[SKIPPABLE INTRODUCTION I’m late to the Darwinpalooza, but I want to say something about evolution. Good little child of the enlightenment that I am, I accepted evolution as fact from whenever I was aware of the idea, but it wasn’t until early teens that I really got it. I can’t remember if there was a particular book, radio programme or whatever that caused the Damascene moment or whether it had just been ticking away in the back of my head, but to this day I understand the basic idea of evolution as follows below. I’m recording it here because in all the Darwin stuff that we’ve seen in this anniversary year, I haven’t seen it explained like this, and either I am therefore a genius, or I’m fundamentally misunderstanding the process. Or both. Comments in the usual place, please.]

Detractors of evolution say that you can’t see it happening. Supporters of evolution say that that’s not bloody surprising because the effects take millions of years to be readily discernible. I say bollocks; I say, you can see the process of evolution happening every time a baby is born. Let’s take humans, because we can – unsurprisingly, and not a little punnily – relate to them. If a Caucasian man and a Caucasian woman have a child, the child will be Caucasian, yes? Let’s take a more specific example: If a man with an enormous nose fathers a child, that child too has a chance of having a similarly Brobdignian schnozzle. The child inherits – not exactly, not perfectly, but it inherits nonetheless – some of the traits of the parents. And if those traits are useful or desirable, children who inherit them grow up to be big and strong and will have nookie and will make new babies to whom they will pass these traits.

(Note: nobody – save perhaps Hitler and other eugenicists – consciously decides what constitutes useful or desirable. It might be a slight resistance to malaria – in which case the child will have a better chance of reaching sexual maturity and being physically able to reproduce – or something less quantifiable. The mechanism isn’t perfect, and we may prize characteristics that have no apparent evolutionary pay-off – why, for example, do gentlemen prefer blondes? – but it keeps poking away, pushing and thrusting in different directions to see what works.)

It takes so long both because the process is inexact – we don’t create clones or even averages of two parents when we reproduce – and because we don’t practice eugenics. We may think that a genetic propensity for baldness, myopia or a pot-belly are undesirable traits, but, as your humble narrator can attest, they’re not sufficiently debilitating in the short-to-medium term to stop people growing up and bonking. That species go extinct suggests that evolution is simply too slow to accommodate changes to the environment – both in the ‘trees and clouds’ and the ‘animals and shit around you’ sense – and I wouldn’t be surprised if folks were to show me examples of where evolution has pushed a species down an awkward road from which it can’t retrace its steps, but none of that argues against the basic mechanism. Look at a child, see how like its parent it looks, extrapolate a little and apply your understanding of basic reproduction, and evolution, I think, looks inevitable. The theory of evolution isn’t tied up neat with a bow – there is, I’m told, lots still to work out – but I remain puzzled at how the contentious the observable facts are; we pass on characteristics, and if they prove useful to a species, they stabilise and flourish, and shape species over their lifespans.