Natural Selection in Society

For the ones who haven’t heard about it, “natural selection” is Darwin’s famous theorem.  It can be explained as survival of the fittest as well. I first thought about it just as a theory for animals, plants, not humans, but I was wrong. Yes, it is not that much like it in humans, but I would definitively consider it so. 

How can this happen to us? Lets picture high school environment, if you are up to date with all the trends, all the slang used, all the music everyone listens to, then you are “fit”, lets avoid saying being “cool”, since if you are fit and cool then you are the one that is most likely to be the one who survives. 

On the other side, you might not be the one who parties every weekend, the one with the coolest clothes, you might be a “geek”, a “freak”, or any of the labels that people use on others who are different.

What happens to these persons? Do they survive? This time our answer has to do with why I consider this “natural selection” in our society really similar to the one for wildlife. We might not die because of this, but we suffer and go through lots of changes such as:  personality, appearance, ways of thinking, desires, basically our true selves change radically just for acceptance.

Personally, I can tell that it is difficult to go back. For girls it is really important to be like a Barbie, perfect, pretty and thin, to be up to date with all the trends, and not intelligent. I admit I love each and every of my English classes, no matter what subject it is, and I could never accept that with my friends around, but once I discovered the people that were a good influence to me, this changed and I started being myself again.

How does this work? Why did it start working? All that matters now is if you are pretty, thin, etc, no one cares much about personality or intelligence, not anymore.  Joining the choir, drama club, or orchestra is not well seen anymore and you can be judged about it, and not even mentioning  joining chess clubs, or playing games such as “dungeons and dragons”.

What is considered geeky? Maybe fantasizing with working at Microsoft, enjoying reading a book, being member of a club where you debate about a video game, having friends on internet, enjoying jigsaw puzzles, wearing glasses, between others.

I will never worry about ruling the world, I just care about the world not ruling me. I am not worried anymore about being called: nerd, geek, freak, or weird. It doesn’t bother me anymore.

                   “I’m not weird, I’m limited edition.”

By: Lucia Miri Echavarria