In a paper published just a few years ago, it was determined that there are populations of rats in Manhattan which can be distinguished by neighborhood.[1] Specifically Uptown and Downtown Rats. Likewise, the London Underground species of mosquito is distinct from the surface species, biting a much wider variety of animals, not hibernating during the winter months, and which cannot successfully breed with the surface variety.[2]
There are, of course, many examples of Urban Evolution – the most famous possibly being the Peppered Moth which darkened to improve its camouflage against soot – but there are many others. (My personal favorite might be the anole lizard which has evolved longer limbs and more sticky pads so it can better climb the smooth, broad surfaces found in cities).[3]
But what struck me particularly about these two species was their neighborhood-i-ness. Most of the other strong examples of urban evolution have a much broader habitat – they are adapted to “cities” in general. But the Uptown Rat vs. the Downtown Rat means, specifically, “Uptown Manhattan” and “Downtown Manhattan.” These are not rats which have adapted to “life in cities,” they are rats who are adapted to living “uptown” or “downtown.” The London Underground Mosquito is a bit more diverse (it seems like it’s really just a variety of mosquito which happens to like warmer, moister environments and not from “The Tube”), but none-the-less, when it “moved” to London, it chose the Underground as its ‘hood.
Perhaps I am partial to making this distinction because I grew up in both of these cities and have, over the years, experienced quite acutely the differences between the folks who like to live “here” and the folks who like to live “there.” But regardless, it did get me thinking about how fun it might be to see if there was a genetic basis for neighborhood preference.
There are already some hints that a love of nature can be influenced by our genome[4], so it seems reasonable that our love of needing to be “in the center of the action” (downtown rats) vs. our love of needing to “please, please, just get some rest” (uptown rats) might have some genetic component.
And if there were, it would be just one more reminder of all the hidden forces that shape our lives. We like to think of ourselves as “fully independent.” That our choices and decisions are entirely based on free will. There are good (also evolutionary) reasons for this – if we do not believe we can manufacture our own destinies, then why get out of bed in the morning, let alone sharpen a stick in case a bear comes along?
But the reality is much more likely that there is an interaction between our free will and forces of which we are never aware.
I do not mean this in the trivial sense of external forces – of course, there are butterfly wings on the other side of the world creating hurricanes all around us (a widely misapplied metaphor, but that’s for another time).
I mean this in the sense that there are internal forces acting on our free will all the time of which we are not aware and of which we may never be aware. Whether Scrooge’s “fragment of underdone potato,” the complex interaction of a few dozen genes, a dream we forgot we had but our unconscious did not, or our unresolved childhood traumas, we need to constantly remind ourselves to take a step back from our own choices in the present to ask if any of these forces might be the true drivers of our “choices.”
Hindsight is 20-20 for a reason – with distance, we can see our decisions more clearly, examine them more easily, and spot these internal motivating forces. But doing so before you make those decisions is an almost superhuman endeavor. Looking in the mirror is so hard but we must do it as best we can because, as Socrates would have agreed with Scrooge’s ghosts, “the unexamined life is not worth living.”
Scrooge is, in fact, a poster child for exactly how hard this can be. He is able to tell himself (likely incorrectly) that Marley’s ghost must be an illusion created by some internal factor influencing his judgement, but completely unable to understand how his own childhood made him the man everyone despises. He needs the (probably) external ghosts to show him that.
But we don’t have ghosts. We have therapists and spouses and best friends and bartenders and taxi drivers and “journaling.” Yet, all of these mirrors still depend on our being able to bring to their table some significant amount of self-reflection and honesty, otherwise, they simply reflect back only what we want to believe and not what we need to hear.
So what is the solution? Meditation (in its many forms)? Perhaps. But ultimately, probably, the best solution is paying particular attention to unsolicited honest feedback from the people around you. When you ask for feedback, all too often you are already engineering the conversation towards the answer you want to hear. Thus it is the times when someone offers you advice you did not ask for that are probably the most valuable and require the most consideration.
This can be very difficult. I look back at so many times in my life when people did tell me to consider why I was really making a decision and I didn’t want to hear it. Our self-hypnosis is so powerful, even when someone tells us outright that they can see what we cannot, we refuse to accept it. Even now, having given this some thought, when my good friend from Jersey tells me, “Check yourself before you wreck yourself,” I still, all too often, dismiss the advice. In the future, when I hear this from him, maybe I need to remember the Uptown and Downtown Rats and the fact that, as much as I like to imagine them in little top hats or getting tattoos, they almost certainly do not understand why they prefer their part of town…they “just do.”
References
[1] https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/mec.14437
[2] https://www.nature.com/articles/6884120
[3] https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/evo.12925
[4] https://www.theguardian.com/science/2022/feb/03/love-of-nature-is-in-the-genes-say-scientists