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Detective. But in his own mind, he was first and foremost a professor (currently the Abraham Goldstein Distinguished Professor of Anthropology at the University of Washington), and at this moment he was in his element: a full classroom, a lectern to lean on, and a captive audience.
    “What you have to remember,” he was saying, “is that ‘survival of the fittest’ doesn’t mean survival of the biggest, or strongest, or cleverest, or any other such thing. No, natural selection simply favors those best adapted to the existing local conditions, by weeding out those
least
able to adapt to them. For example, sometimes being large—and therefore intimidating and powerful—is obviously a survival advantage; but at other times—as when food has become hard to come by or speed is more valuable than strength—it can be a disadvantage. You know that old joke about the two hikers and the bear?” he asked, shutting down the laptop he’d used for his PowerPoint presentation on post-cranial blunt-force trauma.
    Only the two Americans in his audience indicated they’d heard it, responding with groans. Strictly a New World joke, apparently.
    “Okay. Two hikers are out in the woods when, fifty feet down the path, a huge grizzly bear rears up on its hind legs and roars at them. Ralph immediately starts to struggle out of his backpack, getting ready to run for it. ‘Thank God I wore my running shoes,’ he says. Rodney stands there, frozen stiff. ‘What’s the point of running?’ he groans. ‘You can’t outrun a bear!’ ‘I don’t have to outrun the bear,’ Ralph yells back, already thirty feet down the path. ‘I just have to outrun
you
.’”
    There was an obligatory murmur of laughter. Gideon waited, and then, as expected, a louder, longer wave followed. This was one of the things you had to get used to when giving lectures to multilingual audiences. English was the official language of the conference, so anyone attending was required to have a grasp of it. But grasps varied, and many attendees took a little time to process what they heard. Humor apparently took more processing than most things. It was unsettling at first—your immediate reaction was that your jokes fell flat, but eventually you got used to it and learned to wait.
    He continued as the chuckling died away. “Well, to me that’s a great metaphor for the way natural selection works. Ralph didn’t have to be the fastest man alive, he just had to be fast enough to be the one to survive on that particular day. Now . . . fast-forward fifty years, and there’s Ralph, the faster one, sitting there at a family barbecue—well, a family dinner. He’s a white-haired old grandfather now, and he’s surrounded by his family—say he had two children and each of them had two children—he’d have six descendants, and all six would be carrying his genes, including, perhaps, whatever genes might have made him a little faster than Rodney that fateful day.
    “And what about Rodney? Ah, poor Rodney’s but a dim memory. He’s been gone these fifty years now, and his genes with him. So in the gene pool as a whole, the ones he was carrying are a little less well represented than they used to be, while Ralph’s now have a bigger share—those six descendants. Well, assuming that those ‘fast’ genes keep providing a survival advantage—however slight—every generation will have more people carrying them and fewer and fewer of the ‘slow gene’ people. The genetic makeup of the population as a whole would change.
But . . .
they wouldn’t necessarily become as fast as it was humanly possible to become, they’d just need to be fast enough to get away from the bears. Well, that’s the way natural selection works. The results don’t have to be perfect, they just have to be good enough to get by.”
    One of Gideon’s many admirable traits was his ability to deliver a coherent, fully formed lecture on the spur of the moment. One of his less attractive