Survival of fittest not always true
Several years ago, I was teaching a classroom of students about plastic pollution. I passed out rubber bands and instructed the youth to entangle one of their hands while pretending it was a marine animal, and then asked them to try and escape without the assistance of their classmates or the use of their free hand.
Yes, I derived joy from trolling the children, counting down from 10 and stalking through aisles of desks while screaming “Hurry, you better get out, a shark is coming.” This lesson intended to prove that ocean organisms did not evolve to escape entanglement in unnatural, synthetic debris such as plastics. The kids writhed and whined, dramatically shaking their contorted rubber band hand in frustration until my verbal buzzer went off. “Aww shucks, you all died,” I taunted.
This activity was usually an easy win. A lightbulb would flicker, and students would lament about the unfortunate plight of nonhuman animals ensnared in the profuse trash swirling throughout the planet’s gyres while pledging allegiance to reduce their plastic consumption. My anti-pollution sermon went swimmingly all until that fateful day that I met “The Darwin Kid.”
The Darwin Kid presented himself as a typical sixth grader, slightly bored by my proselytizing while drifting into a postlunch coma. As his classmates empathized with and cradled their imaginary post-mortem hand-turtles, hand-seabirds, and hand-fish, The Darwin Kid stared back at me with glazed eyes. All of my flowerchild discourse came to a screeching halt when he loudly declared, “Those animals are meant to die because of survival of the fittest.”
This is the part of the story where I became a babbling goober. I was clearly unprepared for the heat this kid was bringing. Does he not possess the ability to feel? How is this his response to animal death? I fumbled about with my words, asking The Darwin Kid if plastics were natural and if they’ve been around for millions of years.
I unsuccessfully argued that it is absurd to expect animals to evolve in less than a century, and, more importantly, why would we ever want marine organisms’ epic battles to be with