The Stupid Inheriting the Earth

Here's some scary thoughts for you...

There was an English statistician, evolutionary biologist, and geneticist named Ronald Fisher. He's sometimes called Darwin's greatest successor, and with the publication of his book Genetical Theory of Natural Selection, in 1930, he laid the groundwork for later generations and a fundamental shift to genetics and numbers as a means of describing natural selection as the process by which evolution occurs. While in the sciences evolution may not be up for debate, whether or not it's done by natural selection (survival of the fittest) or by a different process (cooperation is necessary) has quietly become an area for discussion.

In any case, Ronald Fisher had some doubts about the fate of Homo sapiens. In a world where medical science will strive to find cures for disease, murders have been turned into capital offenses, and no natural predators, the less-fit humans will not be dying off in numbers as great as they should be, evolutionarily speaking. Natural selection favors the strongest or smartest or most ingenious of any particular specie, so what happens if we as Homo sapiens decide to alter that?

Wouldn't it be interesting is someone made a dystopian movie in which the future was run by idiots, running along the lines of thinking of our geneticist Ronald Fisher?

Must be our luck, because somebody has, and not just anybody, but that old lovable rascal Mike Judge. Yup, that Mike Judge, father of Beavis and Butthead, King of the Hill, and the supremely satisfying film Office Space.

Mike Judge's film is called Idiocracy, and if you'd like to laugh and be scared at the same time, I suggest you find it as soon as possible. It's smart, crass, and extremely quick. Starring Luke Wilson (the Wilson brother that's likable) and Maya Rudolph, it takes place in 2005, and quickly moves to 2505, where both Luke Wilson's and Maya Rudolph's characters are thawed accidently in an Army experiment gone bad.

The film was treated like a radioactive carrion; wasn't given any marketing funds, wasn't given any commercials or previews, and only played--briefly--on 130 screens.

I don't want to give away too much, like the hottest television shows and movies in 2505, but, as one example, viewers see the decline through a voice-over and montage, with the constant being the restaurant FuddRuckers. Of course, FuddRuckers starts out as the name, but as time goes on, and people become more and more stupid, it devolves into FuttRuckers, then to ButtRuckers, then, as you might've guessed, all the way to ButtFuckers. Now, I know this is crass and low-brow, but the shock value is greater in this blog form than in the film, because the idea is taken seriously.

Will the world depicted in the film Idiocracy ever come about? With clean fresh-water problems, global climate change, insistence on fossil fuel-burning industry, and nuclear proliferation already entrenched problems, that the world should devolve into a dystopian place where an average schlemiel becomes The World's Smartest Person seems like a novel worry.

But Mike Judge and fans of the film weren't the first to be worried about it.