THE Red Queen Hypothesis originally emerged in the evolutionary sciences. The name and central principle derive from the hypo-manic character in who remarks that "in this place you have to do all the running you can do just to stay in the same place".

A life form, so the theory runs, must make continuous minor adaptations to the environment in order to maintain fitness relative to other organisms that are co-evolving alongside. Which is jaw-breaking techno-babble for saying a species system must match at an ongoing rate any and all minor competitive advantages gained by its rivals. The alternative is extinction.

With the most successful and longest-enduring species there are no quantum evolutionary leaps forward according to the Red Queen theory; just steady, indefatigable modifications that can only be measured by yardsticks that calculate time in millennia, not centuries. Progress may be incremental but it nevertheless occurs.

To the casual observer, the longest-lived and best-adapted species seem to stay in the same place in evolutionary terms. Yet in reality they must move at the steady pace of the long-distance runner in order to remain both competitive and viable.

The Red Queen Theory can as easily be applied to evolving constitutional systems as it can to living organisms. A healthy constitutional system can never cease developing: it has to remain both adaptable and flexible. There can be no retrograde steps, no backsliding, no atrophying of any positive features that have resulted from years of trial-and-error experimentation.

No democratic constitutional system can survive regression in an environment where competing systems are perpetually advancing.

The preamble to the United States Constitution heavily underscores this point with its emphasis on the ongoing pursuit of "a more perfect" democracy. Absolute perfection is a political chimera, as unattainable as a bottled rainbow. But the pursuit of constitutional perfection is the engine that drives progress. Maintaining and ultimately enhancing democracy ? ensuring a system becomes ever "more perfect" ? requires never-ending effort. It is a kinetic endeavour, not a static one, even if such undertakings superficially resemble a frantic Red Queen running in place.

The journey must lead ever onwards; to fall behind, to stop, is to stagnate. The cost of liberty is as much constant forward motion as it is eternal vigilance.

As Bermuda's latest Independence debate begins, as the handful of stock arguments both for and against sovereignty are removed from storage for the first time since 1995, a number of fresh suggestions have been floated that could most charitably be described as regressive.

The most full-throated ? and, it goes without saying, least fully developed ? contributions to what is being optimistically termed a "national" debate have so far emanated from Independence partisans (the prefix "national" presupposes diminutive Bermuda is an embryonic nation state, a country-in-waiting, rather than the village-state it can at most aspire to be; but with the term affixed to everything from libraries to art galleries these days, Government is certainly not the only entity in Bermuda suffering from a sense of self-importance in converse proportion to all objective reality).

Demonstrating a sense of occasion as badly compromised as their sense of scale, two of the more didactic nationalists on the scene suggest Bermuda embark on the next major phase in its constitutional development by first negating some of the more obvious benefits of representative democracy.

One activist, whose commentary likely meets the legal and medical criteria for a blunt force capable of inducing traumatic brain injury, backs an Independence referendum. But a referendum with a franchise limited to those who meet his diabolically vague definition of who in fact constitutes a Bermudian.

Rolling back the Universal Franchise, he presumably believes, will result in a culled electorate more likely to favour his preferred option of Independence.

Couched in the language of feigned piety, his proposal is as genuinely inane as it is disturbing. Such selective exercises in pedigree-based democracy had very few boosters when South Africa was the last quasi-developed country to employ them on any regular basis.

Another Independence proponent, a sometime legislator renowned for his pragmatism but occasionally tone-deaf to the still small voice of political reason, suggests there is no need for a referendum at all.

He posits that Independence is too complex an issue for the man on the street to digest let alone decide on. Instead, he says, sovereignty should be determined on the basis of Parliamentary voice-votes.

The unhappy precedent for just such a step in fact exists ? the jury-rigged procedure put in place to allow for the boundary changes. It was pointed out repeatedly at the time that the mechanism being adopted to introduce relatively minor constitutional amendments could be used to impose very major changes.

Parliamentary "ayes" could in fact have it on Independence if the conniving mandarins at Britain's Foreign & Commonwealth Office, who have been quietly attempting to set the stage for Bermudian Independence since at least the early 1970s, nod their silent assent to such a proposal. The FCO might well be tempted to enter into an alliance of convenience with an Independence-minded Government if a Parliamentary vote were more likely to bring about their long-desired result than a referendum. Such collusion is certainly not unknown. In a disturbing variant on Clemenceau's dictum it seems democracy may be too important to be left in the hands of the Bermudian people.

In both of these examples the very underpinnings of representative democracy are dismissed with the same acid disdain Bermuda's old mercantile elite reserved for what they termed "mobocracy". Bermuda, it seems, after a 45-year growth spurt in political terms, may now be entering a period of stagnation, at best, actual degeneration at worst.

These are political ideas whose times have come and, mercifully, long since gone in the rest of the world; in Bermuda it is unsettling to discover they may still be viewed as .

There's a word for both of these suggestions. It's fascism or at least the skulking, crypto-Bermudian variation on that theme. A standard definition of fascistic thought is the belief that decisions should be removed from the hands of the people and instead be imposed on them.

To propose restricting the franchise, to float the notion that the issue be decided by Parliamentarians with no mandate to take the island to Independence, is nothing if not politically regressive.

While there may be no such thing as premature anti-fascism elsewhere, in Bermuda these suggestions that would, if adopted, drag the island back into the primordial ooze of political development have been met by an island-wide silence.

If there is one cultural trait Bermudians seem to have inherited from the British, it is their collective affinity for silence when both words and actions are called for. Yet proposals that are little more than dusted-off relics from the age of totalitarianism go completely unchallenged. Rather they seem to be accepted with the dumb resignation of cattle trudging after the Judas goat on their way to the abattoir.

There is no outrage. No protest. No impassioned defences of the civic liberties that were so hard won in Bermuda. Just a silence that can all too easily be read as tacit acquiescence. If both moral outrage and political self-preservation are not entirely obsolete in Bermuda, they both appear to have gone into deep hibernation.

The Premier's call for a debate on Independence has so far not resulted in dialogue on the issue. Instead, all that has been heard are a number of strident, ideologically-stunted monologues, the two cited here being perhaps the most pointedly asinine examples.

The toy theatre of Bermudian politics has always drawn those who mistake a facility for talking incessantly with the talent to frame credible, well-reasoned arguments. Verbal incontinence is no substitute for good sense although in Bermuda that distinction is only very rarely drawn.

And there will be more histrionic entrances in the coming weeks from more unlikely characters, political mountebanks masquerading as truth-seekers, the fringe players of Bermudian public life elbowing their way to centre stage.

cranky voices cannot, of course, be muted in a democratic society no matter that they are calling for the comprehensive circumscribing of others' civic liberties. But they should be answered. Left unchallenged even the most patently ludicrous ideas can take on the patina of authenticity, even acceptability.

Those with contributions to make to what indeed should be an all-inclusive debate are choosing to exclude themselves through either indifference or a perceived lack of urgency. Thus far they have abandoned the stage to those who normally exist on the very margins of public life.

This failure to counter the entirely resistible rise of political irrationality, to answer the non-sequiturs and nonsense, amounts to an abdication of responsibility, unconditional surrender to the forces of unreason and regression.

If such widespread somnolence continues, Bermudians might well discover the practical consequences of allowing the Red Queen theory to come into play in the constitutional field. They will not like the end result. Extinction, after all, is forever.