Natural Selection - living on the edge
August 12th 2007 14:19
Often when people talk about evolution, what they are really talking about is the long term effects of natural selection. so when we say evolution, often what we mean is evolution by natural selection.
Without natural selection, evolution would be radically different. There would be no strands, categories, distinguishable independent threads. Every generation would merely mutate randomly, the family tree would be a fractal spreading out equally in all directions from the centre. It would be a tangled web of infinite forces and directions. It would be quite hard for us to make any meaning out of this, not in the way we can construct neat little narratives about evolution by natural selection. But lets talk more about the influence of natural selection.
Natural selection is like a knife edge, cutting away at the different possibilities on the evolutionary tree, choosing what will be and what will not be. But at the same time, it seems to do cumulative work, creating new futures which previously were not possible, but doing so by excluding others from existence. Using the bodies of the dead to stoke the engines of the living.
It seems from an objective point of view that natural selection is a static line, on one side are all the modes of life which can't work, will not survive, and on the other are the modes of life which can work and will survive. The entities which have been evolving have been feeling around in the dark, some dropping off the edge, and others luckily managing to draw a line along the cliff edge, but never falling off. On either side of the line are infinitely vast ammounts of space and if the organism would just move across into the space away from the cliff he would have plenty of room to feel around in the dark without chances of falling off the edge.
Take the emperor penguins for instance. These stubborn idiots are living the most ridiculous life at the edge of the cliff, all the other animals left Antarctica millions of years ago, realised it was no longer a tropical paradise but instead starting to become a bit chilly, packed their bags and left. A few dumb idiots hung around and met their extinction pretty soon. But one of those stubborn no foresight having fools is still around! how the hell has this animal not died out yet? Every year all of them meet and breed in the same freakin place, all of them! Talk about having all your eggs in one basket. Anyways, so they find a nice spot and decide they'll stay there to do their breeding cycle. Oh man, I don't think I want to go into it any more, but they sit there in the ridiculously cold winter with the eggs resting on their feet, under a fold of fat, and if they try to shuffle a little bit and they lose balance of the egg and it touches the ground for a second, it instantly freezes up and the chick to be instead cease to be. And then we've got all this waiting around for as long as they can without food, and going on these long treks and all this rubbish, i mean talk about living on the knife edge, they are so lucky to survive at each point, they should just move away from the cliff edge a little bit, there's so much room here, they don't have to be dealing with such intense cold, they are doing things the hard way to an extreme never seen before.
We don't feel like we are living on the edge like that. We use our brains to think about these things, we live well away from the edge. We've got technology which lets us not worry about food gathering, producing living offspring is a cynch, we've even got a bit of time on the side which we like to call leisure time, that's the times when we are not fighting for our survival, you other animals probably won't understand it. We think we are above the other animals, we think we are no longer feeling around in the dark, we can see. so we casually walk around and strutt our stuff and hurry along on our merry way, no concern for dropping off the edge of that cliff which we moved away from ages ago when we invented agriculture.
but now we have realised that the twists and turns in directions of the edge can be huge, and suddenly we aren't as far away from the edge as we thought we were, relatively. So maybe feeling along the edge allows you better chance of survival than arogantly walking around with your eyes closed. But it does not beat cautionsly walking around with your eyes open. So we must open our eyes and realise there is a cataclysm ahead. If we are to survive it it will be because we were advanced enough to be willing to make whatever changes necessary to stay alive. I suspect that at the last minute this will kick in, but by then we will find we are riding a train headed over the edge at such a speed that even if we jumped off allowing ourselves to be brutalised and damaged in that violent way, we would still have so much momentum that we would roll over the edge anyway. But there are 7 billion of us and if enough of us all lean to one side we can get the train to curve in its path. If we can learn to steer the train we will not have to jump off. Better yet, if we can get the train to steer itself, we can get back to our leisure time and never worry about our survival again.
From feeling around on hands and knees, eyes closed at the edge of a cliff, carefully and slowly making our way, trying not to fall off the edge; to racing along on a train at breakneck speed, sitting around and having a laugh as the train takes on you on to untold lands.
Now is the test. Either we will work together in enough numbers to make the train safe, or we will careen off the edge in an epic drama of destruction. It will either be the begining of the tale of our journey, or the journey will not happen at all. What a shame if the journey never takes place, who knows what wonders and mysteries we might encounter.
