Runaway Social Selection In Lord Of The Flies By William Golding

The process of natural selection has enabled evolution, through genetic variation and environmental pressures, as a result of this, species and populations diversify constantly. A Canadian hip-hop artist named Baba Brinkman is known for creating cool educational raps about various topics, one of them being Natural Selection and its role in the way of life. Above we have chosen the first two stanzas from his song The View Of Life and analyzed the lyrics, connecting it back to concepts we have learned in BIOB51 along with our own findings in science and public media.

William Golding’s Lord Of The Flies (LOTF) is a novel about a group of boys stranded on an inhabitable island, throughout their days on the island they all compete to survive and

Upon further analysis, an article called Runaway Social Selection in Human Evolution gives insight into Darwin’s ideas on the descent of humans and Alexander’s runaway social and sexual selection. Sexual selection occurs to increase mating. Species will often pick the most fit to mate with, this increases their chance of survival and ensures their lineage will survive in the future (Crespi et al., 2022). Traits enhance over time due to selective pressures, the favorable traits are passed on, and become adaptive traits. As species continue to mate, these traits will be favored among that population (Crespi et al., 2022). As animals are evolving, their physical form evolves as well, sometimes certain physical parts of them will still remain intact but their function is lost overtime, this is referred to as vestigial organs, this is also referenced in stanza 1, line 4. As evolution occurs over extended periods of times, these vestigial organs will continue to be passed (Crespi et al.,

The article expertly chose information from Darwin’s book that was relevant to their topic, and in this case, which will be relevant to the song. As seen in stanza 2, lines 5-8, Baba Brinkman speaks about the range evolution could be seen and the effects of natural selection in the tree of life. For example, line 8, “from quadruple to walking”, is a direct reference to the natural selection seen in evidence in history that portrayed the change in terrestrial animals. In the article chosen, the author provided an example that was shown in an article written by Thomas Henry Huxley. Back in 1863, Huxley was able to prove how humans and tailless apes are more closely related in terms of their body and brain capacity, compared to the relatedness of tailless apes to baboons and other types of monkeys (Harris, 2000). Examples of tailless apes provided were gorillas, chimpanzees, and orangutans. This directly relates to the eighth line in the second stanza as it shows how to quadruple mammals (gorillas, chimpanzees, etc.) have a close relationship with walking mammals (ex. Homo sapiens). In addition, Harris highlights a point in Darwin’s book where he mentions the possible reason why quadrupeds became bipeds. This reason was due to the fact that ape hands were not as adapted for diverse functions, even though they share lots of similarities