Darwin & Co.

To head up snow-covered Mount Fuji – in trainers. To take a selfie – with a bear. To clean a chimney – with a hand grenade. To practise yoga – on a runway. A festival of recklessness and a scientific lecture in one. A gala evening celebrating those who have most inventively denied the instinct of self-preservation. And it might even be your turn! Don’t you believe it? The Darwin Award, ironically given to ‘those who have removed themselves from the human gene pool in an exceptionally foolish way’, can, after all, be displayed on the shelf by all of us (of course, postmortem). Not even the most viral laughter at someone else’s foolishness can drown out today’s increasingly urgent question – could our species wipe itself out not just through stupidity, but through its own intelligence as well? After all, what else it means to fight for voting rights for all – and then give your vote to right-wing proponents of the ‘law of the strongest’. To develop the capacities of the brain and free will over millions of years – and then hand them over to the market. To develop technology that will eventually replace us. The transition of life from organic to inorganic form as a matter of natural selection? And what would Darwin himself have said about that?