I don't know what it's like at your end of the global village but I keep coming across extraordinary instances of evolutionary good cheer. The optimism doesn't involve the theory of human origins or the longed for decline of the theology of intelligent design but the simpler assumption that adaptation is an ongoing success story. Human beings, it seems, are all right. We may shoot ourselves in the foot, other people in the head, crash cars and planes, ruin the environment and have a bad habit of turning conflicts of interest into vast cash bonuses, but natural selection works, or at least works better than reason and technology and cultural history want us to believe. The grand suggestion seems to be that although we feel we are helpless in all kinds of respects, help is not only round the corner but already lurking in our heads and our habits.

LRB 24 September 2009 | PDF Download