I can’t stop worrying about how we’ve stopped evolving. If you don’t trust me, Sir David Attenborough has been saying the same for years and he knows. When it comes to silverbacks, they don’t come any bigger than Sir David.
The whole thing has resurfaced in my mind because of the whales that recently washed up in Lincolnshire and Norfolk — but I’ll get to them.
It’s not like evolution was going to take all of us with it anyway. That’s not how it works. There’s a Gary Larson cartoon of a classroom full of Neanderthals. Slumped in a chair behind one desk is an australopithecine — one of those monkey-men we all have swinging on our family trees. The teacher says, “I’ve got your final grades ready. I’m afraid not all of you will be moving up.”
It’s worse than that though. I’m not sure we’re even managing to stand still. Instead of acquiring wings and ESP, as I’d hoped, we’re giving up what we had.
Sir David says that now we’re able to keep 99% of our young alive, we’ve put the mockers on natural selection.
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It’s not wholesale survival that gives a species the kick up the rear to keep things moving, but virtual extinction. We nearly got done away with 70-odd thousand years ago by a volcanic eruption that cut us back to a few thousand souls, worldwide. Another catastrophe reduced us to 50,000 a million or so years before that.
It’s when you have small numbers that the mutations get through. Bad mutations could mean a total wipe out. Good ones can bring big changes, and fast. If only a few dominant males get all the action, the whole species might evolve hugely in just a few generations.
But that ship has sailed. The only evolution we can hope for now is cultural — and look what our technology is doing.
We used to use fingers — elegant fingers dancing over qwerty keyboards. Now we’re back to thumbs. Thumbs! In Japan the under-25s call themselves oya yubi sedai — the thumb generation, or the thumb tribe. And it’s not just them — it’s the same all over.
I’m not an anthropologist but I’m pretty sure that’s us going backwards. Next we’ll be fishing for ants with twigs.
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And before anyone starts, this isn’t about race — because there’s only one race. We’re all the same breed of dog. Colour is as easy for genes as it is irrelevant. Throw a couple of switches on the genome one way and you’re a shade of brown, the other and you’re a shade of white.
So cultural evolution is all we’ve got left and it’s our only hope — freedom from absolutism, equality for all men and women under the law, a decent cup of tea in France.
Surely it’s why the news is unbearable. The whole world is somewhere I don’t want to hear about. I know that’s selfish, and it’s alright for me — but there it is.
Listening to politicians and pundits is like standing too close to someone with bad breath, in that it’s impossible to pay attention because the act of listening is so unpleasant.
Europe, the Middle East, Russia, North Korea, China, Donald Trump. Most of it smells like something that’s been put away wet.
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Why is everyone getting so coarse and self-obsessed? Because we’ve stopped evolving.
Slumped on our couches — in pyjama trousers we’ve been wearing for so many days straight they’re slick to the touch — we can eat things from packaging that squeaks under a plastic spoon and harvest the contents of our nostrils. Out of sight behind permanently drawn curtains, we can indulge whatever primitive behaviour blows our skirts up. We’re just murderous chimps after all.
But when we step outside, we had better straighten up a bit so we at least pass as Homo sapiens .
And then those whales. Experts think they’re part of a pattern that saw others come to grief in Germany and the Netherlands.
People came from miles around to stand dwarfed, like minnows, and photograph their kids smiling by humongous rotting corpses. Go figure.
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While filming a series in New Zealand, I saw the aftermath of a mass stranding of pilot whales. About 200 had beached themselves at a place called Farewell Spit. Hundreds of rescuers rushed to help but most of the animals died.
Each helper was assigned to a whale and during the course of the hours spent together, bonds formed between humans and cetaceans. Most helpers are convinced the whales know they are trying to help, and that they appreciate it.
In the aftermath, the beach was an awful place. The carcasses were slowly rotting and the smell was like a vision.
Here’s the thing: whales evolved from land mammals a bit like hippos — but 50m years ago. That’s when the last of them turned its back on the land and kicked away from shore forever.
But the experts I have spoken to say that they think maybe whales get tired when they’re ill — and have an urge to rest. Even after 50m years in the sea, when ill health leaves them exhausted and confused they head for the beach for the lie-down that will kill them. They still haven’t escaped the memory of the animals they once were.
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Our past is not just another country, it’s a mire. Escaping it is the stuff of nightmares — each step defied by sticky mud.
Our species is only 200,000 years old — a blink of time compared with whales and yet we’ve stopped going forward. We’re already dead in the water.
We have to do better — with each other and with everything else that walks, crawls, swims or flies.
Otherwise not moving up is the least of it. We’ll be going down.