“If survival is only for the fittest then all men weren’t created equal.”

- Xenocrates

Survival is only for the fittest. No exceptions.

Life is all about survival. Survival is all about competition. There would be no point to there being a competition if we all were made of exactly the same stuff. We’re all of the same design, but some of us are better implemented than others. That’s why survival only rewards the fittest. Even the fit will die.

We have two choices in life: Evolve or Die. Because of our genetics, some people will be better at that than others – and that is the frightening reality. For no matter how you look at it, life’s not fair. It never was, still isn’t and never will be. But there is a reason why life isn’t fair. I’m about to tell you why.

Someone commented in a recent post that I’ve somehow reduced the perceived value of humans. I don’t think I ever had to do that. Humanity isn’t really that valuable to begin with. The mere fact that you spend your entire life in competition, it means that somebody has to loose. Someone always looses.

Life is a competition by design. We compete for everything – even sexual partners. Therefore those of us who fail to compete effectively, will be eliminated from the gene pool – and that’s the source of my problem. We were not all created with an equal opportunity to compete in the first place.

In life, some people were born with a rotten Poker hand like this.

I’ve come to the realization that life is like a game of Poker. You were either born with a really good hand, born with just enough to possibly bluff your way to the winnings, or born with a terrible hand thus having to fold early. While the game of Poker is intrinsically unfair, at least you get a second round.

The game of life, however, is not so forgiving.

When you consider all the people in the world, you have to consider not only genetics, but the environment that factors into what makes these people the way they are. Because of these two factors, there will be people in the world that are genetically predisposed to having a really hard time at life:

If you weren’t born fair skinned

Human beings appear to have a natural instinct to be positively inclined towards individuals of a fair complexion. Even among dark skinned people, the fairer members of the lot appear to receive preferential treatment. So prejudice not only exists between races, but also within them as well.

Black People are still Slaves

Bob Marley said it – Black people seem to have enslaved their own minds.

If one is to consider the issues of the psychological phenomenon known as an inferiority complex, they will realise that the problem appears to be rather quite pervasive. People who are fair skinned, irrespective of race, appear to be treated with a greater sense of capitulation, even when it isn’t necessary.

In many third world territories run by blacks for example, there is a well known and common practice to readily fork out millions to pay white consultants to come in and tell them how to do something they already have the skills or foreknowledge to do themselves. The dependency complex doesn’t end there.

Long after the United Kingdom had relinquished control over some Caribbean territories for example, we still see some Caribbean governments using Commonwealth funding to pay Commonwealth consultants. It is as if the British government is distributing money to its own people through them.

But the ridiculous puppet show doesn’t end there. I was once contracted to design an e-Commerce website to market and advertise these services in the Caribbean. After demonstrating the functionality of the website to a group of senior managers, I was ready to take comments from the esteemed panel.

…and what was their first point? This:

“The website features too many images of Caucasians“

I kid you not. This is a team of senior managers comprised entirely of black people. No one commented on the credit card processing feature, or the data storage facilities or any of the other functionality of the website. They were concerned with the fact that too many white people were on the home page.

So I countered:

“That’s an odd request, especially since I don’t see you hiring consultants of any other ethnicity. The site design only caters to your perceived target market.“

The room fell dead silent.

Needless to say, that was the last time I would ever work for that team. I took my British Government DFID funded 37,000 US dollar paycheck and went my merry way. That’s when I first realised that people are only concerned about their preconceived prejudices until they are forced to look at themselves in the mirror.

The realization of the truth is always more painful than the truth itself.  It’s sad that despite their MBa’s and their assorted Masters Degrees, this group of people could not see beyond their own ignorance. It is such a pervasive tenet of that country’s culture, that I am inclined to think it is probably genetic.

If that’s the case, then nature seems to have unwittingly designed black people to be slaves. For example, these governments would prefer to pay for the “wisdom” of their colonial masters instead of a local who could do the job just as well. This mind set still exists, long after they have been set free.

