Everyday Darwinism

I feel like I'm one of the last people in America to discover this fact, but let me state here and now, for the record: The Wire may very well have been the best show on television, ever.  Honestly, it's just that good, and I'm something of an aficionado of the medium, sadly (oh, wasted days).  I'm currently knee-deep in the third season of the show on dvd, about mid-way through the five season run, and every episode strengths my certainty that I'm watching something special.  For the uninitiated,  The Wire was an HBO series focused loosely on a misfit unit of the Baltimore PD, yet more broadly based on the culture and intricacies of life in the city itself, especially the prominence of the drug trade.  More than anything, it's the realism of the show that makes it memorable; the very stink of urban decay practically seeps off the screen.  But why am I bothering to write about a television show on a blog like this?  Well, as I was watching an episode last night, a line of dialog made me sit up an take notice of a certain subtext to the struggle being played out.  I can't remember verbatim, but the line was about the dealers adapting to new technology, from pagers to cell phones to disposable phones, all to stay a step ahead of surveillance.  For some reason, that behavior sounded familiar.  It sounded somehow natural, surviving by adapting to the situation.  It sounded, in short, like evolution.  Hmmm...

Social Darwinism is certainly nothing new, though the concept is fairly out of fashion these days.  Too often, Social Darwinism has been used as a justification for unbridled exploitation or discrimination of individuals or social classes.  As such, our modern, reactionist, PC sensibilities have tended to decry Social Darwinism as an evil in itself.  But, fundamentally, the theory is strong.  Perhaps the greatest example of the logical extension of the principle is Dawkin's concept of the 'meme': the idea that ideas function within human cultures in a way similar to genes (ie. struggling to replicate and survive).  When you understand that the concepts of fitness and selection can be applied, or at least superimposed, on social systems, then, well, things can get interesting.  Lets look at the grim and gritty world of The Wire.

Begin with the basic world of the street level drug dealer, some young kid like Wallace or Bodie or Poot, who takes to slinging because it seems like his only choice for survival, or at least the easiest and most glamorous.  You can basically couch this young hopper's existence in life or death terms: life means he stays out on the street and fathers a few shorties on some hood-rat, death means that, literally, he catches a nine milli slug to the dome, or, figuratively, he gets arrested and sent to prison.  To break it down, this little dealer uses his innate assets (his skill dealing and the quality of his product) to attain resources (straight up skrilla, yo), while competing with rivals for those resources, and avoiding predators (the Baltimore PD, or my man Omar).  It's a primal existence, no doubt.  Now, if you just look at this one dealer's life, it's a straight win or lose situation, like all life is.  But if you widen your scope a bit, and look at the give and take of many people playing the game over the course of months and years, things get positively Darwinian.  Look at the use of technology as a survival strategy.  Players start with house phones to make deals, but house phones are easy to tap.  Some dealers get arrested, some learn better and start using pagers and public phones.  This is a mediocre way to get by at best, as you can still get picked off all too easily by a wired land-line.  Cell phones come along, and they work great; the dealers who adapt to the new tech succeed like gang-busters, till cells start getting tapped too.  When it's apparent that cells can be hacked, the smarter dealers hop on disposable, pre-paid phones, for the moment surviving like that, while the slow and unluck hit the clink.  And so it goes.  Technology is the social adaptation equivalent of longer legs, better ears, keener eyes; it allows survival, momentarily, until the big, blue, predator figures out how to one-up this latest evolutionary step.  Of course, things aren't as simple as this straight-forward cat and mouse scenario, because many factors are in play and many survival skills are being used.  One is a little something known as 'predator satiation'.  It involves countering predation with sheer numbers, feeding them till they can eat no more.  Caribou do it, wildebeests do it, passenger pigeons once did it; reproduce so much that the carnivores can't possibly get everyone.  And that's essentially how the drug trade survives, by being so lucrative and widespread that not even the most well funded or organized force in the world can stop it, much less the BPD.  It's a Darwinian means of survival with a high attrition rate, but it certainly seems to be working.

Yet natural selection alone does not an organism make.  How prudish of me would it be to ignore that oh-so important sexual selection?  Sexual selection is perhaps as equally important a shaping force as natural selection, leading species to evolve everything from feathers to pheromones in the attempt to get that booty.  In some species, sexual selection even trumps survival instinct: elk and other cervids expend massive amount of energy to annually grow giant racks of antlers, all to fight and win harems, and the love songs of frogs at night allow them to be pin-pointed  by owls and other predators.  Yet, again and again, sex is worth the risk.  And one of the appeals of the gangsta lifestyle, or so all those new-fangled rap videos tell me, is the bucket-load of tail that comes with it.  Power and status consistently equal reproductive rights in the animal kingdom, and dealing and running with a flash crew means at least the illusion of power and status, and certainly that all important bank.  For a dealer on Baltimore's west side, cash means cloths, wheels, rims, all the accouterments of a thug lifestyle.  Spinning mag-rims are the equivalent of a peacock's feathers, and just like a peacock's feathers represent a serious handicap is escaping predators, so do the rims attract un-do attention from rivals, jackers, and the fuzz.  In fact, the life of a dealer is so inherently dangerous, dying young is a bit of a given.  But the sexual success while alive counters the early dirt nap; better to have a few fun years (and leave some progeny) than have a long and lonesome lifetime.  In the third season, Cutty, straight out of jail, faces the dilemma of whether to take the high road, or go back into the game.  All it really takes is one good house-party and two loose women to suck him (pun intended) right back into the Barksdale crew, and all the dangers inherent.  Hell, I guess I can see the appeal myself...  

