Today 161 years ago, Charles Darwin sent the first three chapters of his controversial new book to his publisher, and changed the internet forever.
The official myth insists that Darwin waited for 20 years to publish On The Origin Of Species because he feared a backlash from a world that wasn’t ready for his theory of evolution.
That version has been challenged in recent years, but my own suspicion is that, being the brilliant scientist he was, Darwin had foreseen Facebook and delayed for as long as possible the moment that his name would be used by a million dude-bros to excuse every form of wickedness from riding bicycles abreast to talking about bitcoin at dinner parties.
Of course, the people who cite “survival of the fittest” as a scientific justification for being awful aren’t quoting Darwin. It was Herbert Spencer who came up with that one, applying Darwin’s theories to human society and giving a leg up to aggressively antisocial people who prefer to believe their behaviour and beliefs are rooted in primordial biology rather than in how they were parented.
For Darwin, however, it wasn’t about the most fit but the best fit. Evolutionary success doesn’t necessarily require size or aggression: a species of mouse that is particularly good at hiding might have passed on more of its genes for longer than a much larger, braver, now-extinct species that habitually flung itself directly into the jaws of predators.
Another useful example is someone called Lara Logan, a talking head on Fox News spin-off Fox Nation. Last week Logan used her podcast to tell listeners that Darwin had been “hired” by “the Rothschilds” “to come up with a theory based on evidence”.
Given the anti-Semitic right’s obsession with the Rothschild family as the originators of all evil, Logan’s dog-whistle was loud and clear: the theory of evolution was a Jewish plot to deny the true origin of humanity, which as everyone knows was when God made a man, took stem cells from his chest, made a female clone, waited for the man and his clone to have two sons, then made at least two other female clones (who were also the sons’ sisters), for the sons to marry and have children with, because it’s not incest if you’re having sex with magically created sister-wife clones.
Ironically, Logan is a perfect example of how species find and then thrive inside a particular evolutionary niche. If evolution truly favoured the toughest, most resourceful and cleverest, Logan and her kind would have been mulch on the bottom of the gene pool millennia ago. But thanks to Rupert Murdoch, there exists a niche in which you can be an ignorant bigot, entirely closed to reason and aggressively suspicious of science, and still be rich and famous.
As I write about rich, ignorant, destructive people huddling comfortably in a protective niche, I find myself thinking about the ANC for reason, and realising that like the “survival of the fittest” libertarians I’ve been guilty of getting the evolutionary science wrong too.
For starters, I’m pretty sure that at some point in the past few years I’ve described the ANC and the people it shelters as dinosaurs, which is unfair to dinosaurs, who managed to run the place for 165-million years and might still be in charge if it hadn’t been for that meteor.
Certainly, as we watched the ANC dither over whether to suspend twice-convicted criminal Bathabile Dlamini and elect a person accused of murder as its provincial treasurer in Mpumalanga, it’s become clear that your average dinosaur was substantially better at running a country than Cyril Ramaphosa and his cabinet.
They were certainly more ethical: the ANC’s refusal to condemn Russian aggression has looked spineless until now, but as evidence emerges that Russian troops are murdering Ukrainian civilians, perpetrating the same kind of war crimes they committed in Chechnya, it has become obscene.
As for the delusion that Ramaphosa might still serve as a mediator, well he and his government have made it perfectly clear how that would play out, with Ramaphosa explaining that a good and honest mediation needs both sides to make a concession, so perhaps Ukraine should give up its eastern territories and Russia should give up firing missiles at Ukraine. You know, a compromise.
No, the ANC isn’t a dinosaur. Instead, it’s the political equivalent of one of those great beasts that lumbered around before the last ice age, immense and overcooked things that would be entirely unlikely had they not found an ecological niche.
For the ANC, that niche has been comfortable, and it filled it perfectly, preying on the poor, using rhetorical camouflage to hide its true intent, bristling with accusations of racism and counterrevolution whenever anyone tried to question its immense wealth and dysfunction.
But a cold wind is whipping across the plains, and the first flakes are falling. The ANC can bellow at the future, but it can’t outrun it, no matter how loudly it stamps its feet. The climate is changing, and the small, nimble parties with sharp teeth and hungry stomachs are coming.
Whether that is good or bad for us I can’t say: evolution is indifferent to our feelings. But it’s happening, and the ANC should prepare as best it can.
• Eaton is an Arena Holdings columnist.
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