Popularity, or High School Never Ends

Twilight.

You can’t get away from it. The book, and the three others completing the saga, are all over the book store – Box sets make great Christmas gifts! It’s in commercials, the movie theater, the news. The screaming fan girls are deafening.

Naturally, I resisted. I’m a grown woman, first and foremost, and second the sorts of novels I read are the written equivalent of independent art films. But it got hard to ignore; everyone I knew was reading it. There were copies of it in my dorm room, my house back home; people were calling me and asking what page I was on. It got to be like MySpace – it was easier for me to just get it over with than to constantly defend my choice not to read it. So I read it. I swallowed twelve dollars and thirty-five cents for the first book, borrowed the rest. I finished the (at the time) trilogy in about three weeks.

I was mildly horrified.

These, these were the books people couldn’t stop talking about? This was the book that had won the New York Times Editor’s Choice Award, Publishers Weekly’s Best Book of the Year? This was the trio that had spent a combined 143 weeks on the New York Times best seller’s list?

I was befuddled.

Don’t get me wrong, they’re not terrible books. The plot is fairly intriguing, the characters aren’t entirely flat, the action moves well enough. But I wouldn’t say they were great, I would never have used half the words people threw at me – fantastic, amazing, addictive! I’d expected to, if not enjoy them, at least understand the fanatical following the series had gained once I’d read the books. Instead, I was decidedly more confused.

Sadly, this is an experience I’m having more and more often. Books that are camping out on the NYT best seller’s list are increasingly less well-written, less developed, less complex. The quality of titles making it to the top is steadily declining. It’s a numbers game; these lists have nothing to do with critically evaluating literature, with analyzing the style of writing or the character development or the rise and climax of a storyline. The bestseller list is exactly that, what’s selling the most copies; it’s what people are reading most. To sell well and be famous, to be acclaimed no longer requires an exceptional grasp of the English language, or talent, or study; the landscape of literature has, disturbingly enough, become high school. It’s a popularity contest.

It got me thinking about evolution. Darwin believed that evolution “brings about change and adaptation, but it does not necessarily lead to progress, and it never leads to perfection” (Appleman 23). Mating, especially in humans, is a popularity contest; the smartest and the strongest can easily be outstripped by the most charismatic, the most attractive. For example, the most intelligent members of the human species, a trait that should be exceptionally desirable, considering the state of civilization, are often ridiculed, accosted, and deemed some of the least desirable mates available.

If evolution was truly selecting for the best, the brightest, the most capable, wouldn’t nerds be pretty high up there?

Civilization has only recently, in terms of evolution, advanced to a point that no longer requires strong specimens with quick reflexes, ready to kill. Without open warfare and exposure to environmental dangers, the weakest and least intelligent of the species are no longer being picked off by natural selection; instead, they’re mating and procreating just as often as the strongest, and in many cases more often than the least intelligent. And despite the relatively short period, the fall of intelligence is already becoming apparent.

I wonder what Darwin would have to say about evolution in an environment that does not physically challenge and eliminate the weak elements. The theory of Natural Selection, as proposed by Darwin in The Origin of Species, is a process that leads to “preservation of favorable variations and the rejection of injurious variations,” but with what I perceive, at least, to assume that nature is given power enough to decided upon and reject certain variations (Appleman 112). In terms of evolution, we’ve entered a new era, one in which nature is no longer given room to select, to remove weak elements.

Clip from the film “Idiocracy”. Released 1 Sept 2006. Twentieth Century Fox.

The above clip, from the film Idiocracy, is a rather humorous representation of how the Theory of Natural Selection may apply in the future, and with what results. Despite the comedy, the idea that Natural Selection will now benefit those who reproduce most often, instead of the strongest, fastest, etc. is not without logic. If unfit breeders and their offspring are not eliminated by the elements, then those who procreate most often will have the most impact on the continued evolution of the species.

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Works Cited.

Mayr, Ernst. “Who Is Darwin?” Darwin. Ed. Philip Appleman. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2001. 23.

Darwin, Charles. “The Origin of Species.” Darwin. Ed. Philip Appleman. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2001. 112.