Fit to survive?

Most of us have heard the phrase ‘survival of the fittest’ and immediately think of Charles Darwin. It has also been used by racists who thought that it explained their dominance over other races. And now we have an idiot in the White House who couldn’t possibly understand the complex science of evolution, but assuredly regards himself as the ‘fittest’ - ever ! 

First, it was not Darwin who coined the phrase, and it is not a good description of how evolution works. Evolution works through mistakes occurring in the copying of a creature’s DNA as billions of cells in the body of an animal or plant multiply either as part of growth or just renewal, say of skin cells. The DNA copying mechanism is pretty accurate, but every now and then a mistake gets made – termed a mutation. Quite often the change has no effect. Other times it causes a problem, and at other times it leads to some beneficial change, some improvement. It’s just the luck of the draw, and the circumstances in which the creature finds itself at that time.

Here’s an interesting case. One minor change in the DNA coding for our hemoglobin can lead to sickle-cell anemia, not a great thing to have. However, if you do have this abnormality it gives you resistance to malaria; so in certain circumstances it’s not such a bad thing to have, the alternative being a high chance of dying. The result is that surprisingly high percentages – up to 32% -  of people living in parts of the world where malaria is still common (Central Africa, south India, and a few parts of Greece) have this mutation. It certainly doesn’t leave you feeling the fittest, but you’re fitter than other people in that particular situation who don’t have the sickle-cell mutation.  

So a more accurate wording to describe the evolutionary process would be ‘survival of the fitter for the current situation’. The change might be more fur, and because the animal is in a cold place it’s a help and so this furrier animal has more offspring. But then sometime later, because of a change in the climate or because the animal has migrated to a warmer place, then the thicker fur becomes a handicap. And that’s how all living things have evolved over four billion years from the first simple microscopic cells. This is a difficult concept to grasp, but with some cells dividing every half hour, four billion years is a very long time.

We humans went through a long and very difficult period in our early development. A natural period of climate change caused the jungle of East Africa to thin out. Like our chimpanzee cousins we had mostly depended on a diet of fruit plus an occasional bit of small mammal meat. Now we were starving and were forced to go hunt larger mammals. This developed some good teamwork skills. However, each small group or tribe would often find themselves up against another group in the next valley over. It often became a case of either they starved or you starved. Tribalism involving violence against the other was born. We evolved to be fitter in surviving compared to the other guy in these particularly difficult circumstances.

In a brief exchange with Jane Goodall once I learned that our nearest relative chimpanzees do attack neighboring groups and kill; but nowhere near on the scale that human armies or 9/11 style terrorists do, not to mention the Nazi Holocaust, or the many millions who died under Soviet communism or Mao’s purges in China. Our big brains enable us to kill on a massive scale when we so decide.

Now, instead of living in small groups with a ridge of hills or a river separating us from a tribal enemy, millions of us live in cramped cities with people next door who are a different color or dress differently or who speak a different language  - and so too often our instinct is to be on our guard or openly critical of those who are different from us.  This tribalism is deeply ingrained. This evolved stance did make us fitter a hundred thousand years ago. Now this ingrained nature is a serious handicap for future peaceful human development. 

Yes we evolved a big brain, but sometimes we can be too clever for our own good. We’re clever enough to build an atom bomb or an ICBM or hack into another nation’s computer system, but often not clever enough to turn an enemy into a friend.

So this is the creature we are. Our natures evolved in order to survive in the very difficult conditions in Africa a few hundred thousand years ago. Can this complex creature survive into the future with these two combined evolved traits of cleverness and vindictiveness?  I hope we can increasingly resolve the conflict between these two features of our nature; but there are times when I get quite worried.