A while ago I was stuck behind a red light in East York. I noticed that the car in front of me had the the Darwin fish logo on it. You know the symbol. It is a take-off on the fish symbol that many Christians have on the back of their cars exept that the Darwin fish has little feet stuck on the bottom of the fish, to symbolize evolution. The implication being that devout Christians who don’t believe in evolution are backwards in their thinking. Clever riff, I thought. Then I noticed in addition to the Darwin fish, the car had a gay nations flag.
My next thought was, is this guy conscious of the irony involved here?
What I mean is this: Charles Darwin argued in The Origin of Species By Means of Natural Selection that the principal mechanism that drove evolution and explained biological diversity was natural selection. Well what does natural selection care about? Only one thing: a species’, an individual‘s or gene’s fitness function. What’s a fitness function? Partly it can be measured by IQ tests and bench press contests, but an irreplacable central element is the number of offspring you have.
And who has the most offspring? evangelical Christians or urban hipsters? (And by that term I include heterosexual downtown trendys as well.) Natural selection doesn’t care whether you believe in natural selection or not. All it cares about is your fitness.
I know, I know. It is not just a race to see who can have the most babies. Quality counts as much, or sometimes even more, than quantity. This is true. But it is also true that, as a bare minimum, in order to be fit you have to reproduce at least at a replacement level. And if you want to be fitter than a population that has significantly more babies on average than your group, you are bumping up against a quality curve that is very steep. But regardless, if you have no kids, you aren’t fit. By definition.
I wonder if the guy with the Darwin fish on his car ever stopped to think about the impications of the theory of natural selection on him?
