Natural Selection Doesn't Need Our Help
It May Not Be Perfect, But We Can't Improve It
Admittedly, this may come off as a fatalistic essay to some readers. I see it differently. When one reflects on the limits of human knowledge, and just how much is really beyond our control, one is forced to the realization that there are many things in heaven and earth that are greater than we are. We can get angry about that. Or we can feel awe. It is humbling to reconcile with the fact that – for all the incredible achievements humanity has made – we aren’t masters of the universe.
Natural selection is something of a misnomer. It implies that Nature “selects” certain organisms because they’re “fitter.” In our heads, we think this means that “better” lifeforms are “chosen.” But nature doesn’t have agency.1 The fact that fitter – or more well-suited – creatures win out over less-fit creatures doesn’t mean that Nature chose monkeys over dinosaurs.
When it starts raining and you put on a coat, you don’t say that Nature told you to put on a coat. When flooding in a certain area changes the environmental conditions in that area, and the plants and animals that were in that area die, and other plants and animals move in, that doesn’t mean anything was decided. When two men open competing pizza parlors in a town, and more people buy from the first man because they like his pizza better, but his costs are too high and he ultimately can’t make a profit and closes his business, we don’t say that, “Society selected” the second man’s pizza parlor.
Evolution may determine which lifeforms (temporarily) gain an advantage over others and come to dominate, but it doesn’t really choose in the sense that it doesn’t have favorites. There isn’t a causal agent picking favorites, even if there is a causal force. Instead, there is cause without agency.2
This process may feel harsh to us. After all, natural selection can be quite brutal. But it has also given rise to beauty and complexity and diversity and almost everything that we most love about the natural world. Evolution isn’t harsh in any vindictive or antagonistic manner, because there isn’t anything that can be antagonistic or vindictive. There isn’t an antagonist, and we are anthropomorphizing if we think there is.3
But I’m not interested today in exploring whether evolution is good or bad. To the extent that it is harsh or unfortunate, that isn’t anything inherent to evolution itself, it is simply a product of the fact that life and reality are often harsh and unfortunate. We live in a fallen and broken world, and evolution doesn’t create or encourage any vices (if we can call them that), or behavior, that wouldn’t exist in much the same way without evolution. Evolution isn’t what keeps the lions from lying down with the lambs.
But just as the natural world and evolution can seem harsh at times, there is much that is good about them. Reality, and nature, can at times be beautiful, awe-inspiring, humbling, stimulating, exciting, noble, peaceful, frenetic, moving, restorative, challenging, pleasant, and so many other things.
So, while harshness exists in the natural world, it also contains much to be thankful for.
With that established, we can turn to the important question of humanity’s role with regard to natural selection (meaning evolution itself, not individual cases of selection).4
What Does Natural Selection Ask from Us?
Nothing.
Perhaps that sounds stark, but I think it cannot be denied or disputed. However, there is more to the story.
It is undeniable that the evolutionary process has led to incredible abundance and flourishing on planet Earth. It did this without our help. In fact, we can thank it for our very existence.5
Evolution was working fine before we came along, and there is nothing required from us to make it work. It might be the case that our actions can speed up or slow down natural selection in very specific contexts, but even if we can, it would be incredibly difficult to measure our impact if it’s even possible to do so.6 Moreover, there is little we could do to predict or control that impact (in other words, we can’t decide to “speed up” or “slow down” the evolutionary process – our actions are far too clumsy to even think we could do that).
In highly specific cases, humans definitely have power over the evolutionary process, but it is extremely doubtful that we could at any scale. Even if we could, it would be impossible for us to accurately predict the impact.
Nothing we can do helps evolution along. There is nothing we can do to aid natural selection. Which is to say that when life exists within an environment, there is natural selection – and we are unable to affect that immutable reality.
What Can We Do?
We can pick winners and losers. In fact, we are actually quite good at this. Agriculture and animal breeding are prime examples. One species that we chose (and, interestingly, probably also chose us) was canines. We bred dogs to be our companions, and through our efforts we contributed to incredible variety. We breed dogs to have certain traits that we like, and we’ve been enormously successful.
At the same time, we can pick losers. We can eradicate or exterminate species. Often, unintentionally. Sometimes not.
But this raises an obvious point: we often end up doing more harm overall than good. Most especially when we pick losers, but sometimes when we pick winners, too. Our actions can prove enormously destabilizing to ecosystems. We run into Chesterton’s Fence: if we remove a species from an environment – especially if we do not fully understand the role that it plays – we often create downstream effects that reverberate throughout the flora and fauna. The law of unintended consequences.
So, human action has an impact on the environment (all species have impacts on their environments, just as their environments have impacts on them – as by far the most powerful, intelligent, and dominant species, we have the most outsized impact). But no impact of ours changes the nature of natural selection itself.
Why do I make such a big deal out of this? Isn’t this an obvious point?
It may seem obvious, but there’s more to say. It’s important to set the stage for what comes next. We need to tease out some distinctions.
Distinctions:
So, we can alter ecosystems. But we shouldn’t mistake the microcosm for the macrocosm. An ecosystem isn’t natural selection itself.
When we do immense environmental damage to an area, we don’t destroy evolution. We don’t “stop” natural selection, although we can affect how it plays out in certain particular cases.
