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| Small Families, Hou Hai Lake Park Beijing 2018, DG |
It’s less than a month before International Darwin Day – his birthday on 12th February. I’ve been asked to give a talk at the Qaudram Institute on 10th February entitled ‘The EyenigmaVariations: Darwin, DNA and Music’ and am planning a whole series of musical posts around that.
But (uniting
both themes of this blog) today, 17th January 2023, has a good claim
to be ‘Un-Darwin-Day’. Natural Selection as defined by Darwin (his
words) requires “Ratio of Increase so high as to lead to a Struggle for Life,
and as a consequence to Natural Selection…” Today marks continued confirmation that
“Ratio of Increase so high…” is functionally over in this phase of our species -
with the expected news of numerical fall in that byword for population enormity,
China. All countries will follow, in
time. Take a look at the chart of births
per 1,000 people since the one-child policy ended in 2016: down,
down, down. This is a social phenomenon, not a legal one, which is why everywhere
else will follow. In fact, my ‘no-worries’ projection of the (temporary)extinction date of the human race, 5,400 C.E. (A.D.) assumes an increase
of China’s current TFR (total fertility rate) of 1.45 to a world average of 1.6
(the current average for OECD countries). But, no worries! Still thousands of
years of culture to go and maybe some big adventures.
Darwin of
course anticipated that the human race had departed from fully Natural Selection,
whatever its explanatory powers for how we’d got here (including his charming
explanation of different skin colourations via the part which sexual selection
plays in many species, itself an adaptive trait). The main force was another
adaptive trait: that of caring for weaker members of society - the protective
urge which he had observed in other social animals. A far cry from the
winner-takes-all mentality that lesser minds took as a lesson from the simple
mathematical ‘Special Theory’ of Natural Selection - a nicer ‘General Theory’.
And maybe we’ll
need fewer humans, even in the cultural spaces we hope will be our preserve
after the ‘end of work’. Here’s a scary story (same date, 17th Jan
2023) that could narrow the evolutionary niche of song-writers, composers etc, and
the rest of us.
I’ll write
further about Un-Darwin-Day with other candidate dates, and reasons to
celebrate it, on a later occasion!
Picture credit: DG, at a popular park in Beijing for family outings, business trip 2018 (Semiconductor equipment business).
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