I was reading an article in a national newspaper recently on provision of pain relief during childbirth. The comments on the article quickly became polarised – and unpleasant. When one woman commented that she and her child would have died without medical intervention, one responder claimed that this would have been “Darwinism in action”. In a similar way, during the Covid-19 lockdown there were certain commentators who argued that since the virus was principally a risk for the elderly and people with underlying health conditions that there was no need to impose full lockdowns. In fairness, the bulk of them didn’t imply that the virus should simply be left to work its way through the population – “Darwinism in action” style – but many were happy to suggest that rather than using national lockdowns governments should simply have imposed restrictions on the elderly and vulnerable and left everyone else free to mingle.
However, I’m not convinced this is a good understanding of evolution. On a simple level, it’s true that success as a species is based upon there being a sufficiently large and healthy population to pass their genes on to the next generation. Yet when people talk of “survival of the fittest” – it often seems to be focused on strength and physical prowess. In fact, long term survival of a species is more a question of adaptability. A good example of this is given by the Burgess shale fossils. A landslide in the Rocky mountains in Canada revealed fossils of around 500 million years old from the time when multicellular organisms had first developed upon Earth. The creatures found in the Burgess shale are beautiful and spectacularly strange – including highly specialised beings with five eyes, some with long snouts and multiple pairs of legs. Ultimately most of the creatures died out and as far as can be ascertained, the one whose descendants survived was a pretty boring, mundane, slug like creature. Some people see this as a kind of scientific Memento Mori. These creatures died – either as a result of a major cataclysm or over a period of time – and there is no reason why species living on Earth today, humans included, won’t ultimately succumb to extinction in a similar way.
I prefer to think of the boring primordial slug creature. Ultimately, being the best predator means nothing if you have no prey. Being an ultra-efficient ruminator is useless if there is no grass. Being able to adapt to changing circumstances and environments – even if you might seem small, weak, unremarkable on the surface – is the way to survive.
When it comes to humans – we don’t have amazing strength, or speed – we’re far less agile than our nearest relations in the primate family. Yet our intelligence and ingenuity has allowed us to live successfully in every environment on Earth. We often focus on the negative aspects of our success – our capability for violence, our tendency to consume to excess – the damage we’ve done to our world. Whilst we console ourselves with the fact that we can act altruistically to help others and to live equitably – we see that this isn’t uniquely human.
Yet what is uniquely human, is using our intelligence and compassion to develop technology and medicine to solve our problems and to compensate for our limitations. Hence dying in childbirth or of Covid-19 isn’t Darwinism in action.
Using our knowledge and medical technology to intervene and save the lives in danger is us demonstrating our evolutionary adaptation – and our humanity.