Darwin’s Bicycle

Darwin’s On the Origin of Species was published in 1859. Across the English Channel, Pierre Michaux and Pierre Lallement were inventing what we think of today as the bicycle. So, the idea of evolving design came into the popular consciousness at nearly the same time as the bicycle began to appear in the public space.

What Darwin (and Alfred Russell Wallace) taught us was that complex designs (organisms) did not appear in nature whole and new and all-at-once, but rather as a process of evolution from previous designs. Such designs as were unfit for purpose (passing on genes to a next generation), would disappear altogether, wholly, and all-at-once. Extinction.

Every ecosystem is dynamic. Some species <ahem> might exert unseen and even unreasonable influence over the survival of another. The vanishing species isn’t morally inferior, just biologically incapable of sustaining itself given the various pressures it’s under. There are more extinct species than extant species, which means that evolution is a pretty rigorous process, and also that any species is more likely to disappear than to survive.

And that brings us to bikes.

Bicycles evolved from carriages and horses. In our little corner of the world, the bicycle loving corner, it’s hard to imagine a more perfect invention, a machine that amplifies human effort in a supremely efficient way and leaves the rider stronger and healthier than before they climbed aboard.

But if we think of the bicycle we know as a species, we have to acknowledge that the great likelihood is that it will go extinct. If you were getting very serious about this metaphor, you might look back through cycling history and think that certain types of bikes, like the pennyfarthing, had, for all intents and purposes, already exited the scene. Every species is vulnerable.

The rim brake mountain bike is gone. Are 26ers still really among the living? Bikes aren’t quite like species in that, in strictest terms, they’re much easier to resurrect. You don’t have to extract DNA from a fossilized dinosaur egg to start a poorly conceived theme park. But you get my point.

So then is it possible that the pedal-bike could go the way of the Passenger Pigeon? When the bicycle was invented, there were millions still in the sky over North America. By 1914, the last one was pecking at its last seeds in the Cincinatti Zoo.

Extinctions are the result of the overwhelming pressure of predatory force(s). So, what are the predatory forces for our beloved bicycle? You might argue that eBikes are one. Mainly they need to be pedaled now, but that’s a formality. Motors and batteries are improving all the time. Remember that Neanderthals were coexistent with Homo Sapiens. Very similar species. One of us is no longer around.

What else? Traffic, for the simple fact that fewer kids ride to school than they did decades ago, and that means fewer adults with strong links to childhood cycling. Climate change is another factor. Hotter temps discourage pedaling. And of course, we’re assessing the technological and environmental landscape as it is now. Many species succumb to sudden, unexpected changes to their environment. A truly killer personal mobility solution, because that’s what we’re talking about when we talk about eBikes, eScooters, mopeds, motorcycles, etc…a truly killer solution to the problem of personal mobility might essentially crowd the pedal bicycle out of the spaces, the habitats if you will, it occupies now.

I know. It feels very unlikely, because you ride bikes because you love to do it, and you believe people will always love to do it. A lot of species seem invulnerable, until some piece of their environment, a complex and interconnected system, shifts, and then populations plummet.

Of course, it can be hard to predict how technologies might react to changes in the ecosystem. The VHS recorder is gone. The vinyl record is on the comeback.

It’s unlikely this great thing, this hobby or transportation or way of life, depending on your passion, is going to die out in your lifetime. But, we ought to be grateful for it now and do what we can to preserve it for future generations. Don’t take it for granted that you got to live in the Age of the Bicycle.