Evolution, the Modern Era, and Nature’s “Resistance Movement” Theme Analysis

“Wherever we aim at a species point-blank, for whatever reason, we drive its evolution, often in the opposite direction from what we ourselves desire,” writes Jonathan Weiner in The Beak of the Finch. The book, written in the early 1990s, calls attention to how humanity’s impact on the globe impacts evolution of the planet’s animals, plants, bacteria, and viruses, but often in ways that are problematic for humanity itself. The book shows through multiple examples how humanity has tried to assert its dominance over nature, and yet nature, through a series of evolutionary processes, continues to resist the modern era’s innovations. By highlighting how the processes of evolution naturally work to resist human dominance, the book suggests that, in fact, human dominance is not as clear as it might seem at first glance: nature is still able to resist the modern era’s technological, entrepreneurial, biological, and medical innovations.

The book explores how the “resistance” of many life forms to human attempts at control is, in and of itself, a form of evolution at work. In one example, author Jonathan Weiner discusses how bacteria are developing increasing resistance to the antibiotics that human have developed to kill them off. The bacteria that survive a dose of antibiotics are, naturally, those that carry the most resistance to the drug. Those surviving bacteria then pass that resistance to their offspring, and those offspring multiply rapidly because they face no competition since the non-resistant bacteria have all been killed off. In this way, colonies of bacteria can rapidly gain resistance to the drugs designed to control them, because the drugs themselves act as a selection pressure for bacterial resistance. In another example, the book explores how insects like moths that feed on cotton crops have developed resistance to pesticides like DDT. The moths that survived initial encounters with these pesticides passed their genes along to their offspring—and in each subsequent generation, the moths have, through pressurized selection, developed hereditary resistance to a huge variety of pesticides. The farmers spraying their crops with harmful insect repellents, then, drive natural selection in a way that produces insects immune to the farmer’s efforts to control them. Evolution is a powerful force—powerful enough, it turns out, to thwart humanity’s attempts to best nature.

Because many different species are evolving to resist humanity’s direct (or inadvertent) targeting of them, the book suggests that humanity is better off conceiving of itself as being a part of nature rather than transcending and dominating it. Charles Darwin himself wrote of how “man in his arrogance thinks himself a great work”. In reality, Darwin supposed that humanity’s capacity for consciousness was simply a random, yet miraculous evolutionary trait that evolved just as his finches’ beaks did. Humanity’s “admiration of ourselves,” Darwin cryptically predicted, would be humanity’s downfall. Humanity occupies its current position of power, the book suggests, because our capacity for heightened consciousness has allowed us to “carve out more adapted niches more rapidly than any other species on the planet.” But the book posits that there is just “one degree” of difference between humanity and other species. For instance, blue tits—small birds found throughout the United Kingdom, Europe, Asia, and some northern parts of Africa—have learned to peck holes in the lids of milk bottles left out on people’s doorsteps overnight. Ornithologists have observed the phenomenon of blue tits teaching others of their kind how to copy their behavior. And a young female macaque monkey named Imo, native to an island of Japan, learned to wash her food before eating it—and, like the blue tits, taught others of her kind to do the same.

Ultimately, The Beak of the Finch is not interested in trying to diminish what makes humanity unique. The book is clear that the leap to consciousness in humanity is the most profound evolutionary change in the history of the planet. But the book does make the case that humanity, like every other living thing on the planet, lives in relationship with every other living thing. And that arrogant or unheeding efforts by humanity to control nature are likely to end up with unintended, and perhaps disastrous, consequences.