The Curse Of High Standards

I’m childless. My wife is childless. Half my friends are childless. Of the remainder, few have produced more than a solitary offspring. These alarming statistics are undoubtedly skewed because I gravitate toward amiable eccentrics in matters of friendship, and eccentrics tend not to be prolific breeders. (It would be a much more charming and chaotic world if they were.) But it’s not just the eccentrics who are losing the great Darwinian footrace -- your aggressively normal double-MBA couple tends to procreate almost as feebly as the owl-watchers and antique button collectors. 

According to Darwin, my friends and I -- and even those enviably upmarket MBA couples -- will be counted among nature’s unfit for our failure to spread our genes among the multitudes. We’re fairly smart, competently educated and headed for ignoble extinction along with the dodos and heath hens. We’ll be discontinued models, not only forgotten but evicted from the community gene pool. 

Meanwhile, poor people continue to blow us away in the reproduction department. A barefoot, barely literate girl who starts having kids at fifteen, and whose kids start having kids at fifteen, will be a grandmother (and still producing new kids of her own) by the time most college graduates start thinking about raising a brood. Three thousand years from now, assuming our species hasn’t expunged itself from the planet, nearly everyone inhabiting the earth will be a descendant of that original fifteen-year-old girl. Yes, her influence will be diluted and most likely unremembered by future generations, but in a way she’ll always be part of the festivities. She might be present in the way people scrunch their lips when puzzled; she could be a fleeting shadow of skepticism in the eyes. But her genes will be on the premises -- still hardy, still eager, still replicating. By Darwin’s standards, our fifteen-year-old Eve will rank among the most successful representatives of her species -- even if she dropped out of the ninth grade and never rose above the cleaning staff at Burger King.

How is it possible that natural selection would favor the poor and uneducated in human society? Why do kids with 140 IQs and stellar SAT scores tend to be such washouts in the art of reproduction? Do the gods conspire against introspective and cerebral souls to keep the earth from being overrun with sculptors and physicists? In a way they do. 

I’m beginning to believe that nature hates a fussbudget. Last week my brother Greg and I were talking about the bluebird houses in his yard. Bluebirds used to be nearly as common as robins in our republic, but these ethereal songsters simply couldn’t compete with gritty, butt-kicking immigrant species like starlings and house sparrows. After threatening to go the way of the great auk, bluebirds have engineered a mild comeback with the aid of manmade nesting boxes. Anyway, each year for the past decade, my brother Greg has patiently watched those luminous feathered creatures flirt with the nesting boxes in his backyard meadow. Each year he hoped that at least one finicky bluebird couple would make a commitment and settle down in one of the boxes. And each year the birds have let him down like a perennially bad baseball team. 

Greg had read that bluebirds, for some reason known only to them, prefer their nesting boxes with the hole facing east. Maybe they like to feel the morning sun on their beaks. So my brother repositioned his bluebird houses to accommodate their whims. Still they wouldn’t nest. I felt his exasperation and told him, only half-jokingly, ‘If they’re that fussy, they deserve to go extinct.’ He laughed, and we agreed that some species just can’t seem to master the complexities of mating and survival. They’re nature’s eccentrics, lovable and hopeless. Look at pandas, those wild teddy bears of China that restrict themselves to a diet of bamboo shoots and dismiss most of the potential mates that lumber their way. I feel like shouting at them, ‘Hey, when you’re on the verge of extinction, you can’t afford to wait for a sensitive, professional, high-energy, financially and emotionally secure Ivy League panda to answer your personal ad! Just get on with it!’ But I’d be a blatant hypocrite.

Like many of my college-educated Baby Boomer peers, I didn’t get on with it until late in the game. What were we waiting for all those years? What treacherous dreams of romantic and spiritual rapture led us to shun the perfectly serviceable potential mates who crossed our paths? We were just possibly the most self-conscious segment of the most self-conscious generation in history. We cultivated our individuality until we individualized ourselves out of contention; the pool of kindred spirits dwindled to a few widely scattered puddles. (Thurber aficionados have a harder time finding mates than country music lovers.) Waiting and waiting, holding out until the gray hairs sprouted on our sorry heads, we still searched for bliss while our less ambitious peers were escorting their firstborn to the altar. 

The gods wouldn’t have it any other way. Darwin would have us believe that nature is an elitist, favoring not only the fittest breeds but the fittest representatives of each breed. We smart ones like to think that ‘smart’ equals ‘fit’ -- that somehow we’re entitled to procreative preference in the great genetic marathon. But it just ain’t so. The gods love the sturdy, unpretentious yeomen and yeowomen who mate readily and often, the ones who don’t fret about their partners’ academic credentials or demand enlightened political views. They of the modest intellects and rock-solid nervous systems are the ones who carry the future of the species on their capable shoulders. They're the ones whose genes will be determining the progress of our species in the next millennium. While mentally overdeveloped scholars and poets spin themselves into their own convoluted webs, the meek actually do inherit the earth. Jesus was right, and nature is smarter than we think.

Cynic’s Pick of the Week

Heeeere’s Billy! Rumor has it that ex-President Bill Clinton is negotiating with a major TV network for his own daytime talk show. If the bosses can come up with his reported asking price of $50 million a year, the former White House occupant and sometime saxophone player might be the next Rosie.