Chapter 5: A Typical Day In A Typical High School

I was completely wrong, Candide was not boring at all it was fun an entertaining compared to the Selfish Gene. I know we have to learn of evolution but isn't that the point of science class? I practically felt in it while reading. That is why, to make it more entertaining, I decided to try to find a relation with all of this to our daily lives.

Lets turn our minds to a typical day in a typical high school. As you know there are certain social groups within the same grade. The only relation in which we see that each group bears with another group is when they, "may be predators or prey, parasites or hosts,competitors for some scarce resource. They may be exploited in special ways"(67). You might think this doesn't make sense but it really does. For example, there is the  the popular group, they compete against the nerd's group for some kind of grade or an achievement in class( it's not very likely but it happens),or something much probable when the popular group exploits the nerds to copy their homework in exchange of something.  When I quoted "predators or prey" I referred to it as when a group is the prey, in the sense of social humiliation or rejection of one of the other groups. We can see it when the not so social rejects("lions") mock the nerds ("antelopes"),when people laugh at someone or discriminate him because of what their wearing, etc. To survive to these types of behaviors  each social group has to use "An evolutionary stable strategy or ESS"(69), to make it safely to graduation, or just to at least have a livable day in high school, after all you spend half of you adolescent life in it. Take this as an example: "Lions and antelopes have reached a kind of stability by evolutionary divergence. They have become highly proficient in the art of chasing and running away"(84). Don't take it literal, that is not the point. Think of it as any group of whatever grade that starts humiliating someone from another group, the "ESS" of that someone is to ignore them or just run away. Sadly, everyone wishes that things were different but things are just the way they are. You can think that the "antelope" could just stand up for himself and prove that he is worthy as anyone else, but "a 'stand and fight' strategy against lions would be less successful"(84). It is just the way of surviving, the person from that group, or the group itself, would  even get  more hurt and end up worse than before. That is why we have stick to that "kind of dominance hierarchy"(82), to survive those four years that may seem a waste of time.

Maybe it is just a matter of a typical high school to understand nature...