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“Evolution is operating with a vengeance in the urban environment,” New Scientist reports, “as animals struggle to adapt to novel conditions and cope with ‘evolutionary illusions’.” An evolutionary illusion is when an animal “does something it has evolved to do, but at the wrong time or in the wrong place.” Like grilling chicken in bed at 3am. Or massaging oneself in public.
New Scientist then explains how “cities are not just accidental homes for animals that really ought to be elsewhere. They are also hotbeds of evolutionary change, shaping the adaptations of their resident fauna as surely as the Serengeti plains or the Amazon rainforest.”
Interestingly, both of these articles seem to overlook any evolutionary changes cities might inflict upon humans – in addition to the squirrels, rats, songbirds, or coyotes who also happen to live there. The evolutionary illusion of the studio apartment, for instance: what strange pathology of life wrongly lived has made its appearance inside these domestic spaces? What new behavioral triggers have evolved? Pale-faced urban apartment dwellers staring at themselves in badly lit mirrors, popping zits, wondering where on earth the rest of the planet has gone.
“Most new species arise not from the insensibly gradual transformation of large populations,” Andrew Knoll writes, “but rather by the rapid differentiation of small, isolated populations at the periphery of the main group.”
In this context, you could re-read all of European existentialism as the philosophical by-product of an evolutionary struggle: humans, fighting to adapt to the biological niche of the isolated single apartment.
In Planet of Slums, Mike Davis makes the point that, soon, all future human population growth will occur inside cities – even within slums. Will this have a genetic impact on what we now consider the human species? And what new branches of philosophy might therefore arise?

(See also animal urbanism and simian urbanism).

Originally from BLDGBLOG on April 26, 2006, 10:14am