The Peppered Moth

There are these pretty little critters called peppered moths. Their wings are a milky white colour with grayish-black spots. Like several other insects they feast on tree sap, and their favourite just happens to be that tall, beautiful white-bark eucalyptus tree. They land on the tree, insert their mouthparts and feed off of the sap that moves upward in the tree’s vascular tissue, its bloodline. If you look hard enough you’ll see them. But if you’re a bird looking for a meal as you’re flying around, chances are, you won’t. The beauty of camouflage.

During the Industrial Revolution, we succeeded in painting the pretty white barks of the eucalyptus tree black with all that soot deposit. And the vulnerable feeding peppered moths became visible to their predators. Not much chance of an escape from that. Until a freak accident of nature - which is in fact the way evolution works - leaving a peppered moth all black. So during its developmental stages the process that encircles all that black in a milky white hue was skipped from that DNA change. And the peppered moth was now all black. And that worked out well for it during the days of the soot-covered eucalyptus. Not that every species has such a stroke of luck each time the surroundings change. Since humans liked making mistakes and then working out compensatory solutions, we figured out what to do to make the white bark stay white. And that left a death sentence for all those black moths that had collected, and revived the flailing peppered moth populations instead.

I didn’t study much about evolution in high school. I don’t think the Central Board of Secondary Education in India is as yet teaching something like evolution the way it should be taught. But I loved what I studied at McGill. My favourite lesson was this: evolution is not a process toward perfection. Monkeys were NOT one of the evolutionary steps toward making a human. “Animals” were NOT borne out of sea creatures- as a matter of fact, whales come from land creatures that moved toward the sea, not the other way round. And also, peppered moths were not better than the pale moths, or vice versa. The biggest lesson you learn about evolution is that it is a principle followed consistently, yes, but without a final destination in mind. “Natural selection” is about what suits the current environment best, period. And not each step in the evolution of a bunch of related species is necessarily a step “forward”, whatever that means!

Evolution is blind in the sense that it does not “know” what forward means. Now I find it slightly amusing when people try to think about everything that way.

Like for instance, the disdain at moving from joint families to nuclear ones. Thomas Hobbes was one of the first to write about social communities in that exceptionally long book Leviathan that I didn’t have to read; all hail Wikipedia! He said that like every other thing in the universe, individuals in every species move towards disorder. The electrons, protons and neutrons are stuck inside that atom by a whole bunch of forces, of which some are driving them apart, and others are trying to hold them together. When one weighs over the other, the atom either stays intact, or bursts wide open. Likewise, a collection of humans tends to move towards disarray if there is no enforced order. And in any social grouping, an individual is going to have to give up an advantage he may have as an independent, to gain the advantages of living with others. I’d love to have a sibling who can side by me when the generation gap lands my parents and myself on opposite sides. But I’ll also have to let it slide if he wants the TV at the same time as I do, or if we have to bunk together in the same room. Opportunity cost.

We’re becoming a race that’s increasingly deriving a sense of self from within, and not without. A case in point would be the difference between the previous and current generations of South Asians. No longer does our sense of self come ONLY from how good a child, sibling or parent we are. We’re taking time with ourselves, defining ourselves before we bring everyone else’s opinions into the picture. The whole “love marriage” thing for example, I think, has not so much to do with an outburst of sex hormones in one generation as opposed to the prior ones, as much as it has to do with a stronger understanding of our independent self that winds up leading us to be more capable and surer of deciding what we want for ourselves. And then proceeding to find it - if we had the smarts to figure out what we want, we have the smarts to find it too. When people stand to gain so much from within, it’s hard to do all that work and then acquiesce all this freedom for what now starts to look like local fiefdom. The era of patriarchs and matriarchs heading a 15-person household isn’t ending because it’s a horrible tradition; it had solid advantages. It kept people together, with the strongest person among them in charge of the toughest decisions, in charge of keeping them together when their personal interests could drive them apart. Order for those prone to be naturally disorderly.

Now, however, living in such proximity to so many people requires a larger subset of personal advantages to be given up in for intimate social contact. Not likely to sit well with people enjoying the route to self-discovery and the advantages of self-confidence and self-reliance that it confers. While I’d like to have someone to help me with the dishes and the laundry, it’s elevating knowing that there’s nothing I can’t do, because college and being on my own teaches me how to cook, clean, wash, drive, buy a round of drinks and even pay my rent, or at least try to get to the latter. Plus, there’s the added advantage of the shrinking world that makes me meet more people like myself, so I really don’t wind up feeling lonely. Of course, there’s the issue of replacing, not just using, the internet as a forum of human contact instead of a physical realm. But that’s a whole other issue. What’s key here is this: is it so dismal an outlook for people moving from a joint family household to a nuclear one? I don’t think so. Nuclear families can be just as functional, or dysfunctional, as joint ones. It just gives more space for individual growth along with a development of an understanding of living in a community. Plus there’s school, and play dates, and hobby classes and after-school activities, or office luncheons, and gym-mates and regular girl’s night out and sports matches. Just how dismal did that sound?!

It’s likely that an opposing argument would arise about how further disintegration of the nuclear family could occur in the same way as that of the joint family did. And how it may be possible that we’ll soon disintegrate into the very thing we tried to prevent by enforcing order, much along the lines of Hobbes’ advice: self-involved single electrons and protons and neutrons, opposing each other and refusing to fuse into the stable atom. Then what fate befalls us?

I’d like to know that if Evolution ticks away at the hands of a blind watchmaker, and has done pretty darn well for itself - seeing as it lasted for millions of years - why a race so young believes it has the answer to an ultimate question such as this? What worked well for the peppered moth at first, became its death sentence under different circumstances. Evolution illustrates that the ultimate question does get answered over a long, long period of time, but does not proceed with the end in mind. As geeky as it may sound, this little concept was what made me fall in love with the study of evolution. And it also taught me one of life’s important lessons: answer the proximate questions first. No one has a crystal ball. It’s good to look for something all-encompassing, but you don’t get to that unless you answer the small questions first. Sure, joint family was a great concept while it lasted, but it was just another step.

So keep walking.