STUPIDITY EVOLVED

STUPIDITY EVOLVED   (Originally posted 9/26/12)

An Andrew Tirade

“Two things are infinite: the universe and human stupidity; and I'm not sure about the universe.”

-Albert Einstein

My fourteen-year-old son started high school a few weeks back.  As we all remember to a greater or lesser extent, high school is the true proving ground for Evolutionary Science.  It proves that diversity doesn’t always benefit development.  It also proves that adaptation tends to flounder more than it fails or succeeds.  Most of all, this time we spend in transformation from childhood to maturity reveals a certain undeniable truth; Natural Selection favors physicality, not brains.   In fact, personal experience has lead me to conclude that any intellect developed by the human race to this point, is nothing but a divergent accident of the evolutionary process.  The reality is that Natural Selection, favors survivability, and as any Saturday afternoon trip to Walmart will assure, smarts has nothing to do with our reproductive survival.  It is my position that this evolutionary spike in learning and intelligence that has occurred over the past 7,000 or so years, is nothing more than a temporary anomaly.  Without question, the next few millennia will bring us back to our natural state.  This is the one where we pissed in our drinking water and ate tree bark for a few hundred thousand years.  This is not really as bad a thing as it is natural and in keeping with Evolutionary Science, because as I have always believed, adaptation and natural selection favor stupidity much more than intellect.

I THINK YOU KILLED IT PAL

This was the conversation that I had with my son, Jake during his second week of high school:

“Hey Buddy, how was school today?”

“Uh, okay I guess.”

“Why?  Have you been having a problem with anybody?”

“No, not really a problem.”

“Well was there an incident then?”

“I kinda guess it was.  My friend Noah started yelling at me when I sat down at his table for lunch.”

“Why would he yell at you?  I thought you guys are friends?”

“Well when I sat down, Noah and four of his friends arguing with another two guys at the table about how evolution isn’t real.”

“So what did you do?”

“Just sat there and ate my lunch for about five minutes, then Noah asked me what I think.  So I told him I believe in evolution.”

“How did that go over?”

“They gave me really angry looks and then Noah told me ‘that’s really stupid!’ So then I asked him ‘why do you think that’s stupid?’ So then he got really mad and told me ‘Because it’s proven that evolution is false in the Bible!’”

“Sounds like a pretty heavy lunch.”

“Yeah, so then I asked him ‘Is there any physical evidence in the bible which proves evolution is false?’ So he answered back ‘No, but there is no proof for evolution either.’ So I told him ‘Yes there is, haven’t you ever been to the Museum of Natural History?’”

“Good for you buddy!  What did he say to that?”

“He told me how stupid I am again.  Then I decided that it was pointless to argue and I walked away.”

Jake went on to tell me that he no longer associates with those kids because they bring up the “evolution thing” every time he sees them.  As a person of Universal Faith and the firmest belief in Science and the Scientific Method, I tried to explain to my son what I believe to be a fundamental truth; “You can’t argue faith with science and you can’t prove science with faith.”  I think Jake got it, when he said; “It’s kinda like the circle thing right dad?”  Recalling a recent conversation we had about what was around before the Universe, before the Big Bang.  “That’s right buddy, it’s like trying to find the corner of a circle.  You just can’t.”  Now Jake just avoids the lunchroom revival meetings.  I’m proud of him, however, I reminded him that to avoid them is good, but to ignore them is bad because before you know it, one of them could turn into a Pogrom!

Here is the nickel version of Evolution, as I understand it.  You have any group of animals.  Then every so often, they accidentally produce a random mutation.  Lets say brown bunnies have snow white babies.  Well, those mutations aren’t very good, because the white bunnies are highly visible to predators, which makes them more likely to have shorter lives and less likely to pass along their whiteness to the next generation of baby bunnies.  Pray for snowy winters bunnies!  On the other side of this evolutionary coin, every once in a while these same brown bunnies have baby bunnies with dark brown spots mixed in with their medium brown pelts.  These spots work to naturally camouflage the bunnies, making them less visible to predators.  So these babies live longer and pass along their spots to their babies who in turn do the same.  Being that the regular brown bunnies are at a disadvantage compared to the spotted bunnies with regard to survivability, competition for food resources and making new bunnies they eventually are replaced by the new “super” spotted bunnies.

