religions, and laws.  We’ve learned to use those as organizing principles for large societies – even empires.  Incas, Masai, Cherokee, Egyptians, Chinese, Romans, and recently Americans organized themselves so that future generations could succeed. Their laws, customs and religions supported societies where future generations could thrive.  That appears to have worked for all of them.  But eventually some things need improvement.

The evolution of cultures seems to be a lot like the evolution of living species.  Some have been overrun by more powerful competitors.  Some fell prey to droughts, or natural disasters.  Some fell when they were unable or unwilling to support their families and societies so their young could thrive in future generations.  Dinosaurs became birds in order to thrive in a changing world.  Romans became Christians and brought much of the western world along in the process before their empire collapsed.   America emerged from that, much as birds emerged from dinosaurs – becoming a new creature that fed and supported each new generation toward ever greater success.

That, unfortunately, brings me back to the American tax code.  Our congress will soon begin debating it.  In our large and complicated nation, the tax code should collect resources from us and direct them toward creating a nation where all can achieve our potential and succeed together.  Will we use it to evolve as dinosaurs did?  Or will we become extinct?