by Justice William W. Bedsworth

I have spent most of my life as an evolutionist. I have abandoned my commitments to Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny and Jean Luc Picard, but I have stubbornly adhered to Darwinism. And it’s a good thing I’m as stubborn as I am¹ because it’s becoming increasingly difficult.

Human beings are the problem. I’m just fine with tiny horses that evolved into Clydesdales and dinosaurs that turned into robins. I’m even okay with fish that sprouted legs and developed into golden retrievers.²

But I’m having a hard time with the fact that human beings have not yet evolved out of—to use the technical, scientific term—scumbaggery. Every day I read about something else we’ve done that makes me embarrassed to belong to this species. So help me, if I could resign my citizenship in the human race and join the chipmunk or whale tribe tomorrow, I’d do it.

I’ve been forced over the years to amend my concept of evolution. I first decided that evolution, being a natural process, was susceptible to change by artificial influences. I took the position that its speed was diminished by things like the internal combustion engine and the refinement of sugar and oil. So human evolution lagged behind dolphin evolution because dolphins weren’t driving Range Rovers or eating Snickers bars.³

But humans still kept falling farther and farther behind. We kept killing each other, and viewing drugs as recreation, and spouting internet idiocy.⁴ Eventually, I was forced to the reluctant conclusion that while the rest of the planet was evolving, we humans had stopped.

For us, evolution seems to have peaked on July 2, 1964 with Lyndon Johnson’s signing of the Civil Rights Act. We’ve been going downhill ever since.

Yeah, I know. We’ve had a few moments since then. There’ve been bright spots that defied the trend. We’ve learned to breed doodles. And after 1,300 years we’ve made some advances in windmill technology.

But that doesn’t prove much. My golf game includes a few moments every week when I get to be proud of myself, but it also pretty much peaked right around 1964, and has been “rolling downhill like a snowball headed for hell”⁵ ever since.

And the evidence we’ve stopped evolving keeps piling up. Here’s a headline from the Los Angeles Times, a newspaper not noted for fanciful headlines: “Antarctica Scientist Allegedly Stabs Colleague for Spoiling the Endings of Books.”

Yep. You can add to the distressingly long list of reasons humans try to kill each other this one: the failure to issue a spoiler alert.

I can identify with this to some extent. It is often my practice to record sporting events and then watch them later, zipping through commercials.⁶ And occasionally well-meaning friends have sent me “Wow, three in the ninth, what a comeback” or “Too bad, Beds; wait ‘til next year” messages before I’ve finished watching. That’s disappointing. But none of those people have ended up in intensive care.

This guy, on the other hand—a research scientist; by definition one of the brighter members of our species—this guy went for a knife. He went from zero to ADW in six seconds. Because his victim had revealed the ending of a book he had been reading.

Stabbed him near the heart. They had to airlift the victim to a Chilean hospital. Over a spoiler alert. This is not the reaction of a highly-evolved animal.

The reaction of a highly-evolved animal should be something less less life-threatening. “Aw, for crying out loud, Oleg,⁷ do you want me to punch your lights out?”

My own mind immediately went to jurisdiction and venue. There are no courts in Antarctica. Hell, there were only twenty-five people on this whole island. Even if you could staff a court, you couldn’t put together a jury venire without impaneling penguins. So who has jurisdiction over this crime?

DO NOT READ FURTHER UNLESS YOU’RE WILLING TO HEAR THE ANSWER TO THIS QUESTION WITHOUT RESORTING TO VIOLENCE.⁸

Well, it seems there is a treaty, The Antarctic Treaty,⁹ that governs this. Workers are subject to the jurisdiction of their home country for crimes committed in Antarctica. So the alleged assailant, one Sergei Savitsky, has been shipped off to St. Petersburg¹⁰ for trial.¹¹

A couple things have to be acknowledged here. First, this is the epitome of anecdotal evidence. It is, in fact, one anecdote. So maybe not a smoking gun for my evolution-has-peaked theory.

And it involved men. That kinda puts a thumb on the evolutionary scale. Judging humankind’s evolution by men is like judging humankind’s music by listening to Nickelback.¹²

Fifty-one years in the criminal justice system have made it quite clear to me that my gender is not only the weak, stupid, irascible gender, but far and away the most violent special interest group on the planet. Even snakes will avoid violence if they can. Men . . . not so much.

So any attempt to reason from the action of a male to the progress of a species is pretty shaky. And this was a fifty-five-year-old male. So this could just be a case of early-onset youkidsgetoffmylawnitis.

Nor were these lab conditions. Wait a minute, let me rephrase that, since it was a laboratory where the stabbing took place.

These were not ideal testing conditions. There were only twenty-five people on the entire island, and they stayed there for a year at a time. Clearly, we have to make some allowances for stir-craziness here. You put twenty-five Quaker hostage negotiators in a small space and keep them inside because it’s literally freezing outside, even they are gonna start sniping at each other eventually. Under those conditions, anybody would need to resort to the SNARKY treaty at some point.

But the fact remains we have reached the point in man’s development where he is ingenious enough to blow up buildings with fertilizer and querulous enough to kill over being told the ending of a book before he has finished it. Disgruntled employees no longer quit and go home; they quit, buy an AK-47, and murder people. Revolutionaries no longer throw Molotovs, they launch missiles.

So there’s probably no real need to figure out evolution. At the rate we’re going, it’s gonna be a moot point very soon.

BEDS NOTES

1. When I was a boy, my mother, after a falling-out with her Swedish father, told me, “Billy, the Swedes are the most stubborn people on earth.” Then, after a glance at her German mother, she added, “With the possible exception of the Germans.”
2. This stuff is easier if you don’t overcomplicate it. The appellate bar will tell you that’s how I approach most things.
3. Although our increasing use of the ocean as a plastics disposal site probably means the dolphins are losing ground now to ducks and geese and other non-ocean-going species.
4. Whereas whales, having continued to evolve at a decent speed, spout only harmless water.
5. Any serious discussion of scientific theory requires a reference to Merle Haggard.
6. I haven’t seen a football halftime show—other than a Super Bowl or Grey Cup show—or a between periods interview since the Obama Administration.
7. The victim’s name was Oleg.
8. Mrs. Bedsworth didn’t raise no fools.
9. Good name. Obviously not named by Americans or it would be the Save Naturalists in Antarctica from Rabid Knife-wielding Yahoos (SNARKY) Treaty.
10. The Russian one. Which is good, because if all he has is a knife, he’d be at a severe disadvantage if he got into an argument in Florida.
11. You think you’ve got witness problems? These people have to get their victim from Chile to St. Petersburg.
12. I kinda like Nickelback. Which I think supports my thesis about evolution peaking in 1964. Certainly it suggests mine did.

William W. Bedsworth is an Associate Justice of the California Court of Appeal. He writes this column to get it out of his system. A Criminal Waste of Space won Best Column in California in 2018 from the California Newspaper Publishers Association (CNPA). And look for his latest book, Lawyers, Gubs, and Monkeys, through Amazon, Barnes and Noble, and Vandeplas Publishing. He can be contacted at william.bedsworth@jud.ca.gov.