The Accidental Species: Misunderstandings of Human Evolution Read Online Free PDF Page A

evolution has no plan. It has neither memory nor foresight. No vestige of cosmic strivings from some remote beginning; no prospect of revelatory culmination in some transcendent end.
    Rather than being at the pinnacle of creation, human beings are just one species on the tangled bank of Darwin’s imagination. Human beings are special in many ways—of course we are—but so is each and every other species, from the insects flitting above the bank to the birds perching on the branches to the worms struggling through the damp earth beneath.
    The idea of progress is, however, deeply pervasive. Our culture is drenched in it: our politics, our economics, and our science, including (and perhaps especially) evolution. It is always assumed that things advance unerringly upward as if motivated by some inherent force. Progress is unstoppable. What’s more, we are told that we need it, that we are reliant on it, and that the stagnation or reversal of progress is a Bad Thing.
    Progress is destiny. The only way is up.
    To be sure, if you look back from the viewpoint of the present day to any period in the past, progress seems natural and inevitable. But such a perspective is limited, because it denies that any other course might have been possible, and edits out any promising side branches that went nowhere.
    An important concept to take away from this discussion is that of
loss
. Stories of progress are written by history’s victors—or at least its survivors. Such tales tend to talk of increasing complexity and sophistication, and ignore the perhaps different perspectives of creatures that have become extinct.
    The concept of loss is vital to a proper understanding of evolution. This is especially so for human evolution, a subject that is often deficient in perspective: understandably so, because we, the story tellers, are only human. The history of life told by other organisms might have different priorities. Giraffe scientists would no doubt write of evolutionary progress in terms of lengthening necks, rather than larger brains or toolmaking skill. So much for human superiority. If that’s not ignominy enough, bacterial scientists would no doubt ignore humans completely except as convenient habitats, the passive scenery against which the bacterial drama is cast. Now, ask yourself—which of these stories is any more valid than any other, at least as a narrative?
    The late Stephen Jay Gould punctured the idea of inevitable progression in his book
Wonderful Life
, by introducing the concept of “contingency.” That is, creatures need to be more than fitted to their lives and lifestyles by evolution: they also need a generous dollop of luck. Once luck has been stirred in, the whole idea of progress driven by some innate striving, or superiority, or destiny, becomes nonsense.
    Gould started
Wonderful Life
by showing how our idea of human evolution as a matter of inevitable progress is so deeply ingrained in our culture that admen use it as a way to sell products. Admen use the metaphor of human evolution so frequently that it’s become a cliché. You’ll no doubt have seen a progression of apelike beings, walking from left to right, each one following the next, each more upright and humanlike than the last. Figure 1 is my own modest contribution to the canon.

    Figure 1
    Admen complete this familiar parade with the latest computer or washing machine. The subtext is that the consumer product we’re being urged to buy is the result of successive improvements in a kind of mechanical evolution, each better than the one before. Some commercials even exploit popular notions of evolution explicitly. The TV commercial that presents evolution as a device to produce a creature sufficiently evolved to appreciate Guinness beer was especially memorable.My favorite variation on this theme concerns a car. “It’s Evolved” purrs the voice-over. 24
    The idea of human evolution as a tale of inevitable progress is, however, a travesty, and has