Obviously spread over long expanses of time, this Natural Selection leads to big changes on an “as needed” basis.  Now exactly why is this against religion again?  We all play at this little game when we go to see somebody’s new baby and comment; “Oh how precious, she has her fathers Toucan like nose!” or“Would you look at that.  He has his mother’s disproportionately short limbs and elongated cranium.  Isn’t that just darling?”  Like I said, most of the random mutations and passed along traits are whopping failures.  We all can’t be spotted bunnies; some of us just have to settle for working the drive thru at White Castle.

Hence we arrive at the big question.  Does this controversial evolution thing favor intelligence?  It should, but as we all know from Real Housewives of New Jersey, human success, at least in the monetary and material sense of the word would seem to indicate otherwise.  Maybe brains helped a little back in our hunter/gatherer days, but I think smarts has run its course and we are all now slowly and steadily boarding the train for Dumb Dumb Town!  Think about it, we’re a really young species as the fossil record indicates.  In a short time, with our freaky accidental smarts we have figured out how to make fire, domesticate animals, communicate across vast distances, and invent the Shake Weight.  Great!  Or maybe not great, according to Mr. Darwin’s findings.

PEOPLE ACTUALLY BOUGHT THIS!  NEED I SAY MORE?

The last time I checked, horses didn’t invent calculus, elephants didn’t build the Great Pyramids, and my dogs are still having a really tough time reading Shakespeare.  This isn’t because they don’t want to do these things, however from the inception of the evolution of smarts, they didn’t have to!  For hundreds upon millions of years, they didn’t need developed intelligence, and for most of humanity’s extended history, we didn’t either.  Maybe without truly knowing it, this is what Jake’s new archenemies were getting at.  Yes, there is a fossil record.  That is indisputable.  (If you would like to dispute it, I will bring you on an all expenses paid tour of the Museum of Natural History in New York.  If you continue to disagree during the visit, I will throttle you somewhere between the T-Rex skeleton and the giant Easter Island head in the Margret Mead wing. )  However, what is disputable is at what point did man’s intelligence enable him to leave the world of nature and construct a world of his own.

This would be the time when God, or whatever you chose to accept as a higher power, lifted us out of the world of beasts and taught us how to finally wipe our asses.  One of the older calendars on the planet puts us in the year 5773.  That’s puts us back to the very beginning of our recorded history.  Not the beginning, but close to the beginning of the world, as we know it.  These were the days when our race really started to control our environment in earnest.  This was the era when our evolution stopped modifying us and we started modifying the world to suit our needs.   So I see the lunch table fundamentalists point, although I see it on my terms.  Terms, which I am sure that any 14-year-old zealot would consider “stupid.”

Maybe a higher power did trigger the event that raised us up out of the evolutionary process.  And it’s likely that evolution plays a major role in the creation of intelligence, albeit not a wholly necessary part.  A very wise ignoramus once said; “If ya ain’t goin forward, you’re a goin backward.”  This being said, evolution is possibly still working in a subtle way upon humanity.  And we are willingly immersing ourselves into the process with loving abandon.  This affair of the mind is what leads us back to the real question.

Are we getting stupider?  Damn right we are!  I say this with a high degree of uneducated bloviating confidence.   Just watch animal planet on a Saturday night(for something other than documentary footage of rhino’s “doing it”, although that is as entertaining as hell) and one can immediately observe that in majority of the animal kingdom, females are not inclined to accept their mates based on any display of intelligence.  In fact, color, strength, and aggression are way ahead of smarts when it comes to reproductive success.  In fact the archetype of the “simple handsome lug” of a man wins the day ninety nine percent of the time.  Now guys, don’t start getting all high and mighty about why David Beckham gets more chicks than you.  Trust me, men are more responsible for bottom feeding for intelligence in their mates than their female counterparts.  In fact, I would bet my last cent that if I asked 20 men what kind of woman they find attractive, brainy wouldn’t be anywhere near their top five desirable attributes.

Should we blame ourselves for our devolution into dumb-dumbs?  No not really, it’s just the way we were made from the beginning.  Our smarts are obviously one of natures more pronounced accidents in Mother Nature’s otherwise spotless 4 billion year track record.   She always seems to clean up her mistakes in the end, but for now, I wonder what she looks like naked?