#16: How I became totally Darwin-pilled

In the late summer of 2013, I had an internship at the London office of the Qatari broadcaster Al Jazeera that changed my worldview forever.

I was 24 years old, one year out of journalism school, and still struggling with depression and dysphoria. I'd landed a place on The Telegraph's graduate trainee scheme — a big deal, career-wise — but it didn't start until September, and in the meantime nobody wanted to hire some kid who was about to go join their competitor.

(I ended up paying rent by working as an usher at the Ambassadors Theatre in the West End, which in those days hosted the improvisational dance show Stomp. My colleagues were, without exception, out-of-work actors, who found my presence among them puzzling and exotic.)

Anyway, my job at Al Jazeera was to research, write, and fact-check scripts for two English-language scientific documentaries, Earthrise and The Cure. One of the latter's episodes (which you can watch here) followed a team of scientists building a database of all the world's venoms.

You'd naturally assume that they were doing this in order to develop antivenoms. In fact, they were searching for new medicines. A venom that can kill you by coagulating your blood can also save your life if coagulation is what you need. A voiceover explains:

Dr Pierre Escoubas follows up by saying:

Record scratch. Sorry, what? What the fuck did you just say?

Bear in mind I didn't know much about biology in those days. For reasons still unclear to me, I'd largely switched my focus from science to the humanities some time around puberty. Nor had I yet lived through a global disaster in which the specific proteins of a specific virus became the fulcrum upon which millions lived or died. So I was fairly ignorant about the operations of proteins, receptors, or cells.

Now Baby Io begins to google furiously. What do you mean the venom is a key? she thinks to herself. It's venom. It's from a different animal. How can it possibly fit the ‘lock’ on a human cell?

Well, says a voice, the venom simply instructs your blood cells to stop coagulating.

You get how that's crazy though, right? How can it 'instruct' them to do anything? Instruction requires communication, and communication requires intention and understanding! Doesn't it? Surely my blood cells don't have that?

No, they don't. The instruction is more like a signal in a machine. When certain molecules chemically bind themselves onto your blood cells, your blood cells will respond a certain way. Often your own body manufactures and releases such molecules in order to trigger that behaviour. The same mechanism can be spoofed by outside forces.

Okay! That's kind of weird, but okay. (Also, who are you? Fuck it, let's not unpack that right now.) Except, how on earth does some random serpent's spittle know how to spoof the system? That’s like if I picked up a pebble from the beach that happened to unlock my front door.

You already know the answer. It doesn’t know; it just evolved that way. You remember — natural selection? That thing you loved reading about when you were a child? The snake kept developing random mutations...

...until one of them happened to work.

Yes. At first it worked only a little, and later it worked a lot. The snake didn't choose to adopt that mutation. The mutation simply increased its bearer's chances of survival, and thereby increased its own prevalence. A pebble might well unlock your front door, if subject to such forces by the sea.

Okay, but that's bonkers? Look, yes, sure, I know natural selection is thing. And no, I don't believe in God (yet!). So yes, I know in theory that evolution is sufficient to explain the existence of complex life. It's just that this is all so specific. You're talking about an entire world of interaction and communication, which other animals have somehow learned to hack into in incredibly precise ways, all brought into being by this vast, blind, impossible process, without thought or planning.

Yes.

That's when I saw it. The matt-black rhizomatic woven structure just beneath the surface of reality. Like a Yayoi Kusama net painting, or a Ruth Asawa basket. There was no intention, no purpose, no message. There was only what happens.

In the years that followed, as this complex structure of seemingly infinite density unfolded itself inside my brain, I began to see it everywhere. Which memes go viral or fade out on a given social network. Which politicians get big and which stay fringe. Which ideas take root and which are ignored. Which empires rise and fall. Which religions prosper and struggle. Who lives, who dies, who tells what stories.

This isn't good, any more than the sun or the second law of thermodynamics are good in and of themselves. I am not a Landian evo-fascist, nor a "social Darwinist". Any notion of good that's worth a damn necessarily has to mean more than mere survival of the fittest — let alone some bigot's self-serving fantasy about what constitutes fitness. I have never accepted that these truths make a mockery of ethics, compassion, or mercy.

But ethics still has to live, has to carve out space, inside a Darwinian world. It must eat, and reproduce itself, and fight just to stay in the game. If, as Coil would have it, "the price of existence is eternal warfare", so too is the price of goodness. In warfare the enemy always gets a vote, and facts only care about your feelings if those feelings help you change the facts, and nature to the defeated won’t even stop to say alas.

And in that moment, Io was enlightened.

There is no sketch of the week this week, because I cannot find my sketchbook. If you see it, let me know!

Anyway, thanks for reading. As always, you can find me on Bluesky here, on X here, and read my recent stories here when I am well enough again to write them.