By their logic, it seems that knowledge is somehow different when a white person imparts it. Even when people are applying for a job, preference is given to locals who were educated overseas, even though the education curriculum is exactly identical to that of their local universities. It’s really quite sad.

Maybe these people have gotten so used to being enslaved, that 200 years after slavery ended in the Caribbean, they’ve yet to “shake off” the comforting feeling of being shackled at the limbs. It’s probably the same way how the brain “remembers” a missing limb long after it was amputated.

I’m being cynical of course, since slavery is not genetically propagated.

Black people have a lot of positive cultural aspects to celebrate. However, it appears they will never truly realise their own potential until they’ve learned to emancipate themselves from their own mental slavery. As Bob Marley once sang: “None other than ourselves can free our minds“.

Cultural Stigma and Racial Profiling

There is a massive cultural stigma that is attached to being dark skinned. This does not apply only to Negroes in America, but also to the dark skinned East Indians automatically born in a lower caste, the Aborigines of central Australia and any other permutation of dark skinned people that exist in the world.

In the United States, there is an extremely tense history between African Americans and everyone else. Being born black means that people quite literally precondition one to misappropriated stereotypes. While many blacks break these stereotypes, the large majority fail to escape the stigma.

The infinitely destructive cycle starts with being born black and in poverty. If a black person fails to escape that condition, then they are statistically more likely to fall into the same vicious cycle that ensnare such folks. This is why many blacks’ first priority is to get out from among their own kind.

Even black folks that were born in upscale neighbourhoods (and by this, I mean among a conspicuously non-black suburb) still find themselves being prejudiced against because of stereotypical expectations. While these expectations are not necessarily far fetched, they sadly inhibit the good ones.

The harsh reality is that even well meaning dark skinned people have to either jump through hoops to prove their worth to the people who have already doomed them to failure, or be good at playing hoops (or some other sport) to win over the respect of the rest of the world.

Rappers spout profanity, violence and misogyny with reckless abandon, fulfilling the infinitely vicious cycle of black stereotypes.

I won’t even bother to mention the black folks whose music became a channel for their escape. While rap music is largely funded by white America, the stigma of ignorance is perpetuated by the very black people who use the musical form to escape their stereotypical doom. Strange, but true.

Life it seems, is not without a sense of irony.

What does the Science Say?

Scientists like Morton and J.P. Rushton have both claimed that people of African descent have smaller brain size and are thus less intelligent than Caucasians and Asians. Even though such controversial declarations have long since been soundly debunked, people still insist on quoting their work.

According to Professor J.P. Rushton's magnum opus "Race, Evolution and Behaviour", Black people were born genetically stupid - unless they were interracialy sired.

The problem with the works of Morton (1849) is that it was was largely based on the premise of attempting to validate slavery without contravening Creationist theories. J.P Rushton’s Race, Evolution and Behaviour (1996) had sampling problems, which cast some doubt on the outcome of his findings.

Rushton apparently used too many male Caucasian skulls and too many female Negro skulls. Additionally, as bone size is directly co-relational to nutrition irrespective of an individual’s race, it would have been more useful that Rushton factored environmental conditions into his survey as well.

So if we were to measure the skulls of African descendants, we’d have to measure those skulls of Africans living in first world countries, if we are to make a comparable analysis with first world Caucasians. This would make for a far more reliable study – provided someone is brave enough to do it.

Finally, the variations that exist between the races overlap considerably. This ultimately renders Rushton’s findings unreliable at best. Thus these results, while compelling, are intrinsically flawed. However, even if these findings really were considered accurate, most scientists would never openly admit it.

The point is this:

Every black man's worst nightmare: Henry Louis Gates Jr. - arrested for disorderly conduct after breaking into his own home.

However, none of that is relevant. The bottom line is that once a person is born dark skinned, they are either genetically or culturally preconditioned to a series of challenges, some psychological, some social, that exponentially increases the complexity of the life that they may have to live.

