Do you ever get that nagging feeling Covid has pressed pause on our evolutionary voyage? I’m not implying the velocity of humankind’s flowering is starting to wilt. It’s more our emotional intelligence has taken an evolutionary dip and we have stumbled backwards.   

I’m not prophesising that in a few thousand years’ humanoids will be clambering back into the trees if Covid sticks around. As appealing as that is.

For all the delicacy and brilliance of the human mind, something in our design has triggered the survival behaviour button lurking in our DNA, making us, well, selfish bastards. I would be a myopic meathead to condemn the whole of humanity as rapacious, self-seeking, narcissistic and unbenevolent, but I’m going to do it anyway.

I’ll admit my ethnographic research is somewhat inspired by my brief, but brutal brush with Covid. But the father of evolution (yes, that is a gigantic leap but hang in there) Charles Darwin believed that our natural selection required us to self-worship. His theory of natural selection – which still defines and challenges human thinking – determined that organisms only behave in certain ways if it benefits their own survival. There is something majestically merciless about his theory.

Darwin claimed that true altruism would be wiped from our genes because humans are inherently selfish bastards. To be fair to Darwin, he never thought we would become bastards, but he did think we’d all end up married to our cousins.   

So if everyone was going around being a bleeding-heart altruistic bugger, with all the alacrity of Ned Flanders, our species would become extinct.

Darwin came up with his theory after spending only five weeks on the Galapagos Islands. Most us mortals would’ve ended up trying to befriend Galapagos Dragons after two days to stem the boredom and isolation.

British evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins went one step further than Darwin, claiming living organisms are controlled by selfish genes. As a result, yep, you guessed it; humans are inherently selfish.

Dawkins also felt humans weren’t big on benignity as altruism could be viewed as a sneaky form of selfish behavior used by an organism in order for the genes’ survival. “Let us try to teach generosity and altruism,” Dawkins wrote, “because we are born selfish.”

So in reality, we are all screwed from the start. It’s in our DNA. The next time I’m pulled up for speeding I’m going to tell the officer “it’s best you address that fine to an R Dawkins, England”. “It’s all his fucken fault”.

Dawkins also saw the evolutionary paradox of reciprocal altruism in nature, where animals may help each other out. “I’ll your scratch back you scratch mine”.

But during Covid it has been tweaked slightly to “I’ll scratch your back you scratch mine”, while I steal your toilet paper.

Granted, I have painted a simplistic picture of evolution and people are going to feel incredulous about what I’m saying or not saying

Most of the time we control our self-aggrandising and brutality, until well, the shit hits the fan like a global pandemic. But you don’t have to look very far to see that Homo Sapiens over the past couple of years have displayed all the gallantry of George Costanza bulldozing kids at a party to escape a fire.

Let me take you back a few years before we all became oddly attracted to epidemiologists named Norman.

It was a simpler time. We had mild disagreements around politics, football and shared a mutual disdain for Marie Kondo’s idea of origami-folding everything.  

Then were a couple of warning signs when the virus first appeared that proves the human gene pool was becoming a bit murky. People trying to kick the living shit out of each other over the last 4-pack of double-ply, toilet roll wasn’t a high water mark for humanity. We all had a raucous chuckle at the absurdity of two Karen’s pulling each other’s hair extensions out in the middle of frozen food section, before realising we just got a sneak look at how our ancestors acted. And when push comes to shove, humans are willing to display ruthless survival mechanisms to stay in the game.

The pandemic introduced us to the phenomenological behaviour of panic-buying. The Germans have a wonderfully poignant world for it called Hamsterkauf. It roughly translate as selfish bastard.

When Covid first smothered our lives and the everyday pleasures were slowly taken away, a rare and powerful introspective illumination should’ve emerged.  

If you believe Kierkergard and a couple of his miserable mates Schopenhaur and Nietzsche, we become more evolved people through suffering and despair.

So through this jarring, universal disconnect we were all going to reconnect and live a more sincere and authentic life. Happily share our flourishing permaculture produce and homemade honey with neighbours, who we normally hide behind the bins to ignore.

Look what happened after World War 1 and the last great pandemic – the Spanish Flu.  That harrowing devastation and deprivation produced the greatest epicurean decade on record – the roaring 20s.

The cultural and revolutionary art movements of Dada and Surrealism caused a seismic rupture in the art world. And how vacuous, empty and unbearably futile would our lives be if African Americans didn’t introduce the world to jazz?

And the language of the 20s. Foot juice. No other name can describe cheap wine. It makes goon bag sound exotic. It you wanted to crucify someone socially you called them a phonus balonos. Now, we just ghost them.  

Hey, we are only two and a bit years into this decade so there is still a large chunk of time left to produce the goods. At this stage I can see anyone busting out the Varsity Drag.

I doubt it very much that the history books will reflect on our Covid time and say, this was the short period when humanity was a bit of an arsehole.

Look, it’s not really our fault because we biologically predisposed to act selfishly and in the interest of self-preservation. We are born selfish bastards. And those no good, altruistic do-gooders, would lead to the death of our species anyway.

Covid is running out of puff. It’s still leaving many families battered and bruised. Most of us ache for our pre-Covid lives when the only whacky people we had to deal with were flat earthers. Humans can’t escape their entitled, feeling of self-importance. We just embrace being selfish bastards.  

Like Dawkins said: “The true ‘purpose’ of DNA is to survive, no more and no less.”

But I’m sure we can still get on with surviving, even if we act a little less selfish.