Evolution Doesn’t Care About YOU

Steve Gould has a great analogy about natural selection:

Suppose that a population will be better adapted if it can move from A to B. In the…cruel Darwinian hecatomb, each individual stands at spot A and falls at random. If he happens to fall right along the line to B he survives to the next trial. All Individuals who fall off the line — the vast majority — are summarily shot…Standing now at one body length along the path to B…the process continues…The population moves but one body length towards its goal each time. The population will eventually get to point B, but would any engineer favour such a poky and punitive device?

Here’s a diagram (blue dots are corpses, green dots are those who happen to fall on the road to B):

The analogy is powerful for 2 reasons. First it explains the basic process. Second (unlike others), it brings home just how wasteful and cruel the process is. The Great Wall, Pyramids and other grand projects were built on the corpses of countless victims. Evolution is the same, but with an even more extravagant waste of life. Movement towards B requires constant punishment of a population. To quote a friend’s description of working conditions in a certain company: “there’s a big carrot but an even bigger stick!”.

Each design or adaptation is the result of tens of thousands, sometimes tens of millions of corpses. And the faster a population evolves the more punishing the stick is. (If the stick is lax, the population is likely to meander from A to B, or not get there at all.)

I think (or hope?) humans have stopped evolving. The alternative is frightening. For things to be reasonably good humans society must get as far from natural selection as possible.