So says nature broadcaster David Attenborough.
Just when the ghost of literary Darwinism has briefly risen from the grave to explain how storytelling helps evolution through natural selection … David Attenborough has announced that humans have stopped evolving,
… after becoming the only species to “put halt to natural selection of its own free will”, Sir David Attenborough has said, as he predicts the “cultural evolution” of the future.
So, let’s see. There isn’t natural selection any more. There is free will.
Last we heard from Attenborough, he had renounced atheism (sort of) and thinks that natural selection is only a theory. Still, in this interview, he said,
.“Because if natural selection, as proposed by Darwin, is the main mechanism of evolution – there may be other things, but it does look as though that’s the case – then we’ve stopped natural selection.
“We stopped natural selection as soon as we started being able to rear 95–99 per cent of our babies that are born.
Actually, it is increasingly unlikely that natural selection is the main mechanism of evolution; it is rather the main mechanism of tenure in evolutionary biology departments inhabited overwhelmingly by Darwin’s followers.
Anyway, the fact that most babies grow up today is not as significant as Attenborough supposes. The future, in his terms, depends on who has children, and increasing numbers of people do not. The population bomb he seems to fear is probably a dud.
Anyway, here’s Attenborough’s vid on the Cambrian.
Here’s him on origin of life: