Lack of Natural Selection - Beatrice the Biologist

I like to think about how many times and how many ways I would have died already if I happened to be born 25,000 years ago instead of 25 years ago. I say I like to think about it because none of them have happened, so I can be glad. And I think you should too.

Here are the 5 most plausible deaths of my hypothetical prehistoric existence:

1. Dead at 1 day old

I was an enormous, 10-pound baby. I was so huge, I couldn’t maintain a stable body temperature for a few days (so I was a big fan of heat lamps). I think it is a fair bet that I wouldn’t have survived the first year of my life if I hadn’t been born in this century.

We often forget that not long ago, it was not surprising for babies to die in the first few years, or for mothers to die during childbirth. I’m not talking about thousands of years ago, either. If you go back just one century or more, infant mortality rates were significantly higher. So even if I hadn’t been a troublesome baby, statistically, I wouldn’t have had a good chance of surviving the first few years.

2. Eaten by a bear

I am clumsy, and what little coordination I have doesn’t stand up terribly well to high-pressure situations. I can all but guarantee you that if I was being chased by a hungry, large-toothed animal, I would trip over even the most unobtrusive rock or twig and be greedily consumed.

3. Fallen off a cliff

I was born with less than aweswome vision. I had to wear glasses (and get teased for it) when I was in kindergarten. If I had been born before glasses were invented, I would have been stumbling around with my arms outstretched looking for a landmark or friend.

It is perfectly likely that one of those days, I would have gotten too adventurous and gone half-blindly exploring near a cliff, quickly finding myself at the bottom of it.

4. Infection

As clumsy as I am, I’m not as accident-prone as I should be, but I have had a few pretty bad, self-imposed injuries: falling off my bike, mangling my face; smashing my thumb in a car door, breaking it; slicing into my finger while cutting tomatoes (I do this a lot). Had I done any of these things before hand soap and hospitals were around, I would have lost fingers to infection, if I didn’t entirely succumb to it and die.

5. Competition

I’m not a competitive person. Sure, I have a vague interest in being good at stuff, but I’m not a head-to-head, “you’re going down” kind of person with any kind of regularity. So if push came to shove, and food or water resources were scarce, I’d probably be more likely to share than hoard. This behavior would benefit me if everyone else did the same, but in a life-or-death, every-man-for-himself situation, I wouldn’t be the one to let others die so I could live. So that would be the end of prehistoric me. Oh, well.

Obviously, I am very glad that I was born in the 80s instead of 8,000 B.C. The fact that I have survived this long, despite my imperfections, means I can someday have my own clumsy, blind, compassionate children who can continue the lineage of these traits. Luckily, they will be born in a time where those traits won’t mean their demise.

That is what most call progress and what I call human beings being exempt from Natural Selection. Thank goodness.