When I hear wealthy liberals here (part of that notorious "liberal elite" I guess of whom I only have ever met one IRL) saying things like "If I voted for my self-interest, I would have voted Republican," thereby (perhaps unwittingly) patting themselves on the back for their selflessness, I am put in mind of this passage I recently read in a book entitled
The Beak of the Finch by Jonathan Weiner (Vintage Books/1995), a Pulitzer-winning must-read for anyone who is interested in confronting Creationism, but also a cautionary tale on so many different levels, for our own species.
...Yet the rapid accumulation of change is not always progress, and forward motion is not always an advance.
When they visit cactus flowers, cactus finches on Daphne Major sometimes snip the stigma, which is the top of the hollow tube that pokes out like a tall straight straw from the center of each blossom. When the stigma is cut, the flower is sterilized. The male sex cells in the pollen cannot reach the female sex cells in the flower. The cactus flower withers without bearing fruit.
These finches are, of course, completely dependent on the cactus. Without cactus pollen, cactus nectar, cactus fruits, and cactus seeds, they would starve. The birds' fates are so closely bound up in the fates of the cactus that when there is more cactus on Daphne Major, there are more cactus finches on Daphne Major; when there is less cactus, there are fewer finches.
On Daphne one December near the start of the cactus-flowering season, the Grants peeked into more than two thousand cactus flowers. Almost half the flowers had lost their stigmas. On Genovesa the next month the Grants examined more than a hundred cactus blossoms, and four out of five of them had been violated. In some years the cactus finches have destroyed almost every cactus flower, and in those years the cactus on their island produced virtually no fruits or seeds. It is hard to imagine a simpler, neater, faster way for a species of Darwin's finches to drive itself toward extinction.
To find out what was going on, the Grants took turns, rotating every two hours all day long, keeping watch over seventeen cactus flowers. They noted when each flower opened, which finch fed at each flower, and what each finch did. Cactus flowers usually open in the morning between 9 and 11. When a cactus finch lands besie an open flower, it holds the stigma to one side with its foot so that it can nibble on the pollen that is cupped in the base of the flower. But sometimes a cactus finch will visit a bud very early in the morning, an hour or two before opening time, and pull apart the folded petals to get in there before anybody else. When the flower is pried half-open, the stigma is liable to poke the finch in the eye. On Genovesa, in the year of their stigma study, the average stigma stuck out of the cactus flower about 25 millimeters; the average distance from the tip of a cactus finch beak to its eyeball was only 21 millimeters. So when it forced open the flower bud, the finch would sometimes snip the stigma with its beak and flick it away. Not all the finches on the island were doing this, the Grants discovered: only about a dozen.
A finch that nips stigmas is like a farmer who eats seed corn. The bird steals from its future and the future of its line. By sterlizing flowers, the cactus finches on Daphne Major cut each year's harvest in half. And all the stigma snippers get out of it is a little pollen the other birds can't get, and a bit of nector the other birds can't reach - a sweet treat in the early morning.
Darwin's process cannot stop this dirty dozen, and in fact the process favors them, because the stigma snippers pay no special price for their stolen sweets. They are no more likely to die in the dry season than the birds that spare the stigmas. In dry seasons, cactus finches forage on one another's cactus anyway; they don't stay within the borders of their own territories when they are hungry. So the dozen flower violators on the island are trampling on a commons, not on their own private gardens. A finch that spares the flowers on its territory cannot guarantee itself a good meal later in the year when times are hard. In fact, as the Grants point out, a bird that takes good care of all the stigmas on its property may even encourage trespassers later.
Natural selection turns upon the profit of the individual. What is good for the individual is usually good for the flock. But when the needs of the individual clash with the needs of the flock, it is the individual that triumphs, even if this private success leads to the downfall of the flock. If the terrible drought of 1977 had been followed by a second year just as dry, all of the cactus finches on Daphne would have been in jeopardy because of the stigmas that the dozen birds had severed. Those birds might have made the difference between survival and extinction on Daphne Major.
"The great God that formed all things Both rewardeth the fool, and rewardeth transgressors." Each year the habits of the dirty dozen on this island handicap the flock and increase the odds that the whole flock wil die. Cactus finches did go extinct earlier in this century on the uninhabited island of Pinzón, whose name is Spanish for finch. The cactus finches of Pinzón may have cheated themselves off the face of the earth.