They have to deal with racist hoteliers in France, pastry shop owners who won’t sell to them in Germany, prejudicial Asians who call their women ugly and even when they do make it in life, white people who overtly scrutinize their every word to expose them as racist. The cycle never ends.

They just can’t catch a break.

Ethnocentrism aside, black folks seem to have more natural enemies just by virtue of being black. Even though much of that flak comes directly from their own kind, it doesn’t help that the rest of the world gives them a hard time too – and I’m referring in particular to those who have broken the stereotypes.

Life shouldn’t have to be so hard for black people whose minds are obviously not bound by the self destructive nature of their encapsulating culture. Unfortunately, to be fair to everyone else, others do have a hard time telling the difference between a black man in his own home and a real criminal.

I’ll tell you one thing: I would rather be black in the Caribbean, than be Black in America. Heck, I’d take being black in Europe over being black in America. Being Black in Africa only seems like a sweet deal in the south. Anyway you look at it, Black People people are damned one way or another. Life’s not fair.

If you weren’t born a genius

Do you recognize these men? Not one of them has an MBA.

Bill Gates is one of the richest men in the world. Microsoft is as synonymous with computers as Honda is with cars. While he doesn’t have any degrees to speak of, he has people who have collected many advanced degrees working for him. However, they will never be as rich as him. Ever.

Steve Jobs is one of the richest men in the world. While he does have a B.Sc., there are engineers working on the development of the Macintosh platform who are far more skilled, and far more educated than he is. Yet, they will never be as rich as he is. Ever. He is the iPod god and the real Mac daddy.

Michael Dell, like his software giant counterpart, is an egocentric Texan who dropped out of college to start his own company. However, if you don’t have the visionary brain power of this guy, do not try this at home. Mike has more MBA’s working for him than an entire Harvard post graduate year.

What is the significance of this disparity in the world?

Being educated does not correlate with being smart. There are millions of people in the world who have the highest levels of education and are broke. Then again, there is a far smaller number of people who have a natural talent for making money who are comparatively uneducated.

They were born with a gift. You however, shouldn’t quit your day job.

There are two kinds of people in the world: Leaders and Followers. You are naturally born as either. Leaders are go-getting, ass-kicking, risk takers who always see the glass half full even when its clearly empty. They are the visionaries who become world leaders, philosophers and Fortune 500 CEO’s.

If however you have an advanced degree and you owe quite a bit in credit card debt, and you’re pretty much a slave to the paycheck, then you are quite frankly, a follower. Having an advanced degree doesn’t mean that you have an entrepreneurial bone in your body. But don’t let that stark reality get to you:

You were just meant to work for someone else.

I have since come to realise that people can be born with a passion to do things that might not necessarily be the things that net them with fame or fortune – but still, it makes them happy. Those are the people who may follow their education all the way up to the Ph.D. level, only to work for someone else.

Then there are those who are natural born leaders and geniuses who pull these collective pieces together to make themselves wealthy using the same skills of the other people who are passionate about their fields of choice. These passionate folks are the building blocks of every CEO’s empire.

The long and short of it is that if you were born a genius, you probably don’t need a college education. It’d only precondition you to a set way of thinking that will make you an indelible member of the follower society, inextricably bound to the laws and principles of herd logic, doomed to a life of mediocrity.

The world needs geniuses change it every once in a while and geniuses cannot be confined to herd logic as taught in school.

If you weren’t born a genius however, then you have to go to school. You have to get educated, possibly all the way up to the advanced tertiary level, because you need to find a way to creatively regurgitate what the aforementioned geniuses spent their entire lives developing and perfecting.

Your following is needed.

Incredible Stupidity

Natural Selection at work.

By extension, this means that there exists a certain number of people in the world who are just not intelligent enough to figure things out for themselves. They are doomed to win a Darwin Award for their own intellectual ineptitude that ultimately led to their accidental removal from the gene pool:

Safe sex gone awry.

