Seeing evolution

Recently I finished reading The Ancestor’s Tale by Richard Dawkins. It took me a while—I’ve read numerous other books while on it—but long before the end my views about life on our planet have significantly clarified. I’ve begun to see the algorithms of evolution and natural selection at work in various forms where previously I have not.

One example can be how people usually do not maintain the same level of communication and attention to their partners when they realize that they don’t need to. Every individual optimizes its activity to succeed; here a relationship is the aim and the instinct is to do just enough of what it takes to maintain it at a desired level. This is usually the case with any human activity that can be assessed.

Sometimes human intelligence and biological success diverge. Nikola Tesla, for example, held an opinion that not having any affairs with women helps him maintain his scientific abilities. Having no children makes him a failed individual in the biological sense: he did not pass on his genes and our species never got a chance to have further benefits from new individuals that could have inherited them.

Within groups, competition is critical for an individual’s achievements. When highly competitive environments yield people who are better trained at certain labour, sport or art, it is the same process that drives the biological arms race in the wild between hunters and prey.

Businesses are units of evolution. The origin of wealth taught me this earlier actually, but now I see it not just as a purely logical, but as a consequence empirically derived as well. Businesses are just a special case in fact. Any functional group of living organisms is a subject of evolution in an environment created with other groups who share the same goal.

Yet the rules and mechanics of competition within a group influence an individual’s life just as much. Societies create their own conditions for natural selection. Given the high standard of living in most of the world today, “selection” here does not usually signify survival, but rather success in forms such as authority and power. Now, you may not like the concepts of authority and power in modern human societies, but we should keep in mind that the notions of good and bad are subjective human concepts and for nature (evolution) they do not exist as such. In societies that maintain crony capitalism, for example, it is then a natural consequence that people who use political party membership to gain business opportunities are usually more successful than those with a regular job.

All problems that we share on Earth today, such as pollution, food crisis and climate change, are natural regulatory consequences at the scale of our overdominance as a species. In the long run, I believe that out of any destructive actions that may occur, a new balance must emerge. Ultimately everything we do is natural and is subject to the same rules.