Without natural selection, evolution would be radically different. There would be no strands, categories, distinguishable independent threads. Every generation would merely mutate randomly, the family tree would be a fractal spreading out equally in all directions from the centre. It would be a tangled web of infinite forces and directions. It would be quite hard for us to make any meaning out of this, not in the way we can construct neat little narratives about evolution by natural selection. But lets talk more about the influence of natural selection.
Natural selection is like a knife edge, cutting away at the different possibilities on the evolutionary tree, choosing what will be and what will not be. But at the same time, it seems to do cumulative work, creating new futures which previously were not possible, but doing so by excluding others from existence. Using the bodies of the dead to stoke the engines of the living.
It seems from an objective point of view that natural selection is a static line, on one side are all the modes of life which can't work, will not survive, and on the other are the modes of life which can work and will survive. The entities which have been evolving have been feeling around in the dark, some dropping off the edge, and others luckily managing to draw a line along the cliff edge, but never falling off. On either side of the line are infinitely vast ammounts of space and if the organism would just move across into the space away from the cliff he would have plenty of room to feel around in the dark without chances of falling off the edge.
Take the emperor penguins for instance. These stubborn idiots are living the most ridiculous life at the edge of the cliff, all the other animals left Antarctica millions of years ago, realised it was no longer a tropical paradise but instead starting to become a bit chilly, packed their bags and left. A few dumb idiots hung around and met their extinction pretty soon. But one of those stubborn no foresight having fools is still around! how the hell has this animal not died out yet? Every year all of them meet and breed in the same freakin place, all of them! Talk about having all your eggs in one basket. Anyways, so they find a nice spot and decide they'll stay there to do their breeding cycle. Oh man, I don't think I want to go into it any more, but they sit there in the ridiculously cold winter with the eggs resting on their feet, under a fold of fat, and if they try to shuffle a little bit and they lose balance of the egg and it touches the ground for a second, it instantly freezes up and the chick to be instead cease to be. And then we've got all this waiting around for as long as they can without food, and going on these long treks and all this rubbish, i mean talk about living on the knife edge, they are so lucky to survive at each point, they should just move away from the cliff edge a little bit, there's so much room here, they don't have to be dealing with such intense cold, they are doing things the hard way to an extreme never seen before.
We don't feel like we are living on the edge like that. We use our brains to think about these things, we live well away from the edge. We've got technology which lets us not worry about food gathering, producing living offspring is a cynch, we've even got a bit of time on the side which we like to call leisure time, that's the times when we are not fighting for our survival, you other animals probably won't understand it. We think we are above the other animals, we think we are no longer feeling around in the dark, we can see. so we casually walk around and strutt our stuff and hurry along on our merry way, no concern for dropping off the edge of that cliff which we moved away from ages ago when we invented agriculture.
but now we have realised that the twists and turns in directions of the edge can be huge, and suddenly we aren't as far away from the edge as we thought we were, relatively. So maybe feeling along the edge allows you better chance of survival than arogantly walking around with your eyes closed. But it does not beat cautionsly walking around with your eyes open. So we must open our eyes and realise there is a cataclysm ahead. If we are to survive it it will be because we were advanced enough to be willing to make whatever changes necessary to stay alive. I suspect that at the last minute this will kick in, but by then we will find we are riding a train headed over the edge at such a speed that even if we jumped off allowing ourselves to be brutalised and damaged in that violent way, we would still have so much momentum that we would roll over the edge anyway. But there are 7 billion of us and if enough of us all lean to one side we can get the train to curve in its path. If we can learn to steer the train we will not have to jump off. Better yet, if we can get the train to steer itself, we can get back to our leisure time and never worry about our survival again.
From feeling around on hands and knees, eyes closed at the edge of a cliff, carefully and slowly making our way, trying not to fall off the edge; to racing along on a train at breakneck speed, sitting around and having a laugh as the train takes on you on to untold lands.
Now is the test. Either we will work together in enough numbers to make the train safe, or we will careen off the edge in an epic drama of destruction. It will either be the begining of the tale of our journey, or the journey will not happen at all. What a shame if the journey never takes place, who knows what wonders and mysteries we might encounter.
| 30 |
| Vote |
Subscribe to this blog
Comment by Timothy Powell
my second my first blog
poetryatrics