This is how natural selection works. If you’re too dumb to live, you’ll probably die before everyone else and by your own doing. This is proof positive that stupidity is a functional precedent of how nature instinctively purges itself of the genetic garbage that comes out of the abundance of its life giving throes.

I know that wasn’t pleasant to hear, but life’s not fair. Rhyme not intended.

If you weren’t born beautiful

Megan Fox is so hot that the fact that she’s a terrible actress is completely irrelevant.

Pretty people were born lucky. That is the hard cold truth. People like pretty people even when they’re rotten. Unattractive folks by comparison seem to have more natural enemies, especially if they don’t have a sweet personality or a brilliant mind, or some other asset to balance out the aesthetic deficit.

Beautiful people are talented just by being beautiful. In some cases they can make it in life just for having a pretty face. People tend to forgive the fact that their other assets aren’t so great when looking at an incidence of genetic poetry. It is only a pity that such things only last while they’re young.

Age is a bitch that forgives no one.

If you weren’t born beautiful however, then it is hoped that there is some other talent hidden away in your DNA that will save your soul. Life is not very forgiving if there isn’t an intrinsic biological asset that one may use to make the journey easier. Nature usually finds another way.

The sad thing is that many people were born in this position and have ultimately lived a relatively meaningless life and have died having contributed nothing to humanity other than statistics. While that is also ultimately true for even people born with opportunities, I suppose we can’t all be performers.

In this case, there seems to be purpose to the intrinsic inequality of life after all.

If you were born untalented

Emily Bear is only 6 years old – and she is a piano prodigy

There is a select, very small set of human beings that were born with remarkable talent. They make up a very tiny percentage of the human population and are obviously at the far end of the Bell Curve of human intellect and genius. Their very existence is proof that inequality is real.

Now I believe that it is highly improbable that one could be born completely untalented. Everybody’s probably got something. The question however, is whether they were born at time in human civilization where that something could be a useful contribution to the greater good of mankind.

Some people were born with talents for which there is no discernible use – at least not until some invention comes along that takes appropriate advantage of that rogue talent. Until that happens, they may spend their entire lives in obscurity, unless their talent is weird enough for a circus side show.

…or the Guinness World Records.

For example, really, really tall men with an unusual level of hand-to-eye co-ordination that were born in the 1900’s would’ve been born 40 years too early to have become an NBA super star. Their height would certainly have been noticed. They might even become famous for it.

But who would notice the fact that they had good hand to eye co-ordination? At that time in world history, there were too few fields outside of the sporting arena that could take advantage of something like that. There may have been jobs that could take advantage of either ability, but not both.

Similarly, a math and logic genius born in squalor in India is useless in his immediate environment until he’s hired by Microsoft. Brilliant people are oftentimes born in places where their genius is never harvested for good – or just never harvested at all. This is the sad reality of human inequality.

Thus talent is directly proportional to social development. However, those who were born talentless and in squalor will be naturally selected for elimination from the gene pool. Do you see a trend here? Nature seems to be a perfectionist, only perfecting the useful DNA permutations.

Although, Nature doesn’t seem to always get it right.

If you were born Poor

This little African baby was lucky. There are millions more dying of starvation in war ravaged, poverty stricken African states.

Poverty is a crime. It’s even worse if you were born poor in a third world country. It’s far worse if you were born poor in a war ravaged third world country. It is practically hopeless if you were born poor, in a war ravaged third world country, and you have no discernible talents or opportunities.

Can you imagine being born poor in a third world country ravaged by an idealistic religious or political war, with no talents, no National Geographic photographer to take your picture and expose your plight to the world, and no obvious talent that would cause henchmen to spare your life?

Being born poor is one thing. Being born poor with positively no means of escape is a horrifying realization that only turns the people afflicted to what is often the only available source of escape: Evil. Young boys in Somalia join militias to feed their families while the destitute in the US prey upon the rich.

