She stands gazing out into the ocean. The precipitous cliff falls away just inches from her feet, the waves crashing angrily onto the rocks a hundred feet below. She feels no fear, simply the exhilaration of the leap that was yet to come. The cool sea air embraces her naked body. She inhales its welcome purity. She bathes in it. Without a care in the world, she dives into the abyss.
The clues were always there and yet we chose to ignore them. In the mid-nineteenth century Darwin stood in the teeth of the gale that was religious doctrine. His barely heard voice screamed ‘Evolution’, the word that would change humankinds’ perspective on the world forever.
As years passed his word was accepted, but all too soon it was distorted by the clerics, the medics, the economists, the educationalists, the social engineers, the politicians – damn, even the philosophers.
Evolution was the answer, but no-one, simply no-one could remember the question. So the question evolved out of complacency and arrogance.
The question became, “How did we get here?”
The cold and hopeless conclusion was that we had arrived. There was nowhere else to go. We were at the peak, the apex the absolute pinnacle of evolution. We were, after all, in Gods’ image. Everything else around us was there to serve. Everything else was less evolved.
Everything else, though, was part of the real question, “Where are we going?”
By the beginning of the twentieth century the eugenicists had the answer. The middle class intellectuals were the peak of humanity. The indolent, pond scum that were the working classes were there because of poor breeding. It was time to stop them from reproducing. The world could do without them.
Hitler caught on to this wonderful zeitgeist, but he took it further. It was time to destroy the impure and the different. It was time to ethnically cleanse humanity. The world fought bitter battles to defeat this most inhuman of monsters. Who was he to say that blond and blue-eyed was the purest form of us?
The victory for the world in 1945 was a victory for all – from the richest to the poorest, for the whites and for the blacks, for the Chinese, the Japanese, the Asians, the Aborigines, for the able bodied for the disabled, for the sane and the mad, for the religiously devout and for the zealots.
Everybody won.
And yet.
And yet the scientists were dissatisfied. If the scientists were dissatisfied it wouldn’t be long until the politicians were dissatisfied and then the masses and then…
Gregor Mendel started it. He found that if he bred different types of pea plants with other types of pea plants he’d end up with the pea plants he wanted. This was manipulated evolution. Or was it?
Slightly over a hundred years later, the human genome was unravelled. Now we could see all the impurities in our species. The genetic diseases that caused imperfections could now be identified pre-birth. These flawed humans could be destroyed before they were born. A silent genocide. It was controlled evolution that allowed the survival of the fittest by eliminating the weakest.
But it wasn’t evolution, controlled or otherwise. In 1859 Charles Darwin told the world about evolution in his oft quoted tome, “On the origin of Species.” By the end of the twentieth century, science had stopped human evolution in its tracks.
And yet the clues were always there. We just chose to ignore them. And we were punished. Punished by a future of homogeneity, a future of mediocrity.
Down and down she plummets parallel to the cliff, her mane of brown hair rippling behind her. She shrieks at the sheer joy of the moment as, with a flick of her wrists and an arch in her back, her wings unfurl as she darts away from the cliff to skim the waves. Her fingers trail in the water before she soars up and up fuelled with the momentum of her fall.
Driven purely by her love of life, she laughs as her flight stalls allowing her to turn in mid air to plunge into the welcoming ocean below. Her gills activate, replacing her lungs as second eyelids protect her vulnerable eyes from the salt. She is as at one with the sea as she is with the air as she is with the land. The subtle webbing on her fingers and toes give her a gymnastic manoeuvrability under the water.
She has evolved.
While our ancestors stifled our growth through the abject terror of change and of difference, hers set her free with three simple words, “Let it be.”
Where we manufactured longevity through the destruction of viruses and bacteria, through fear and mistrust of our world, she gradually developed the lifespan of the giant redwood by adopting some of its finer attributes over time.
Where we could keep ourselves well through medicine and surgery, she developed the immune system that could match her environment, and a physiology that could replace broken limbs and organs.
We only had to wait.
Where we now live in sanitised corridors, fearful of any infection breaching our manmade defences, she can swim and fly and run wherever she chooses with a freedom that we could only dream of.
Where our antecedents had chosen to live vicariously through computer games and simulations, through their chosen sports stars and through anyone who actually lived rather than tasting life for themselves.
Where we stifled development and equality through the contrived control of people through money, they lived by the simple premise, “From each according to ability, to each according to need,” free from greed and avarice.
Where, for us, the ocean became synonymous with fear, the unknown, and what we believed to be its inhospitable nature, for her it became a huge extension to her play park. No longer would three quarters of our beautiful planet be forbidden to her.
For her the ocean came to mean everything – the land, the sea, the sky – and hers was a better world because of it.
Chris Young November 2009