Geeks and Natural Selection

I was always the smart girl. In second grade, I was the one whose hand shot up to correct the teacher because she had the wrong answer written on the blackboard. (That was my first experience of pointing at naked emporers.) Smart girls in elementary school are usually ostracized right through junior high. Our only friends? Other smart girls, or other misfits that for some reason don't make it in the particularly rigid social structure of childhood. This phenomena is well-documented.

But then high school came along, and suddenly, cute guys wanted to sit beside me. I thought maybe I was suddenly popular. After all, I was, post-puberty, pretty cute, myself. I had gorgeous dark brown hair, big brown eyes, and best of all, the only thing I ever got a D in was my breasts. So I thought maybe the cute boys - the football players, the wrestlers, the baseball players - all wanted to sit beside me because they were interested in me. Well, in a way, they were. But they weren't interested in my "D's". They were interested in my "A's". They wanted to copy my answers on tests, and be partners with me on projects, because they knew they'd keep their averages up so that they could remain on their respective teams. I remained clueless until I met Drew.

Drew was in my gym class. I got stuck playing volleyball with a bunch of junior boys. I have never been athletic, but tall, skinny Drew discovered that short freshman me could give him the perfect set to spike the ball. We were a team for the entire semester, and it was great. He wasn't interested in the "D's", or the "A's" - we worked together. He was actually the one who warned me about the jocks. Stay away from them, he warned. Stick with guys like me. Drew and I remained friends for 2 years until he graduated. We never dated - but we saw each other threw several ill-fated relationships. Often, I set him up for a perfect spike, but he never seemed to be able to quite follow through off of the volleyball court.

Drew was a geek. He was tall, kind of dorky, and when he wasn't spiking the hell out of a volley-ball, he did a lot of A-V set up. In the 70's, when I was in high school, we didn't know that the geeks would inherit the earth. There weren't computers in the schools at that point. There weren't cell phones, there weren't even cordless phones. Remember? We thought touch -tone was kind of cool. You could play music on it if you knew what you were doing.

We did have an Atari set at home, but we couldn't get it hooked up. I called Drew. No problem. He came over, hooked up the Atari, ate lots of dinner, and then we played Pong and Space Invaders. For hours.

When Drew graduated, he went away to college, and found, to his surprise, that there were other girls like me, that had found that geeks were good. He happily made his way through college and grad school, fixing tape decks, building rudimentary computers, and winning the hearts of women who, in his words, were "way too beautiful to want to be with a geek like me."

Those women knew what I had learned. These smart, wonderful geeks, awkward in social situations, knew how to fix things, didn't realize they were supposed to be dragging their knuckles on the ground, and acutally liked to have intelligent conversation. They were fun to be around. So what if they liked Star Trek a little too much. Star Trek grows on you. Seriously. As long as they're not wearing a communicator on their jacket, you're probably ok. (Unless the communicator works, and they actually built it themselves - that would be cool.)

I have a theory about this. Back in the days when it was necessary to capture and kill our food, fight off enemies with brute force, and produce offspring who would be able to do the same thing, women were naturally attracted to the beefcake type. Brawn, with not much brain. Cute, usually - the Kevin Sorbo type. We needed muscle to protect us, to keep us from being carried off by rival tribes, and to give us babies who could protect the next generation of our tribe from the same thing.

But now, we smart girls know that we don't need brawn to protect us from being carried off - we can take Tae Kwan Doe classes, and learn to kick maurauders in the head. Or better yet, just get a geeky guy to build you a taser. No problem, and no beefcake needed. We can get our own food. We can order our groceries online now, if we need to, and have them delivered to our door, if we live in the right part of the country. No hunting necessary. We don't have tribes, we don't get carried off. No knuckle dragging, beer-swilling, pig-grunting, couch-jumping, beef-cake needed, thank you very much. What we need are geeky lovers who can make all of the remotes work - or better yet - make one remote work everything. We need for them to give us their geeky genes so our smart, geeky babies will become the next Bill Gates, or Steve Jobs, and the world will move to the next level.

The Geeks have inherited the earth; they've also inherited the women. Eat your heart out, Kevin Sorbo. Somewhere, I hope Drew is out there, daddy to lots of beautiful, geeky babies (realistically, Drew could be granddaddy to geeky babies at this point!). Natural selection at it's finest.