(from Chapter 20, "The Metaphysical Crossbeak," pp 289-292)
The problem isn't just American exceptionalism, it's human exceptionalism. We don't think of ourselves as animals, not even secular humanists who say that we're all animals no different from any other sort of animal. We don't think of ourselves as a species, and our societies as evolutionary outcomes of behaviors that worked for a while in given environmental circumstances, and what, exactly, "fittest" means at any given moment.
If we were Galapagos finches, this would be understandable. Finches after all don't get newspapers, they can't learn about what happened on another island, and they're birds of very little brain, shortlived (15 years is a long lifespan) and occupied dawn to dark with the work of scratching out a meager living. They can't really help it - if what seems like a good idea at the time, a get-plump-quick scheme that gives your brood an edge over your neighbors' chicks, turns out to have been a short-sighted policy that destroys your own habitat and pushes you into extinction because you can't adapt fast enough or there aren't any open niches for you to try to mold yourselves into, this is regrettable, but not something that you can exactly be blamed for, if you're a cactus finch.
If you're a human being, however, with the ability to perceive, communicate, and reshape the environment faster than the environment reshapes you, so that you do not have to change, you just make something to allow you to cope and keep going, this excuse does not apply.
We do not think of ourselves as a species. We are like cactus finches, if we think that we are really acting in our own (or our family's) best interest on a selfish level, by putting financial success ahead of the welfare of all of the nation - or all of the world.
Whether we act on it by voting for the plutocracy, or don't, and fancy ourselves extraordinarily virtuous, for "sacrificing our own good" on the altar of humanity, we are still thinking on the level of small-beaked birds of very little brain, who have discovered that by nipping off an inconvenient bit of plant they can scarf down a little more blood sugar than their neighbor, and are incapable of correlating that to the decreased number of housing and primary food sources, and of projecting out what this will mean for their grandchicks.
What we also don't realize, most of us, because of the silly reductionist version of evolution we were taught (if we were taught) in schools, is that it is not totally random, and it is not passive, either. It isn't that somehow a creature is magically "fit" for an environment, and then sticks there where the others die off. It's totally dynamic, and yes, your actions can change how you end up looking as a species.
We were all raised to laugh at Lamark, with his stretching giraffes - and yet as in the case of the finches, and of other bird species, like the crossbills, experimental evolutionists have observed how new behavior skills - utilizing a slight shape difference in a revolutionary way, such as the tiniest hook on the end of a bill as a lever - will cause that small shape difference to not only be perpetuated, but magnified, by a kind of self-selecting. Those who can utilize their physique - greater body weight, a thicker bill, camouflage - to both survive predators and to eat better, become the most desirable mates - in a given year. And thus their offspring become "the fittest" - for as long as the weather holds.
Change the environment, and what was fit is no longer fit, and something else better suited to the new circumstances will come along and eat you out of house and home. Most competition is internal to a species, not against predators, for nutrients. It's a combination of what you were born with, what your parents teach you, and what you figure out how to do with this inheritance, that lets animal species survive in the wild.
How does this model on human behavior? In many ways. Everyone tries to find a niche. Some try to take over new niches, in family or workplace or marketplace. Many end up wasting their substance and hurting themselves, like the small finches that in dry years could not open the big seedpods, and starved. And yet, in other years, with different plants thriving, the biologists found that the formerly "fittest" large finches starved, because they could not find enough of the optimal food to fuel their larger bodies.
Being bigger is not always better.
And those who can reshape themselves to new circumstances will always do better - but it isn't always possible to do that, either.
If we sahel the whole world and turn most of it into a desert - and remember, the Sahara was once lush jungle - there will not be enough for us to eat in the coming generations, and our population will crash horrible.
And those few who survive, if we do not change it so far so fast that none of us can, will end up being physically very different from those of us who live in temperate regions. And that will be it, for civilization as we know it. Some sort of strange new civilization will grow up, afterwards, but it won't look anything like what it used to, and we as a species may never recover to what we were before - and neither will anything else that we have killed off by destroying their habitats.
Assuming that our oceans, and our planet, don't just go the way of Mars...
In nature there are neither rewards nor punishments; there are consequences.
--Robert Green Ingersoll
(And according to the Old Testament verse that Jonathan Weiner references, God doesn't bail out self-destructive idiots with miracles, either - the Creationists seem to have missed this common theme.)