The Spirit's role in evolution

I've been mulling the evolution/large early human community thing (cover article "The Search for the Historical Adam" in Christianity Today a few weeks ago). It was my observation of how some parents treat their children and how I treat Evadel sometimes that lead to my latest thought.

Presupposing an evolutionary model, in the beginning, or some time after the beginning, God breathed his spirit/breath into some primates and made the first human community. When they disobeyed, they died, or perhaps God's breath simply left them, and they went back to whatever advanced primatic state they were in. Let's look forward to another time when God's breath came powerfully upon people. Acts describes people loving and caring for one another in evolutionarily impossible ways, seemingly. Or at least their social behavior was counterintuitive, but it was the sociological evolution that God was directing.

Regarding parenting, it's interesting that nonhuman species show different parenting characteristics. Some parents eat their young. Others abandon the kids to fend for themselves. Still others hang with their brood for years to give them the best opportunity for survival. When we think of human parenting, "good" parents equip their children with the best tools they can to support survival and thriving. (I really wanted to say "thrival.") However, we see alcoholic—or abusive, or otherwise dysfunctional—parents teaching terrible behavior patterns to their children. These children have their own children, and they often exhibit the exact same parenting tendencies.

Theologically, we could say that abusive parenting is sinful. Or we could say that God's breath does not animate such parenting, even if this Spirit is present, sometimes protecting young psyches, sometimes restraining awful behavior. (And sadly, children still die at the hands of their parents today.) But think about some of the accounts in the First Testament. Parents would place their babies in the red-hot arms of flaming Molech idols. That's terrible parenting. That's worse than anything we see in the animal kingdom. Other animals, as far as I know, do not use technology to invent ways of torturing and disposing of their young.

This leads me to wonder if awful parenting, for instance, shows evolutionary regression. Other examples would include leaders committing genocide (physical in despotic regimes or emotional in workplaces), spouses speaking harshly to one another, and taking something illicitly to enrich oneself. (Strangely, this model of evolutionary regression is also called sin.) Humans have the choice to let the Breath of God animate them, or they can seize the fruit and declare that they can handle the differentiation between good and evil.

I've heard antievolutionists say, "Well, if evolution were true, why haven't we evolved into something else?" I wonder if it's because we've squeezed the Spirit of God out of the lungs of our communities.