Charles Darwin is one of the greatest thinkers in human history. He envisioned life as a struggle for survival—a constant struggle for existence. This is his perception of Mother Nature. And thus, this is the foundation of natural selection. Survival is not given. Individuals are constantly challenged by their environment.
Heredity, variation and selection. He drew these three concepts as the essence of evolution before the concept of genetics emerged and much before the discovery of DNA. Many people think his idea was mainly derived from his observations in Galapagos. In my view, that would mislead his thinking process. His biggest wonders in the Galapagos were astonishing correspondences between the anatomical and physiological properties of individual species and their habitats. No more than that. He wondered how that happened.
Before Darwin, heredity and evolution were already recognized because of the discovery of various fossils in geology, the work by Erasmus Darwin, Charles Darwin’s grandfather, and Jean-Baptiste Lamarck. Why do people and animals appear to fit well where they are and what they do? Why is no fish out of water? Lamarck focused on use or disuse. The properties in an individual that are frequently used can develop more and better while the ones disused are regressed - the early concept of plasticity and adaptation. This says that phenotypes are changeable. Based on use or disuse, the phenotypes adapt to their environment. Then, Lamarck thought those phenotypes were heritable to offspring.
In addition to the Galapagos voyager, Charles Darwin had incredible knowledge about the domestication of plants and animals. He knew hybrid sterility – a hybrid of two different species cannot produce offspring. He understood the power of selective breeding based on preexisting variations and selection. In selective breeding for domestication, humans are the ones who set the criteria of selection. Who would select in Mother Nature?
Darwin lived in the mid-19th century, during the Industrial Revolution and the development of capitalism and imperialism. Those social situations made him consider it a ‘struggle of existence.’ His most significant insight was the consideration of a group population. Not as an individual, he captured the group consisting of individuals. Then, a few will be selected for the next generations. Who makes the selection? Not God but environments.
Darwin had no idea how heredity happens and how variation is created. But he came up with a mechanistic interpretation of why each species looks perfectly fit for its habitat. That is the concept of natural selection based on competition, selection, and adaptation in a population.
No one doubts the concept of natural selection today. Since publication, some revisions, corrections and reinterpretations of his idea have been made. However, the essence of natural selection is widely accepted. However, I am doubting about it. Perhaps natural selection was wrong. It could happen in highly unique conditions but with no general applicability. Darwin made one big mistake, although I don't want to call it a mistake. His perception of life as a struggle for existence is highly reasonable based on the social situation at that time. That was the best new idea, capturing Mother Nature and human society. His idea stands more than 150 years after his publication. But perhaps now is the time for a massive revision.
The key word is ‘abundance’.
Can we recognize something abundant? Do we compete for something abundant? Is there any value in abundance? Can something abundant be essential and vice versa? Can we rely on something abundant? Does something abundant mean something unnecessary?
Realizing something abundant is very difficult. It can be realized only after it is no longer abundant. Something abundant and unnecessary exists, while so does something abundant and necessary. Abundance is only recognized in comparison to non-abundance. Its necessity is only realized when you face a non-abundance situation. Think of your own health as an example.
Abundance is the most essential property in each environment – a context. However, as long as you are inside the context, abundance is valueless and unnoticeable. No one competes for something abundant.
Life never started from competition but from abundance. Abundant biochemical materials, a chaotic soup of organic materials permitted the first cell to emerge. The cells keep reproducing as long as they stay within the abundant context.
Abundance is neither uniform nor eternal in any environment but local (i.e. uneven) and could be temporal. Life emerged because of the abundance in the local environment. In other words, life depends on it. Alternatively, life is constrained by the availability of abundance.
There are variations in abundance, spatial and temporal, including seasonal. Some types of abundance are global or continent-scale, like oxygen levels in the atmosphere, salt concentration or pH in oceans, etc. The other types are local and probabilistic abundance, like spontaneous bumping (or searching) for food, water for land animals, and finding mates.
When any global abundance becomes non-abundant, like a drop in oxygen level, the species relying on the abundance will experience massive extinction—the rate of death increases in non-abundant conditions. None can escape it.
Probabilistic abundance is very interesting—it is abundant in frequency. This can be rephrased as the frequency of chance and risk. The abundance of chance frequency is the key to survival. When this goes non-abundant, the population size decreases. This is not based on fitness but on luck because the frequency of chance and risk is out of control of individuals. Not only the frequency but also their order is out of control of individuals. In the end, for an individual, chance and risk are serial events with random unpredictability in contents, frequency and order.
Domestication (i.e., selective breeding) is the process of intervening in the frequency of chance and risk applied uniformly and consistently by human power. Antibiotic resistance in bacteria is very similar and is a serious issue in the modern world. Those bacteria did not exist and had no chance of emerging in nature because no directional, consistent, uniform risk existed. Humans created antibiotic resistance based on consistent, unintentional, uniform selections over time, similar to domestication.
As long as an individual can survive in abundance, continuity is permitted. However, whether it can continue or not depends on luck. The only thing that nature does is eliminate the properties that are not allowed to survive in abundance. I call them lethal deficiencies like intrinsic lethality and lethality in interaction with their environment, like an albino.
Importantly, abundance is not uniform and eternal conditions. Abundance can become non-abundance, but also the other way around. Based on this shift, the requirement to survive also changes. However, the essence of life is based on abundance.
Darwin wondered why each species looked so adapted to its habitat. My interpretation is that the species accidentally became suited to an environment that no others could fit. A species live because of abundance. Simultaneously, however, abundance limits where the species can live. Accidental intrinsic changes permit the transformation in its own anatomical and physiological properties, making a former junk and toxic environment considered a resourceful and abundant environment. None of the originals can follow and do not need to follow. However, only the new ones can survive and continue in the new environment. Think of oxygen, eukaryotes and mitochondria. Think of living on land. There is no need to live in the presence of oxygen or land. But the ones who overcame the limit, their progeny survive and continue. Of course, the ones who did not overcome survived and continued in their original environment.
Selection of ‘better’ is a unique human activity. Humans are the only ones who can select because we conceive the future and predict. In hindsight, the chance and risk that you experienced can be interpreted as selected. In hindsight, the past is always one path that appears to be chosen from multiple possibilities presented each time. Is it your intention or environmental intention? Did you select or were you selected? I would say neither. We bump and interact by chance. Life is an unpredictable individual journey for searching/bumping unique, abundant environments suitable for oneself. We don’t need to forcefully adapt ourselves to an environment but interact with it with open-mindedness and willingness to change. Sometimes, it suits or doesn’t. Suppose it doesn’t suit you, move to a new environment. There is an environment suitable for you.
Humans are the only species that conducts and favours competition and selection because of our cognition of the future and predictability. In this sense, we are different from other species. We built our unique society based on this abundant cognitive ability created by languages.
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