On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection...

On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life

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a Short Story concerning one Severus Snape

by Wemyss

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I write this to you as from a tent by the sea at Aquileia. If, as I fully anticipate, you do not understand the reference, I suggest that you beg enlightenment of Ted the Tinker Tonks. My situation is different to that of Macsen Wledig of course on many heads, not least that I am, in sending this to you, not writing to two loyal protégés of mine own, as Maximus was doing in writing to Pertinax and Parnesius. Rather to the contrary.

I suppose I ought to be grateful that I am least held at York. As, however, it is exceedingly unlikely that you will either of you have made the connexion between my Christian name and the place where I am being held at your orders - much less the connexion between that theme and the reference I have just made to the war between Theodosius and Magnus Maximus - I cannot persuade myself that gratitude is due.

Save, perhaps, that some gratitude is due to you both - however grudgingly - because you have - however grudgingly - allowed me to secure, by granting me this stay of time for the writing of this document, the judgement of history upon my actions. It is at your hands that I have been privileged to commit my motives and an account of my doings to posterity, which, I am assured, will do what you and all of your smugly victorious acquaintance cannot do: comprehend my doings. I know that I will not be blamed by those who come after, who will understand my motivations and no more think to blame me than they would blame a glaciation, a drought, or a microbe.

Such magnanimous victors you are, to be sure.

I wish only that I could imagine that either of you possessed the faintest glimmerings of a capacity to understand me. Well, I shall write the whole of it, regardless of your inability to take it in, and leave events to the natural order of things and the eventual emergence of a competent posterity.

You have, neither of you, any idea of what I speak of, do you? Classical allusions, the Romano-British forebears of Vortigern - so material to the history of the great Merlin - these are as dark and closed to your pathetic understandings as is, say, simple biology. And yet you have, somehow, triumphed. For now. Remarkable.

Perhaps it as well that you are in a state of unadulterated nescience in most respects. Doubtless, if either of you knew your Gibbon, you would already be reaching for a borrowed epigram to avoid having to think for yourselves. You would, presumably, be already reflecting that 'the arts of Severus cannot be justified by the most ample privileges of state reason. He promised only to betray; he flattered only to ruin; and however he might occasionally bind himself by oaths and treaties, his conscience, obsequious to his interest, always released him from the inconvenient obligation', and on that basis dismissing anything I could possibly say to you.

Indeed, you might have gone so far as to recall the political munera sine missione between the first of the Severans and his rival in Britain, Clodius Albinus, and from that claim some divinatory portent. It would be no more daft than much that has been said regarding Arthur Weasley and Lucius Malfoy, and no less nonsensical.

And once again I can comfort myself, not with imagining, but with envisioning accurately, based on lengthy experience, the looks of utter incomprehension on your markedly unintelligent faces. Yes, it is truly remarkable that you won - and survived into the bargain. It is on such random turns of events, against all odds, that mankind has built its fantasies of fate and destiny, of providence and prophecy. It is on such unanticipated accidents that all the comforting falsehoods of frightened children seeking hope are founded: not only the deluded belief in gods, but the still more deluded belief in destiny, the conviction that, not only do the gods exist, but that they play with loaded dice. Would that I had done more to refute - nay, to eradicate - these inanities: ecrasez l'infame.

At least I disburdened us all of that twinkling ass, Dumbledore. It was of course necessary; I will not deny that it was also a pleasure. At the end of the day, I veritably believe that the senile old dodderer believed the idea to have been his own. (I cannot conceive of respecting a man who needs must use others to commit suicide.)

I can all too readily imagine your present state of - well, one cannot really call it a state of mind, can one, not with any decent regard for terminological exactitude. Temper, perhaps. I imagine you regret having afforded me the courtesy, de haute en bas, the victor's condescension, of justifying my actions. I can see you both in my mind's eye, reacting to a simple statement of fact regarding the late Headmaster: one of you in a blinding rage, stuffed so full of self-righteous indignation - or, really, as every day of your life, with self-righteousness, full stop - that you are choking, the other preparing for the usual Italianate, La Scala aria of operatic penitence and self-dramatisation. Chorus, obviously, being supplied by the narrow-minded John Bull of the Burrow and the strident, bien-pensant henpecking Virago of the Libraries, the Boudicca of the Restricted Section.

And yet, somehow, you have won. Remarkable, is it not.