It's possible that I've simply got Darwin on the brain, given the old man's recent bicentennial, and it's certainly possible that I've been watching too much of The Wire lately (it is like visual crack).  But like The Dark Side of the Moon and The Wizard of Oz, things are synching up of their own accord, and I'm simply the messenger.  Try it yourself: see if you can spot social or scientific principles at work in your own favorite tv programs.  Perhaps feminism in 30 Rock.  Or island bio-geography in Lost.  Or eugenics in Sesame Street.  It's fun for the whole family.     

 

Happy Birthday Chuck!

Today marks an auspicious date: the bicentennial birthdays of both Abraham Lincoln and Charles Darwin.  It's no surprise, really, who gets the attention here in America and who get's short shrift; Honest Abe has been the belle of the ball lately (even Bush tried to invoke him in the waning days of his term), and poor Charley, well, let's just say some folk don't kindly take to his thinkin.  It's a shame, honestly.  Not that Lincoln is garnering so much attention, but that Darwin is garnering so little.  While, admittedly, there's no grounds for it, if the two men were to be held up in direct comparison, Darwin's star should far eclipse Lincoln's.  Though Lincoln's impact on the course of American history is difficult to diminish, what, at the end of the day, did he really contribute to the greater cause of humanity?  He begrudgingly ended the institution of slavery in the US, but this was effectively playing catch up with the rest of the civilized world.  And, he couldn't do so without plunging the nation into it's bloodiest and darkest period.  While that says more about the nation than the man, it doesn't exactly take take the stink off. Ultimately, Lincoln was a skillful orator with enough bravery to tear the band-aid off.  He was a good man, maybe a great man, but when push comes to shove, he was merely a footnote in the greater scheme of history.

What, then of Darwin?  If anything, the man was a less impressive specimen of an individual, portly, balding, wracked with anxiety, exuding about as much raw charisma as the barnacles he so dearly loved.  But beneath that beetling, neanderthal brow, true genius percolated, the informal, unpretentious genius than drew wisdom from the world at hand.  What we today call the theory of evolution in shorthand was the brainchild of a humble country naturalist, and perhaps no other scientific principle is as important or as influential.  There's a well worn quote by Theodosius Dobzahnsky that goes: "Nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution".  It's very true; without the guiding principle of evolution by natural selection to shine a light on the intricate workings of life, one would be forced to resort to ridiculous and preposterous make-believe explanations, like suggesting the world was 'designed' by some 'intelligent' 'god-like' individual.  Oh, wait...

Of all the slew of unaccounted for flaws that embarrasses me about being an American, none rankles me so much personally as our good, old-fashioned, religious-fueled ignorance.  I spent about two hours today casually perusing a high school biology textbook (the glorious life of a substitute teacher) and was struck by how much sense everything made, how much exquisite, well-formed sense the whole biological process made.  I'd hate to think that the entire, delicate system of life as we know it could be negated with one well placed sentence ascribing credit to some divine designer.  It's disgusting.  It's the antithesis of intelligence, but it's the goal of innumerable individuals across the country, eager to insert their religious beliefs into the body of scientific education, at a time when our nation already trails the rest of the industrial world academically.  We should all be embarrassed, not just me.  

So as I kick off this week of evolutionarily themed posts, I bid you to take a moment and, after giving Abe his proper congrats, give Darwin a little much needed love too. 

 

Spare a Moment for Wonder

If you pay attention, the world will continually astound you with it's miracles.  Consider 'Henry'.  Henry is a tuatara, a distinct type of lizard native only to the islands of New Zealand.  Henry is 111 years old.  And now, Henry is a father.

The specifics of tuatara sex are for the tuatara, and the tuatara alone.  But to further the stature of the venerable little guy, know that Henry successfully reproduced only after having a tumor surgically removed from his genitals.  That's a lot for anyone to go through.  But then again, Henry is a member of quite a remarkable species.  111 may seem like a ripe old age, but for a tuatara, it's merely the middle of the road: the lizards can live up to 250 years.  Of course even calling them lizards is a bit of a misnomer.  The tuatara, though a reptile superficially resembling a lizard, exists on its own in the taxonomic tree of life.  The two species of tuatara belong to the order Sphenodontia (cone tooth), and are nothing more than cousins of lizards and snakes.  In truth they are more closely related to the ancestors of the reptiles than to modern reptiles themselves; they are essentially living fossils, lingering on in a lone corner of the world since the days before the dinosaurs.  

There are signs that point to this ancient lineage, most notably the tuatara's 'third eye'.  That's right, a third eye.  It's only visible in newborns, being subsequently covered by skin in adults, but it's there none the less: a distinct bundle of photosensitive cells with a proper retina and cornea, all in the center of the tuatara's forehead.  It's called a parietal eye, an evolutionary anachronism linking the tuatara to the distant past.  On the face of it, this would suggest that the tuatara is merely a leftover from a bygone age, a relic too primitive to evolve.  Yet new genetic evidence suggests that the tuatara has actually evolved faster than almost any other living creature.  The changes have been on a molecular rather than physiological level, but they have been comparatively rapid, faster even than Homo sapien's own DNA evolution.

So there you have it: a super-evolving leftover dinosaur with a third eye that lives to a ridiculous old age on a single island in the southern hemisphere.  Henry the tuatara is a bit of a miracle, and his children will be miracles too.  Small miracles, old fashioned miracles, ugly little miracles maybe, but miracles none the less.  Such is nature.