Page 49 - CULTURE IN THE COMMUNICATION AGE

EDUARDO NEIVA

not subjected to change. Darwin then held a form of essentialist thinking. But,
in the trip to the Galapagos Islands, the assumption began to erode. He noticed
empirical evidence that could contradict the idea of species as stable natural
kinds. Back in London, Darwin would present to the ornithologist John Gould
samples of mockingbirds collected in different islands of the Galapagos. Gould
maintained that they were distinct species. Darwin was not convinced. The
variation of the birds was the result of what came to be known as geographic
speciation: the mutation of a species living in a separate niche from the one the
original species inhabited. Eventually, in one of his notebooks, started around
1837, Darwin (1987: 172) would remark: ‘Animals on separate islands ought to
have become different if kept long enough. – “apart” with slightly di fferen[t]
circumstances’ (Notebook B, 7). Two facts about biological life were becoming
clearer and clearer: there was evolution and it was gradual (Mayr 1990: 19).
If early British anthropologists diverted their gaze to societies living at the
edges of the destruction imposed by the Industrial Revolution, Darwin did just
the opposite. As he explicitly stated, the dismal struggle for existence was a
reality equally valid in the human and the natural world. In both realms, life is
the result of a continuing substitution of solutions aiming at better and better
adaptations, without which living organisms would perish. Humans and all
other living beings exist at the center of an arena where adaptative solutions
would be enacted in confrontation with the environment. The adaptation of an
organism to its niche determines its future. In the natural world, the organism
incapable of adapting to an environment under constant change is doomed
to disappear. For all organisms, life is always a matter of either perishing or
surviving; it is a frame limited by ceaseless births and deaths.
Facing the hard countenance of biological existence, Darwin concludes that
life is always a delicate state, in which havoc and destruction should be
expected. The insight comes from Malthus’s gloomy prediction about the fate
of Industrial Societies. Malthus (1888) saw the combination of geometric
population growth with the steadiness and eventual shortage of housing and
food as inevitably spelling disaster. Shortage of housing and food would
increase prices, making survival a toss-up in industrial society. Darwin picks up
Malthus’s prophecy, and extends it to animal species that, incapable of either
increasing the production of food or controlling their demography, are under
the constant threat of disappearing.
In Darwinian terms, the inherent destruction in life processes receives the
name of natural selection: in other words, the discarding, the preserving, and the
multiplication of adaptative variations in the individual members of a species.
The mechanism of natural selection delays evolutionary mutation, keeping
organic solutions that have worked in the past and still function in the present,
but disposing of them only in the case of change in the environmental condi-
tions bequeathed to the individual members of the species. Again, the term
natural selection can be misleading. Natural selection has nothing to do with
improvement. In fact, there is nothing in the idea of natural selection to suggest

38