I should like to be able to take credit for your having won. Accuracy forbids. Certainly it was my intention that the Dark Lord lose, and I did rather considerably more than either of you did to effect that result. But it was not my intention that you all of you live to enjoy the fruits of victory: complacency being foremost amongst these.

It is worth noting that the three individuals who exerted the greatest impact upon the course of the struggle were examples of hybrid vigour: the Dark Lord, his Chosen One, and the most important of all, the Half-Blood Prince. Hah. Primus inter pares. Foremost, certainly, but when have I ever been amidst peers? I remain surrounded by inferiors. Even here, in a cell, at York.

I suppose it is only to be expected that you do not understand me. In the one instance, obviously, it is your father's doing. He may have feared, unconsciously, to train you properly lest you be unavoidably recruited to a losing cause; he certainly meant to keep you too weak ever to challenge him. He gave you a top-dressing, a merest smattering, of learning and of manners, enough to pass as an intelligent man and a gentleman ... at a distance, in the dark, and with the light behind you. It was enough to prevent your realising the need to apply yourself so as to cultivate such brains as you did have. In the other instance, well, what can one say. Were it not for your mother's genetic contribution, the Dark Lord would have been best advised, and he would not have been alone, in preferring the Longbottom boy to you for any ... celebrity. Certainly environmental factors are responsible for much of your astounding incompetence - I have said that Dumbledore was a fool - but they were operating upon unpromising material at best: Potter's clay.

Nymphadora possesses far more intelligence and power and possesses a special capability that surpasses anything her mother, aunts, or unlamented cousin - the one with fleas - ever imagined. But then, she is an example of hybrid vigour. Bellatrix was beyond such euphemisms as 'unstable': an example of the 'pureblood' ideal, which is to say, a classic sample of the dangers of inbreeding. The Gaunts come to mind as well. And such successes as our Golden Boy has stumbled into ... well, one must credit Lily's Evans genes, certainly Potter and Black showed themselves at school an object lesson in the consequences of inadequate genetic diversity and the resulting inbreeding depression.

Imagine that. Had Tom Marvolo Riddle, or the Gaunts themselves, been instructed in simple Mendelian genetics, and disabused of Lamarckism and Lysenkoism, the Wizarding world might have avoided two wars, and thousands of Wizards and Witches would not have died.

And that would never have done.

Oh, do be quiet: I know full well that you are both moved to pointless tantrums by that simple statement of fact. But do try to be sensible, and look about you. Already - as I can discern even from my cell - the Wizarding world, flush with victory, is sinking once more into thoughtless lethargy, unthinking complacency, and all the old patterns of bigotry and stratification: based, what is more, upon a perversely mistaken, an almost perfectly miscomprehended, concept of 'blood' and lineage, although they will try to hide it for a few months in deference to Potter's status.

You have won, the both of you, with your ragtag Order. Is what you see about you truly victory?

If man dwelt in a state of nature, and were subject only to the usual influences of natural selection, unmediated by recent constructs, I should never have considered my duty and taken on my role. There had been no need were that the case. It is not.

The effect of domestication upon formerly worthwhile animals is to infantilise them. For some curious reason, I do not particularly care for wolves - I cannot possibly imagine why not - and yet I find them preferable to lapdogs. The deleterious effects of coddling and cosseting are of course still worse and more marked as the subject population becomes smaller. And that the subject population will become smaller is inevitable: with each reduction in genetic diversity not ameliorated by outbreeding, the 'purebloods' of the Wizarding world have grown increasingly infertile, incompetent, inbred, insane, and inept. Even amongst those members of the overall prospective breeding population who might usefully breed: the ones, that is, who are not so inferior that they should be sterilised for the good of society: even amongst these, instability increases; risks are run during the prime reproductive years, resulting in deferral of breeding and, particularly in Gryffindors, in their being killed off before procreating; and increases in homosexual orientation further reduce the available, viable breeding stock - perhaps to levels below the population replacement level.

That the Wizarding world had not yet, as of the 1970s, say, died out, can be attributed only to outbreeding (including some surreptitious instances in certain 'pure' families where the paternity of a child might better not be too fully investigated) and to some instances of beneficial mutation - coupled with great good fortune in the randomly benign, or at least not fatal, instances of genetic drift and founder's effect in the alleles of this laughably small and inbred population.

