The Dallas Safari Club is raising money to promote the survival of the black rhinoceros, which is good because the number of black rhinoceroses in the universe has now dropped below 5,000, which is down from 70,000 forty years ago. They are auctioning off – I am not kidding – a permit issued by Namibia to hunt and kill one black rhinoceros. Here’s the good news: That another homo sapiens has a capacious enough intellect to hold both of those ideas, conservation and auctioning off such a license, in his mind simultaneously is proof that the great engine of evolution – diversity – is still chugging along on all cylinders. "First and foremost, this is about saving the black rhino," says Ben Carter, the executive director of the Dallas Safari Club. "There is a biological reason for this hunt, and it's based on a fundamental premise of modern wildlife management: Populations matter; individuals don't. By removing counterproductive individuals from a herd, rhino populations can actually grow." (At least that’s the same kind of logic conservative use when asserting that reducing taxes increases revenues.) My own mind is simply too antiquated to use at one time two ideas so mutually exclusive. Remembering that humans share 23% of their DNA with cauliflower, I can’t conceive that the president of the Dallas Safari Club and I share more than, say, 10% of our DNA, but then that may be another case of the weakness of my own mind, in this case not being able to shrug off logic. Mr. Carter is a bold new experiment, evolutionarily speaking. He and I use our brains for completely different purposes. Adaptations in evolution are often accomplished by using an organ in ways unrelated to previous usage. So rest assured that evolution is continuing to provide variety. The bad news is that we see once again that evolution promises only change, not a direction or progress.