When people suggest that you “make peace with God”, they might mean:
God is very powerful, so you are unlikely to win fights with him,
His authority is legit, so you should be ashamed to fight him, and
Any value by which you might justify fighting him came from him, and he understands it better than you.
I now suggest that you “make peace with Darwin”. Instead of trying to fight Darwinian evolution, you should mostly work with it.
One reason is that while you may have the freedom and resources to pursue whatever goals you choose in the short run, in the long run Darwinian evolution, via both DNA and culture, is a very powerful force. So powerful that if you love something enough to want it to last and grow in the long run, your main way to achieve that is to mix practices which support that thing you love into a pretty adaptive overall cultural and DNA package. After all, cultures with less than adaptive packages go away.
My slogan here is “To Love Something, Mix It With Life”. And to implement this slogan you’ll have to have substantial influence over some cultural package that somehow becomes pretty adaptive. You must work not only to mix practices supporting the thing you love into that package, but also to help that package stay or become pretty adaptive. Which means trying to help it to win at Darwinian evolution.
Another reason to make peace with Darwin is that all of the processes inside you which you might recruit, and also the values that you might embrace, all in support of your opposition to Darwinian evolution, all of those resulted from such processes. Darwinian evolution is a search process that tries out different packages of internal processes and guiding values, to see which might win in the long run. Your existing now with some particular package of such things resulted from recent heuristics of this process picking your package as part of its current bets re which have the best chances of winning.
Now Darwinian evolution is blind in many ways, and so maybe you can see things that it cannot, about how your package is actually a worse bet than Darwinian evolution could see. But this process has also taken into account many things that you do not appreciate, and so your package might actually be a better bet than you realize. The actions that you take to promote your goals in supposed defiance of Darwinian evolution may well actually achieve adaption in complex ways you do not understand.
I actually think that we now live at a special time when our Darwinian evolution process is unusually broken, making conscious analysis unusually good at figuring out how to be more adaptive, relative to following the values and instincts that we inherited from our Darwinian history. Which offers unusual opportunities for promoting stuff you love, via improving the adaptiveness of key cultural packages.
I think you're making a good point. Like much of your writing, it's pretty abstract. Can you give an example or two and show how you would mix it?
I agree with the counsel. I want to push on one sentence.
You grant that evolution is "blind in many ways, and so maybe you can see things that it cannot." The next sentence puts the deliberation back — the process has "taken into account" things you don't appreciate, your package may be a better bet than you realize. The concession doesn't survive its own paragraph. I don't think that's carelessness. Saying it is easy; adjusting your thinking to run on it is hard, and I couldn't do it a year ago either. A blind process has no objective, so "seeing what it cannot" has nothing to compare against. You and it are not two forecasters looking at the same board. There is no board.
That matters most for your last paragraph. If the process is unusually broken right now, what broke isn't only the inherited instincts — it's the return signal. Differential retention is the thing that tells you your steering was wrong. Take it offline and conscious analysis doesn't get sharper, it gets unchecked. It can grow more internally consistent every year while quietly losing contact with anything that would correct it. A broken window is the worst moment to trust the wheel, not the best.
On Henderson's question in his comment, the strongest example I know is the high-fertility religious enclaves. But look at what they actually show: a deliberately loaded package riding a host society they neither maintain nor could reproduce. That's mixing what you love with somebody else's life. It may be the honest version of your slogan, and it's a weaker one.