Natural selective forces, if not mediated and warped by the interference of social institutions designed to make life easier, should then have intervened to force Wizarding populations either to improve, or to go to the wall. Unfortunately, these social innovations for the coddling of the population existed, albeit to nothing like the extent they do in the Muggle world. More regrettably still, where they did exist, they had the not at all unintended consequence of protecting and perpetuating the idiocies and uselessness of the inbred 'pureblood' families, whilst penalising drive, initiative, and intelligence. (You are, of course, both Blacks in some measure, I leave the implication there for you to discover it ... if you can manage to do.) Worst of all, war was imminent, directed by one of the few competent - and at the time, he was competent, it is no use pretending otherwise - dark Wizards on hand (himself, I remind you, an example of hybrid vigour and the utility of outbreeding), in the name and service of further inbreeding and ruinous genetic folly.

Half-blood and hybridised prince though I was, I could no more stop the war from starting than could, you will note, the all-powerful Albus Dumbledore. What I could do was use it, wrest it to my purposes. I did do.

Dare I hope that you, either of you, begin even dimly to comprehend me?

Obviously, the Dark Lord could not be allowed to triumph on a programme and platform that was not only woefully unsound as a matter of science, but was, precisely, the very cause of the very problem that he intended that it cure.

Equally obviously, the Wizarding population of Britain badly wanted to be shaken, challenged, and, yes, weeded and pruned rather severely, lest they die out completely. If the Dark Lord could not be allowed to triumph, neither could he be allowed wholly to fail as a mechanism of natural selection. The herd must be culled, I concluded.

I therefore aided, first the one side, then the other, as it seemed to be most efficacious in the service of phenotypic natural selection.

I am certain that you are, at this moment, damning me as cruel and inhuman. I suppose you would similarly condemn a plague bacillus or an earth-impacting meteor. Do try to grasp the principle, will you.

Neither the Dark Lord and his followers, nor those opposing him, be they the complacent fools at the Ministry, the non-'dark', 'pure-blooded' families, the senile headmaster of a school and his ludicrous 'order', or any others, grasped the stakes that were being played for. None had a vision of what could be - and must necessarily be for the population to survive. I alone envisaged the possibility of a population selected on merit. I alone was in a position to effect the making real of that possibility, using the war and the follies of all involved to - my own advantage? Hardly. That is what I find so galling, to be frank, in the foolish and inaccurate statements that have been made concerning my actions and motives in the late war. Rather, I did what I did for the good of the many. I redressed the balance that had been falsely skewed by social and environmental factors that sheltered folly and reinforced and rewarded unfitness. It was my design - for the benefit of Wizarding kind as a whole - to create a wholly meritocratic society, in which the population was selected for intelligence, and be damned to these false constructs of blood and lineage, Muggle and Squib and Halfblood and Pureblood, Potters and Blacks to one side and the Lesser Breeds Without the Law to the other. A world that valued Regulus Black before Sirius Black, Evans before Potter, even that ghastly, intellectually-shallow poseur, Granger, before such stockfish as Weasley, Crabbe, and Goyle. Obviously, neither the Ministry, nor the Order, nor the Dark Lord and his minions, would have seen and accepted the irrefutable logic of this position, or admitted the need of the society that they so signally failed to advance or even to protect. I - and I alone - could establish this new order by a careful manipulation of all sides in the struggle. I - and I alone - could save Wizarding kind from its own folly and create a better breed of Wizards, selected for intelligence and merit, only by stealth, and I could prevent the fools from intervening against their own best interests only by making the process inexorable, by seeing to it that enough inferior stock was removed and that environmental selection sufficientlt favoured the traits I was selecting for, all to such an extent that the population would no longer be able to resist the force of genetic improvement.

It is only in the last element that I failed. I intended the Dark Lord and most of his followers - these unfit in any case to have their genes passed on - to fail, and fail they did, and I had, I may note with pardonable pride, no little hand in that. But I never intended that so many of his remarkably useless and inferior opponents, wand-fodder, should survive.

I am astounded that mere chance could so have undone me. In a most literal sense, the idiots and the unfit were too many for me. That Granger, who is clever in a minor sort of way, though not truly intelligent, should have survived, is not so very astonishing. That Weasley, for all the rumours of a freakish ability for chess-playing, suggesting an intelligence otherwise wholly lacking in him - I suppose him to be, if these rumours are not wholly baseless, some sort of idiot savant, or possibly something akin to a 'counting horse' - somehow won through, staggers me. And I freely, indeed happily, admit - nay, I insist - that I certainly did not expect both (or, frankly, either) of you to survive the war (although in the one case, obviously, you could not very well have predeceased the Dark Lord).

