Did you know Darwin hated the word “evolution?” The term he preferred was “natural selection,” because he felt “evolution” implied that the entire process was much more organized and focused on improvement than it really was.

Natural selection isn’t necessarily “survival of the fittest.” It’s more like “survival of the randomly mutated” where “fittest” means along the lines of, oh, an organism gets a gene screwed up and is born with fur. And then, if an ice age hits, that organism will survive better than its furless brethren. But if a heat wave hits, that organism would die faster.

Same mutation, vastly different circumstances. So perhaps “survival of the luckily mutated” is better.

Either way, the common idea that “only the strong survive” and each successive generation is going to be better and better than its forerunners is inaccurate. In nature, being a big strong creature that uses a lot of resources will actually often work against the organism.

The reason Darwin is so blatantly misinterpreted has a lot more to do with social reasons than biological ones. Back during the latter half of the 19th century, some businessmen realized that the income disparity gap was getting … awfully large. They came up with a reason to explain why that was that wouldn’t actually require them to do anything to fix that, and that reason would be why “survival of the fittest” became so popular. They made lots of money because they were naturally the strongest – the “fittest,” if you will – and they were obviously the fittest because they made lots of money. And so on.

The misinterpretation of the phrase “pulling one’s self up by the bootstraps” comes from a similar place and, in a neat parallel, was originally a phrase designed to describe an impossible task.

Both of these ideas are fundamentally inaccurate and have been wildly altered from their original meanings. Still, both ideas also persist as the height of common sense and wisdom.

As a result, there’s a collective idea that as a human race, we must be evolving or devolving in one direction or another. Whether it’s idealizing the “good old days” or declaring how we’ve only ever made progress, neither one is accurate or useful.

To put it another way, here’s a complete statement: The present is not like the past.

That much is, admittedly, obvious. Still, it remains a complete statement, in and of itself, and to qualify it by raising one or the other as “better” is both inaccurate and unfair. We’re not advancing in a straight line forward – that much is obvious if you look at the levels of technology Rome aspired to and how much of it was lost during the Dark Ages, or how post- Civil War Reconstruction failed to address problems that would remain relevant a century and more later. It would be equally incorrect to claim that we’re falling off some grand peak, if you consider how many new vaccines or revolutionary developments happen every year.

We’re not evolving. We’re just sort of … randomly fluctuating. Mutating, if you will.

Whether those mutations will survive, well, that just all depends on our environment.

— Nina Collay is a junior at Thornton Academy who can frequently be found listening to music, reading, wrestling with a heavy cello case, or poking at the keyboard of an uncooperative laptop.