Trish's Darwin Revelation

Looking throughout the history of the world as we know it, and all the places in the world, there are very drastic differences between each region. However, there is one thing that all places in the world seem to have in common, and that’s war. War and fighting seem to mark most of the reasons why the world is the way that it is today. For instance, America would not be the “Land of the free” and the democratic republic that it is today if it had not fought the Revolutionary War against our British rulers and declared ourselves an independent nation. Reading in Darwin, specifically about Natural Selection, I found an interesting quote that relates to the notion of countries are drawn to war.

For as all the inhabitants of each country are struggling together with nicely balanced forces, extreme modifications in the structure or habits of one inhabitant would often give it an advantage over others; and still further modifications of the same kind would often still further increase the advantage. No country can be named in which all the native inhabitants are now so perfectly adapted to each other and to the physical condition under which they live, that none of them could anyhow be improved. (Appleman 112-3)

This quote suggests to me that peace may be an inherent trait that could one day be passed down to our future generations through the process of Natural Selection. This seemed interesting to me because I had never really thought about peace or war being anything but environmental. But it makes sense considering that while reading David Linden’s The Accidental Mind, I learned that some personality traits are genetic and not environmental as I had assumed that they were before reading that text. He even says on page 55 of the text that “genes influence behavior (Linden 55).” So, it could be that the desire to go to war that seemed to be apparent throughout the nations of the world, could fall under the genetic category of our psyche, and that we have inherited our willingness to war against one another through genes and Natural Selection. And of course “war” in a sense could never fully be eradicated from the world because there is the food chain to take into consideration – species killing other species in order to survive, but what I am referring to is war in the sense of fighting that it not caused by the need to survive.

Darwin’s text also suggests, in relation to the desire to have war being passed down through Natural Selection that it is possible for the desire to have peace to be passed down through Natural Selection. He seems to suggest that all it takes are one or two people to be born who possess with an advantageous trait against war, and to reproduce, and pass that trait down to their children and to their children’s children for it to start to become apparent among the people of the world. Of course, the process of Natural Selection takes much too long for it to become apparent in our lifetimes, but one day, future generations can look back at now and see what they have evolved from.

Looking at the current society, it has difficult to imagine that we could one day adapt ourselves and evolve to become peaceful. I believe, from what Darwin suggests in his writings, that it would begin with individuals finding peace with all other members of their own community, such as different races or ethnic backgrounds of the same region, and they would stop having racial feelings or tensions towards one another, and once that was established, humanity would evolve further to accept all other races and regions of the world. War has become such an engrained part of society for most of the regions of the world that it seems like a crazy notion that this could ever happen, and like I said before, it couldn’t in the span of our lifetimes, but Darwin is a very scientific and reasonable thinker. I trust that he would not make a statement such as that one if he had not observed and hypothesized from his observations that this sort of evolution had the potential to occur in nature.



This documentary tells the story of two young filmmakers on a journey for peace inspired by the infamous Peace Pilgrim, Mildred Norman. When I found this video on YouTube, I thought that it was befitting my revelation because they have the mindset that I picture people would evolve to have according to Darwin’s words. Towards the end of the trailer she says “the way to peace starts with a single step”, and I think that that’s true. If Darwin is correct and we can evolve to become more peaceful, the trait that would pass down would have to begin with a single person. That’s all that it would take to change the world over the course of time and possibly the two filmmakers making this documentary are the people that it can begin with.

Works Cited:
Appleman, Philip, ed. Darwin. 3rd ed. New York: W.W.Norton, 2001.

Linden, David J. The Accidental Mind. Cambridge, MA: Belknap, 2007.