When talking about god and evolution in the same breath, as I have been, I'm speaking from a teleological viewpoint--teleology assumes that things can be explained better in terms of what they will become. This assumes further that there is a direction in the evolutionary process, an idea with which a lot of people would have a problem. Personally, I think that evoltion goes on its own unguided way for a vast span of time--billions of years--but definitely becomes guided once you have a species (such as humans) who have a vested interest in shaping things to their own ends. You only have to look at the various food crops or domesticated species of today to know what I mean. For the past 10-12,000 years, roughly, we've been changing various species to please ourselves, with various success because we've essentially been working blind (until Gregor Mendel explained genetics, and even then nobody paid any attention to his work until long after he was dead). So if you get to the point (as we have now, almost) where you can genetically manipulate animal species with a particular aim in view, and knowing that we will acheive that aim, what's to stop people playing god and creatring new species of hominid that are slightly more intelligent than chimps, but not smart enough to compete with us? What's to stop humans from bringing back the Neanderthal species, and using them as the lowest labouring class? What are our moral obligations to creatures that are literally subhuman, with all the conataions of that state? God knows, we treat fellow-humans badly when we consider them to be below us in any way; how will we treat those whom we drag up out of the forests and out of deep history to become our servants?
