Unnatural Selection

Unnatural Selection
by, Vaibhav Rajan

Sometime between 1935 and 1995, a man lost a significant amount of blood-flow to his head – blood that was directed south. It is worth considering the beauty of a system that is designed to produce the human brain, and a mechanism to override it, or even that it needed to be overridden. The smarter you are, the harder your brain fights, the longer you resist the urge. This gives us three conclusions: firstly, it is no wonder you find yourself surrounded by idiots. Secondly, it’s no wonder those idiots get laid a lot more often than you. And finally, you should always remember that you were conceived despite better judgement.

In the 1960s something called the Gaia Hypothesis was suggested by someone known as James Lovelock. The natural order of things seems to prevail on account of exactly that - a natural order. His idea was based on feedbacks, but on a more localized level, it's the all-permeating desire to live.

Why the heck do living things insist on wanting to live? A force surges through the biosphere, through the ages, through the cells and membranes and tissues and fights to be. Simply that - to live. Why there is life, or species, or organisms, is not the point of this. The fact that there is life, and there are species, is. The average organism doesn't provide a heck of a lot of productive results for an ecosystem. A species, on the other hand, covers a lot of land, breathes a lot of air, eats a lot of food and is generally responsible for eating of, as well as being eaten by, several other species. A species dies if the organisms don't procreate. Hence, the urge to fuck. Even if it means having your head ripped off and eaten (as is done by certain species of spiders and my ex-girlfriend).

Unfortunately for humans, we sorta kinda maybe enjoy the species-propagation-mechanism (SPM). With all the head-ripping, she was still dynamite in bed, you know. We have evolved, for some reasons, to enjoy the M enough to want to do it without wanting to actually follow-up with the SP part. Nature comes up with these brilliant ways for every species to make idiots out of themselves trying to make babies, and here we are, complex as hell and relying on that idiot-making-mechanism perfected over 3 billion years so we can have sex and not make babies.

I digress. Essentially, natural selection then plays the key role in defining relationships, one-night-stands and head-ripping-extravaganzas (unless you're in Germany, in which case you can order one online). And natural selection, in my humble opinon, sucks balls.

You see, it is blind. It isn't about beneficial adaptations, and it isn't about making things smarter or smaller or stronger or anything of that sort. It isn't even an active force. It's a passive mechanism - it happens, it doesn't do. Here is how it happens: Horny chick across the street smiles at you. You lose blood flow to the head and blink like an idiot. Truck hits you in the face. Another idiot who has genetic horny-chick-alert-system disorder (otherwise known as effective blindness) just crosses the street. Horny chick goes for him. A new generation of HCASD kids arrive. We are left asking: why the fuck didn’t the chick just cross the road herself?

Natural selection didn't select HCASD. Th just happened. If all mating was based on making it across a truck-infested street, then natural selection would lead to faster men or blinder men or men who don't die by trucks or just any sort of man who has something in his nature that allows him to get to the babe on the other side before another guy. We'd also have a lot of really frustrated truck drivers.

So that's the story. Your mom was horny. Your dad was blind. And if it hadn't been for the truck driver, you might never have been born.