There’s no better example of survival of the human fittest as the situations evolving out of poverty. Everyone who has escaped either had talent or opportunity. Opportunity is more important than talent, since that will determine if one escapes poverty at all. Many with talent still die in poverty.

Not even discipline is enough to escape poverty without opportunity.

Now while one can survive with opportunity alone, talent will take them to a whole new level. Whether that talent was being blessed with natural genius or a natural artistry, talent rewards one greatly, irrespective of their original state. Couple that with opportunity, and escape from poverty is inevitable.

But what if one was born poor and had no talent? Then they would have to rely exclusively on opportunity – which is not guaranteed. You see, opportunity is directly proportional to where you were born. Being poor in America is still better than being poor in Somalia. Escape is relative to nativity.

However, there are people in the world who are talented who were just born in the wrong place at the wrong time. Who knows how many Michael Jacksons were born, lived and died in destitute poverty, never living long enough to realise their genetically imprinted gifts? That is a number we will never know.

That’s the ultimate cost of poverty. While the death of any human being is tragic, the circumstances of their death often validate the life that was lost. If however that life was never realised, then the death is even more tragic, even if it’s in the millions. We are loosing more good DNA from the gene pool than we know and from the looks of it, there may be absolutely nothing we can do.

It should not be surprising then that when we speak of “talent”, we often automatically (and fallaciously) preclude all the other places in the world that simply do not have the facilities to make manifest such gifts. If you take opportunity out of the equation, then some places in the world are effectively nothing more than DNA black holes; millions are destroyed by circumstance.

Things like this make one wonder if collective intelligence really is racially significant…

If you were born in the third world

Long lines at an American Embassy in a third world nation

If you were born white, irrespective of gender, then there’s a very good chance that you’d have been born in a first world country. You’d live in the same place where the world’s greatest seats of business and education are either on the same contiguous block of land or the same economic sphere.

Your societies would be the kind that everyone else (largely of other races) would flock to, either trying to escape poverty, oppression, inequality or some other social dysfunction. Your countries would have the most educated population and be at the forefront of social and technological development.

Why is it then, assuming that all men were created equal, that there is this vast inequality between the development of societies? Why is it that most of the developed nations of the world are run by Caucasians while they are being flocked to by people of every other ethnic group around the world?

Why would anybody trade their first class citizenship living in a third world country for a second class citizenship living in a first world nation? I pass by the American and Canadian embassies in these countries, and the lines are always long, always winding and always filled with poor ethnic minorities.

In my travels to European and North American states, I don’t see massive long lines of white folks at a Nigerian or a Bahamian embassy for example, trying to escape anything – except during the winter. These conditions persist year round in third world nations, however. Everybody wants to leave.

But it doesn’t matter how you choose to look at it. Life seems to have a preference and it is probably rooted in our genetics. Maybe those of us who are being politically correct are only soothing the delicate psyches of the disenfranchised. Maybe inequality has a rational explanation.

On Inequality and Survival

Cheetahs may pray on Gazelles. But while this cheetah’s food is right in front of it, the gazelle’s food is everywhere. There is balance in this and all other forms of inequality.

There is a Jamaican saying that goes: “Donkey seh di worl’ nuh level” (translation: [The] donkey says that the world isn’t level) and there seems to be truth to this adage. It is appears that there is an intrinsic necessity that life isn’t fair. But while watching the Discovery Channel, I had an epiphany:

Inequality increases the probability of survival. The competitive nature of life is a sign that ensures that life will go on in the face of extinction. Cheetahs may be faster than gazelles, but gazelles have a much greater abundance of food than cheetahs. Environmental change will favour one of these species.

Think about it:

DNA works by producing enough permutations of life such that something will continue to survive should  environmental conditions change. Competition is produced by the environment which is constantly in a state of flux. This produces a scarcity of resources that only the best of the best will get to.

Thus, if we were all 100% genetically identical, then a flaw of one life form could be exploited to eliminate all such life forms. If environmental conditions change, then this one flaw in all identical forms of life would be consummated to produce a positive extinction of all derivative and dependent species.

