Permit me, dear sir, to reflect upon the nature of aggression as it presently operates in the curious species Homo sapiens.
In the earlier epochs of man’s existence — during those long stretches of time wherein survival hinged upon brute force, territorial defense, and reproductive contests — aggression, in its rawest form, conferred undeniable selective advantages. The strongest males, often the most physically forceful, secured mates, defended resources, and propagated their genetic material.
Yet natural selection, ever adaptive to circumstance, does not remain stagnant.
With the advent of civilization — agriculture, governance, moral codes, law — the environment in which these traits operated changed most profoundly. The former advantage of physical aggression has, in many cases, become a liability. In its place, subtler forms of aggression have arisen, now directed not toward the individual, but toward abstractions: systems, errors, and misconceptions.
Indeed, those individuals who now flourish are not necessarily those who dominate their fellows physically, but those who exhibit what we might term intellectual aggression: the ambition to seek truth, the fortitude to challenge prevailing dogmas, and the resolve to confront collective errors with unyielding clarity.
One might say — and I find the metaphor apt — that modern man’s aggression has been redirected by natural selection into the battle against nonsense itself. The individual who is ambitious not to surpass others, but to advance understanding, to construct rather than to conquer, often secures a form of prestige highly adaptive in the present age. Such individuals attract allies, resources, and, in many cases, reproductive partners — by virtue of their intellectual and moral fitness rather than their capacity for coercion.
This transformation represents not the eradication of aggression, but its refinement — a channeling of ancestral drives into new, and perhaps nobler, domains of struggle. Thus does selection, ever blind yet endlessly ingenious, continue its patient work.
In brief: those who direct their energies toward the dismantling of falsehoods, rather than the domination of their fellows, may indeed represent a newly favored lineage of man.
Yours, in the interest of natural truth,
Charles Darwin (posthumously dictating from the great abyss.)