May 26

I was feeling tired after seven days of activity on the glaciers. My ankle was taking longer and longer each morning to warm up and bend properly and it was giving me more pain while skiing etc. So I decided it was time to have a rest day. I spent some of the day shoveling snow. My stove was disappearing deeper and deeper into a hole. This was even with a board under it to try to stop the snow melting from the heat. Also every flat surface to put pans and mugs down on had melted into slopes. So the kitchen porch of my tent had extenive remodelling. The toilet pit also got some attention. The steps down into it were crumbling away. Anyone paying a visit in just plastic inners risked sliding down the steps and straight into the hole. Not a plesant thought.

The rest of the time was spent drinking tea and reading. I had taken two books on the trip. "First Evidence" is a SciFi novel about an police scientific investigator chasing and being chased by aliens. I had quickly read this stuck in Constable Point before starting on everyone else's books. The second book I had chosen because it would last a long time. Charles Darwin's "The Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection". And that's the abbreviated title! It has a subtitle of "The Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life". Mr Darwin takes many opportunities for procrastinating around the bush. This 470 page book is just the abstract. He intended to follow it up with a complete work of double the length. This never happened and now I've read the abstract I'm not sure it would have been required.

I'd heard this was both a scientific book and a book readable by the layman. In fact the editors notes said many laymen did read it when it was published in 1859 and it caused quite a stir. It does not actually say that man is descended from apes, but that is what it implies. In these modern times that's well known and accepted but in the 1850's that clashed with the religious beliefs of the time. Its a book I've been wanting to read for a long time and I finally found it in Zurich! It gives an insight into science in the middle of the 19th century; what sort of people were interested in it and how they worked out many of the theories we take for granted now. At that time it was possible to understand a great part of the scientific body. Darwin shows this in his work when talking about a great range of things in the living kingdom. The book is readable, although slow going. His theories are well explained and built up bit by bit to give a forceful argument for evolution.

So what's evolution got to do with a trip to Greenland? Survival of the fittest. A thousand years ago it's unlikely anyone could have survived here in the middle of nowhere for 10 days. Today we survived with a minimal level of comfort. So what has changed? 1000 years is a blink of an eye in terms of evolution, maybe 40 generations of humans. Our bodies are little changed. The evolution has not been to us, but to our technology. When man first started to use tools a new chapter in evolution started. This is not something that Darwin considered, but now, in the 20th Century, it's the most important part of evolution. It's the technology that allows us to survive and it's the evolution of technology to will define the development of the human species. The evolution of the body is so much slower it cannot compete with the evolution of technology. In fact technology will probably put human evolution into the reverse direction. Medicines and medical procedures allow the weaker to survive as well as the fittest so humans will devolve with time. So here we were, using the technology humans had evolved, to have some fun in a place we weren't designed to be in. That's that power of evolution!