This is, truly, vexing. A sanguinary war did at least rid us of the Dark Lord and his followers, thus excising the very worst and most corrupted genetic material from our population. And I suppose I should feel some content in the undoubted fact that you and your acquaintance, as the victors, will be more open to outbreeding (politically, I mean, in your two instances, as the two of you, being not only homosexual but too self-indulgent to perform your genetic duties, will not be procreating. I suppose you will claim that you 'love' each other), and your triumphant gaggle of half-wits will, surely, labour to remove environmental factors that do not promote Muggle-borns and Half-bloods. Yet I could have hoped for so much more, a world of half-blood princes and of Muggle-borns selected for talent and sharp wits. If only you and your sort of middling creatures, relying upon luck rather than wiles and wits, had had the grace to die as you ought to have done.

But, obviously, you did not do, to my eternal disappointment. I am advised by your creatures here (such superior gaolers!), the casually swaggering and braggart executors of the conquerors's wills, that the respite granted me to finalise these remarks grows short. What folly. Any reasonably well-organised state had rather kept me as an advisor and as a source of genetic material, selecting for nerve and for intelligence. But you will waste your resources, as you did as inky schoolboys, and brute force happens to be on your side.

A lesser man would rail against this outcome, and suspect it of less than perfect randomness. I shan't do. Another might remark, with such bitterness or not as he chose, but certainly with no little irony in his tone, Vicisti, Galilæe, and surrender. Well, you have, in some sense, conquered, perhaps, but I do not surrender, nor have I wholly failed. Indeed, can you be certain that you have conquered? If your victory is to be meaningful, if the Dark Lord is to be relegated forever to the texts that La Granger alone amongst you reads, you needs must adopt my policies, my programmes. And I know you, both, rather better than you know each other or yourselves. You will resent, reject, and renounce all that I have tried - a triumph of hope over bitter experience - to teach and convey in this missive. You will fail. It will remain in your minds, against your will, and it will take root.

I know you, both of you.

You each have the worst traits of your fathers, magnified, and few of their virtues, if either ever possessed any virtues, which I beg leave, based upon some years's observation, to doubt. Such talents as you possess - including that of survival, or at least the traits that aided you both, regrettably, to survive - you seem to have inherited of and through your mothers. But you did not inherit only talents from your mothers. In the one case - it ran deep in her Noble and Most Ancient House (I apologise for my poor fist just there, but I cannot possibly write that without laughing) - your mother left you with both neurosis and a profound narcissism, such that you will forever after be haunted by my words and wonder how you look and seem and come across to others in light of what I have forced you to confront. In the other case, although what little wits you possess to leaven your dullness, came from your mother, you seem also to have received her lack of the most rudimentary ability to keep your countenance, her emotionalism, her fatally trusting, lily-white nature, her willingness to let her heart rule her head: 'the schoolboy heat, the blind hysterics of the Celt' - or schoolgirl heat, I suppose. Evans was all too typical a Gryffindor, after all.

Thus, I do not feel myself defeated. I have waded through much blood to reach my objective, all for the good of others, however they refuse my gift. I would gladly do so again - and do a better job of ... shall we say, surgery? Yet I have triumphed. The worst of the unfit have been removed from the gene pool. Selection factors will increasingly favour merit, intelligence, and disfavour inbreeding. And the two of you, in particular, in what might almost seem your moment, not only of victory, but of vengeance upon the Evil Severus Snape, shall - whether or not you will to do it, you shall - find yourselves impelled by the logic of events to carry out my programme and serve my goal. My 'great cleansing work' (what a fool the Dark Lord was, to be sure). You will deny my words. You will never speak of these matters. But, hating every moment of it, but powerless to avoid the natural logic of events, you will do my work.

It is enough.

I remain, for what I am told is the next quarter-hour before my execution,

Yrs &c,

SEVERUS SNAPE, MMA, FRAlchS, MRSPS

PS: Pettigrew's remains are in a phial of preservative solution on the third shelf on the No. On second thought, exercise your wits.