Migrate, mutate, adapt, or die

A series, probably

When I was in my late teens or early 20s I saw somewhere a sticker with the slogan: Migrate, Mutate, Adapt, or Die. It summed it all up for me. The first three options are survival mechanisms, for individuals and especially for species. The last is the “or else” statement. I can read the slogan as an imperative; I can also read it as a neutral and concise description. People have survived this long because of migration, mutation, and adaptation. That is, Homo sapiens has survived. Individuals don’t mutate fast enough, I guess, to increase their survival chances. And probably a lot of mutations we’ve experienced have reduced our individual survival chances. But at the individual level, migration and adaptation are at play in what we’re doing and have done for millennia, linking us with individuals in predecessor primate species.

Mutate, Migrate, Adapt, or Die

As a species we started in Africa and moved into Central Asia and from there into Europe, out to Siberia, into the Indian subcontinent, and somehow to Australia. During the last ice age, about 15,000 years ago, so much land was exposed because water was tied up in glaciers that those Siberians just kept going. Why do people migrate? It isn’t just “push” and “pull” factors acting on individuals. It’s systems of power and domination that allow some people to thrive and push other people out. It’s offers of opportunity made to some people based on their origins, and capture and forced migration to others based on their origins. It’s collective decision-making about finding someplace with less scarcity, less violence, more plunder. Individual choices matter, no doubt, but they’re conditioned by bigger forces of society and nature.

We’ve also adapted, continually, to survive. Agriculture is an adaptation. Cities are adaptations. Irrigation is an adaptation. And so on. None of these developments was technically a biological mutation, though maybe there’s good science about how social adaptations led to the selection of certain traits (mutations?) over others, thereby causing species evolution. We’re going to have to adapt like crazy over the next few decades if we’re going to survive beyond a century or two from now. It’s always worked before, but every new adaptation seems to ripple out to new problems for us later down the road.

If there’s something like cultural DNA—some people think there is—then maybe, too, we could say that Homo sapiens is mutating all the time. The meaning of being human has changed over time. And it’s still vastly different from one culture to another, but the very idea of culture depends on the perception of systematic differences among groups that arise not from biology but rather from shared meaning-making.

For the next little while, I’m going to post regularly on each of the first three options: Migrate, adapt, mutate. For a lot of it I’ll be stretching, using my imagination and intuition more than peer-reviewed evidence and rigorously collected data. Scientists call that process “hypothesis-building,” but to be fully legitimate in the science world they (we) have to ground an article, book, or grant proposal on a mountain of peer-reviewed research. This is good at producing what Thomas Kuhn called “normal science.” Maybe I’ll write about this some too: where hypotheses come from.

Please feel free to post below or send me an email to suggest ideas I should or might explore in future posts. Thanks.