I visited the 'Endless Forms' exhibition at the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge recently. It explored the impact of Charles Darwin's theories on the artists of the nineteenth century - and it was excellent, and it made me think what 'survival of the fittest' might mean today.
Over millions of years before Darwin, survival of the fittest was achieved by the physically strong combatting disease, the cold, predators and hunger. Those who did it best of all, survived, with the physically weak dying off. However, since Darwin, advances in technology, medicine, science and other areas of our lives, means physical prowess is not now as critical as it was. So what is?
Quite independent from visiting the Darwin exhibition I recently finished reading 'Peter Camenzind', a book written in 1904 by Hermann Hesse ( - who later won the Nobel Prize for Literature). It tells the story of a young man 'trying to discover the nature of his creative talent' through his deep love of nature, the girls he meets (mostly unsuccessfully), his studies at university, writings and travels, his melancholy, and at the end of the book, his relationship with Boppi "a grotesque, deformed figure...a wretched, half crippled hunchback". Things change though when Peter hears Boppi sing resulting in them spending much time together; "if ever I should complete and publish the work that I had begun so long ago , it should contain little of value that I had not learned from Boppi."
In the same way there is much I am learning from the disabled people I work with, and the 'song' they are singing ( - see my 19th August 2009 blog: 'Giants and foxes that 'eat you up' - and the world of work'). This song has been heard too by Steve Lopez, a reporter with the Los Angeles Times who 'discovered' Nathaniel Ayers, a homeless African American man playing the violin exquisitely on the streets of downtown Los Angeles - now made into the film, the Soloist, which I saw last night at the cinema. Lopez says "he (Ayers) knows what life is about. He knows why he exists, and he has found his passion. Most people I know never find their purpose. It means he lives more in a spiritual than a material world".
But not every 'song' is channelled appropriately. For example there is the sad story of Gary McKinnon, a 43 year old who has Asperger's Syndrome, who having hacked into the US military and NASA computers faces up to 70 years in prison if convicted. But he must be hugely talented to have done this....
I'm not sure where this 'song' will take us in our evolution over the next million years, but I feel very strongly it will have much more of an impact than our physical prowess.
