Spinozablue: An Eclectic Journal of the Arts

Snaps, But­tons and Diguette’s The­ory of Un-​​Natural Selection

by R. Diguette

Paint­ing: The HMS Bea­gle, by Con­rad Martens.

Every time I put on a pair of sum­mer shorts I find myself won­der­ing about the lowly metal snap.  It seems to be going the way of the Nean­derthal, slowly but surely dying out of exis­tence, per­haps even­tu­ally one day to be re-​​discovered as just another unfor­tu­nate vic­tim of the march of time.  In its place we have the plas­tic but­ton.  But why is this hap­pen­ing?  In what way is the plas­tic but­ton supe­rior to, or bet­ter adapted to sur­vive than, the metal snap?

Con­sider this.  Metal snaps sel­dom if ever fall off.  The same most assuredly can­not be said for plas­tic but­tons.  For instance, when was the last time a gar­ment of yours came back from the dry clean­ers miss­ing a snap?  Never?  But when was the last time a gar­ment came back miss­ing a but­ton?  Last week?  Yes­ter­day?  You see what I mean?  But­tons fall off whereas snaps typ­i­cally do not.

The Eng­lish nat­u­ral­ist Charles Dar­win the­o­rized that organ­isms develop vari­a­tions, and that some result­ing vari­ants have a greater propen­sity for sur­vival than oth­ers.  Those vari­ants best adapted to their envi­ron­ment are nat­u­rally selected to sur­vive and over time become pre­dom­i­nant, while the vari­ants less well adapted to their envi­ron­ment are nat­u­rally selected out of existence.

Clearly a metal snap is not an organ­ism, and to that extent Charles Darwin’s The­ory of Nat­ural Selec­tion does not apply.  Some­thing very much like Nat­ural Selec­tion, how­ever, seems to be at work when it comes to snaps and but­tons.  In fact, the appar­ent demise of the metal snap has led me to for­mu­late a the­ory of my own, which I (per­haps immod­estly) call the The­ory of Un-​​Natural Selection.

The The­ory of Un-​​Natural Selec­tion is not dif­fi­cult to grasp, and as far as I know there are no com­pet­ing the­o­ries that I must rec­on­cile with my own.  Dar­win, as you may recall, had no end of trou­ble rec­on­cil­ing the par­tic­u­lar claims of his the­ory with those pro­posed by Lyle, Lamarck and A. R. Wal­lace among oth­ers.  I have no such trou­ble, and it is a good thing because I am incred­i­bly weak at reconciliation.

What is the The­ory of Un-​​Natural Selec­tion?  Allow me to explain it in the fol­low­ing way.  The demise of the metal snap as the pre­vail­ing mode of fas­ten­ing the waist of a pair of sum­mer shorts has coin­cided with the emer­gence of the plas­tic but­ton as the alter­na­tive pre­vail­ing mode of doing exactly the same thing.  Thus it would appear that the plas­tic but­ton is to the snap what Homo sapi­ens was to the Neanderthal.

It is gen­er­ally accepted as his­tor­i­cal fact that Homo sapi­ens pos­sessed a larger brain than the Nean­derthal.  Skulls have been found and dated that would seem to bear this out.  It is believed, as a result, that Homo sapi­ens was bet­ter adapted to sur­vive than Nean­derthal, espe­cially dur­ing the suc­ces­sive ice ages that only came to an end dur­ing the lat­ter part of the Pleis­tocene Age, or about 10,000 years ago.  By then the lin­eage of the Nean­derthal had long since run its ill-​​fated, pigeon-​​toed course.  The metal snap, how­ever, does not suf­fer from an infir­mity mak­ing it less well adapted as a fas­tener than the plas­tic but­ton.  In fact, the but­ton seems wholly infe­rior, or much less well adapted to sur­vive, than the snap mainly because, as pre­vi­ously noted, but­tons fall off whereas snaps do not.

Accord­ing to my The­ory of Un-​​Natural Selec­tion, the but­ton has been arti­fi­cially allowed to emerge and pre­dom­i­nate over the snap for some as yet unex­plained rea­son.  It may be, for instance, that but­tons are cheaper to man­u­fac­ture than snaps, or that but­tons are more eas­ily affixed to gar­ments than snaps, or that mar­ket­ing research has shown but­tons to be more appeal­ing than snaps to the aver­age shop­per.  These are only three pos­si­bil­i­ties, one firmly grounded in eco­nom­ics, one in mechan­ics, and one in aes­thet­ics.  But the fact remains, and on this one salient fact the The­ory of Un-​​Natural Selec­tion hangs its prover­bial hat, but­tons fall off whereas snaps typ­i­cally do not.

I am con­vinced that in the nat­ural world the plas­tic but­ton would never have emerged to pre­dom­i­nate over the metal snap.  I am equally con­vinced that the but­ton has come to pre­dom­i­nate solely because Mod­ern Man, or Homo sapi­ens con­tem­po­rane­ass, has for some rea­son decided that but­tons are prefer­able to snaps. My the­ory, like Darwin’s, will no doubt have its crit­ics.  Some may claim that the The­ory of Un-​​natural Selec­tion is only a the­ory and thereby swiftly con­sign it to the dust­bin of incon­ve­nient ideas.  But then I am only a the­o­rist with one mod­est aim:  to pro­mote dis­cus­sion which may lead to greater under­stand­ing.  As Charles Dar­win once said, “Doing what lit­tle one can to increase the gen­eral stock of knowl­edge is as respectable an object of life as one can in any like­li­hood pur­sue.”   Dar­win was pretty smart.

So con­sider if you will Diguette’s The­ory of Un-​​Natural Selec­tion the next time you pull on a pair of shorts only to find that the but­ton is loose, or about to fall off, or has fallen off  … again!

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Copy­right © Rick Diguette and Spin­oz­ablue, 2008. All Rights Reserved.