"You should not eat talking trees. Nope, nope, nope"

I’m really glad that I don’t live in the world Malthus described in An Essay on the Principle of Population where weaker members of the population are rooted out by purposefully inviting disease and famine in order to ensure that the food supply is always adequate. I am almost certain that I would not be one of the surviving members of the human race. But Darwin really took Malthus’ principles on population to heart in On the Origin of Species, embracing the idea of competition to keep population levels relatively constant. Wallace, analogously, preferred the term ‘survival of the fittest’, which does not sound so favorable to someone so un-fit as myself.

I have, in a way, been hitting the gym

And I don’t mean fitness in the “I’ve been hitting the gym” sense of the word; I mean fit in the ability to pass on favourable genetic traits. For example, I need constant access to my inhaler, and my nebulizer when that doesn’t work. I can’t eat anything I’d like for fear of having an allergic reaction, going into anaphylactic shock, and dying. Even as I write this, I’m getting over a slight cold, one of many more to come this year because it seems I am just predisposed to bacterial infection. If I was one of those squirrels I see running around Old Campus all the time at school—a sickly squirrel who couldn’t breathe, could only eat certain nuts, and needed my little burrow to be perfectly clear of allergens—I daresay I would not survive very long even amongst the friendly Yale freshmen.

So why, then, have I made it to the ripe old age of 19 years given that I am clearly not cut out for ‘survival of the fittest’ lifestyle? I fear that it’s because human civilization has stopped the forces of natural selection in its tracks. People just don’t die when they’re supposed to anymore given elaborate medical technologies—many of which I owe my existence to. These people, perhaps of a more detrimental and certainly less favorable genetic makeup, are allowed to transmit these traits to the next generation. Thus, there is no more mechanism in civilized society to get rid of detrimental traits in our population.

Ducky and Petrie-- my favorite characters from The Land
Before Time-- echoing the relationship I've got with my brother.
Can you guess which sibling is which?

So what becomes of the human race if unfavorable genetic traits are accumulating in the genome? It was Cuvier who argued that every era has a dominant class of organisms, and as evidenced by my favorite Land Before Time movies, the reptilian dinosaurs were once dominant. Clearly, the dinosaurs are no longer around, so what if the same catastrophic global fate is to befall humans? What if we are living in a fleeting age in which mammals are the dominant class?

In this case, I prefer to be an optimist. Perhaps, natural selection is acting, though in more subtle ways. No longer are physical anatomical structures acted upon, but human intellect and reason (which might have even been evolutionary adaptations themselves). Perhaps natural selection is acting such that those communities where reason and intellectual order prevails will be those that are preserved and those where reason does not reign will be eliminated. In any case, I certainly celebrated the birth of the Prince George Alexander Louis because his parents' genes are definitely some of those that needed to be passed on to the next generation.

The London Eye on the Thames lit up for the royal birth