This is was the fate of the dinosaurs.

However, even after that extinction event, something survived. Such is the viability of Nature and DNA. Thus competition among species ensures that life always continues, even when the game changes. However, Darwin’s observation about evolution makes something else very clear:

If survival is only for the fittest, then all men weren’t created equal. Ergo, the popular expression from the American Declaration of Independence is as fantastically flawed as it is poignantly inspiring. If all men were indeed created equal, then social injustice and war would probably not exist.

All forms of social injustice, including poverty, crime, racism, war (for whatever reason) are all manifestations of competition in its most conspicuous form among humans. Just as how cheetahs chase after gazelles, one group of people oppress another for whatever reason. It’s all competition for survival.

DNA as a Fail Safe

This molecule has a fail safe built in to maximize the survivability of any specie.

Then again, the continuation of life is far more important than something as trivial as social justice or war. We may not like the fact that some of us are genetically better off than others, but this genetic disparity was not produced by nature to separate us. It is to guarantee the survival of the species.

The mere fact that Negroes and Caucasians exist alludes to the fact that the Nature has insulated humanity against extinction from a global climate shift. Should the world freeze over, Caucasians would survive. Should the temperate and frigid zones disappear, black folks would survive.

Either way, someone will survive and someone will die – just like how geckos outlived their 80 foot dinosaur cousins.

Each permutation of life was generated by DNA in preparation for an unforeseeable change. That’s why people were born with DNA that makes them different from each other. This genetic diversity guarantees that when the environment changes, somebody will survive.

The Matrix movie trilogy portrays a dystopian future where most of the remainder of world’s population constituted of racial minorities in the US. According to the back story, this is because it was mostly white folks who could afford to own a mecha. Thus when the machines rebelled and wiped out humanity, it was mostly minorities that remained in the last city underground.

Now, while that is purely science fiction – it is based on the same concept of genetic diversity functioning as a fail safe for survival. However, the inherent tribal instinct of human beings, especially in those with blind loyalty to race, will probably obscure the relevance and even the necessity of such things.

Within each race, there are some observable strengths and weaknesses. However, together, as a human race, all of our collective strengths obscure our weaknesses. Thus, could this genetic diversity among the races be nature’s way of adding a third level of redundancy to the species? I think so.

This genetic diversity among us means that while some people are genetically better off with our current environmental configuration, if there should be a cataclysmic change in our environment, (like a global climatic shift) today’s inferior species may become tomorrow’s dominant species.

That’s how humans took over from the dinosaurs as the dominant life form on this planet. Like an uninterruptible power supply to a critical electronic system, I believe that the genetic diversity that is evident in the races on this earth is a fail safe that provides enough variations of humanity to ensure that we are not all wiped out at once, when change comes.

Conclusively;

It's hard to imagine that this peaceful looking planet is at war. © Copyright Allan Davey

If that’s the way nature was designed, then macroscopically speaking, it is certainly a most brilliant design. The microscopic problems that result from this design (such as war, civil inequality, oppression, etc.) seem to pale in comparison to the grand purpose of it all.

Unfortunately, that automatically means that world peace is nothing more than pipe dream.

However, when you think about it, the world doesn’t seem to be at war from space. That life continues is the only relevant fact – and this is probably why each individual human life isn’t worth as much as life itself, whether it is human or not. The rest is just as a result of cause and effect – a necessary evil in perpetuity.

In the grand scheme of things, the perception of inequality in life is irrelevant. Nature is fiercely utilitarian. It is only concerned about its own continuity. Thus, the survival of the singular, unique individual is completely inconsequential. It is a risk that nature is more than willing to take with the life of any individual.

We only think life is unfair because as humans, we’ve grossly overvalued our individual significance. With a little more humility, we will come to simultaneously appreciate the sheer terror and beauty of nature and respect it for what it is, and where we ultimately fall in the cosmic hierarchy of relevance.

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