Evolution goes on, regardless of anything we do. In fact, the only way for us to stop it would be to eradicated all life on Earth, including bacteria.
Human action has obviously done harm to the environment, indeed to the entire planet. But, again, we must distinguish between the microcosm and the macrocosm.
Forest Fires and Antifragility:
It is interesting at this point to raise a well-known analogy: forest fires. Forest services and wilderness firefighting crews have long known that if human beings prevent all forest fires in a wilderness area, the forest will eventually grow choked with undergrowth. At a certain point, the mother of all forest fires will come along and devastate the entire forest – and this fire will be so large and so intense that we will be unable to prevent or control it. In order to conserve wilderness areas, we need to allow some small fires – to ward off the big ones. Fires are nature’s way of clearing out the old to make room for the new.
In other words, the more that human beings intervene heavily in a wilderness area in the name of preserving it (preventing the small fires),7 the more we fragilize it. We remove a necessary natural mechanism – a destructive one, but one that seeds the ground for new life. The day after the fire, the forest may not look so good. But within a week or two, we can already begin to see the signs that new life is being created or is moving in from elsewhere. Opportunity lies within tragedy, and without tragedy we don’t have opportunity.
I believe Nassim Taleb uses the forest-fire analogy in his Incerto books, but it’s been a while since I read them. Whether or not he does, this is the natural point at which to raise his concepts of fragility and antifragility and skin in the game.
Natural selection gives life skin in the game. Adapt or die seems harsh, but it enables organisms to adapt in all kinds of ways that lead to greater flourishing. It led to the survival instinct, without which most lifeforms would stagnate and decay. Actually, that instinct (which is turned on when we have skin in the game, or the risk of serious consequences) is a remarkable driver of human growth and achievement. It’s often said that death makes life worth living. Without death, life would become stale. Natural selection feels harsh because it involves death, but if death gives life its significance and meaning, natural selection is what gives life its vitality and diversity.
Therefore, while skin in the game feels harsh – just like death and natural selection – it is anything but. It is a powerful catalyst for moral behavior, economic prosperity, and personal growth. In fact, it is the removal of death, natural selection, or skin in the game that would be harsh and cruel and unjust. What could be crueler than robbing life of its meaning, or than eliminating the self-regulating mechanism by which chaotic and complex systems produce much of what we know and love?
Evolution is Antifragile And Size is Fragile:
Taleb draws on evolution in his work, but I’m don’t know whether he ever said that evolution itself is antifragile. The evolutionary process is made stronger by environmental constraints, by adversity, by challenge, by chaos, by disorder. In fact, without these, it would wither. Life itself is also antifragile, because (as Jurassic Park reminds us) it “finds a way.”
Taleb points out that – contrary to popular opinion – bigness is fragile and small creatures are more antifragile than large ones. He tells us that an elephant is more fragile than a mouse. If a mouse falls from twice its height, it will survive easily. If an elephant falls from twice its height, it will probably die.
Evolution isn’t kind to megafauna. Disorder and competition are catabolic to size. Bigness increases potential downside. The ultimate example, of course, is the dinosaurs. Despite their size and supposed power, the dinosaurs died out. They were highly fragile. In fact, their size made them fragile. The bigger a creature is, the more difficult it will be for it to adapt. For an organism, scaling up in size turns out to be synonymous with overextending oneself.
For some reason, we humans tend to admire size. We think bigness is a sign of strength. But smaller organisms are almost always more robust. Bigness hides weakness, in the similar way that more complex machinery has more potential points of failure.
In fact, the bigger an organism, the more it must be protected. It’s skin in the game must be removed in some way in order for it to avoid falling prey to some changing circumstance. If human beings weren’t subsidizing cattle (i.e., raising them on farms), cows probably would have died out long ago. The woolly mammoth did.8 Creatures that aren’t able to adapt to changing circumstances won’t survive. They need highly specific environments, and stasis, to remain dominant in their particular niche.
Evolution, on the other hand, doesn’t need any particular circumstances to function. It works, whether the climate is harsh or pleasant, cold or hot, dry or wet.
Circumstantial arguments about life on Earth make the error I mentioned earlier of mistaking the microcosm for the macrocosm. We imagine that particular scenarios or behaviors make the evolutionary process “better” or “worse,” when in reality they have no effect.
If pack rats stopped hoarding, natural selection wouldn’t stop. If worker bees worked less, natural selection wouldn’t work any less. In fact, if any animal or plant changed any particular behavior, absolutely nothing would change for evolution, only for that particular animal or plant. While the actions of pack rats or worker bees might have massive implications for pack rats or worker bees, they have smaller implications for the creatures around them, smaller implications still for the bazaar (ecosystem) within which they operate, and they don’t have any implications whatsoever for the process that governs their activities.
Yet, sometimes, we talk as though evolution needs a set of circumstances in order to function effectively. But the evolutionary process doesn’t need a seasonal pattern to jumpstart it every year. If winter didn’t come one year, natural selection would go on, just in a different way. Life would evolve, whether or not there was a rainy season, or a thawing season.
Climate Change:
I’m not making an argument about climate change or global warming. Life will go on, even if the climate changes drastically. Clearly, individual organisms and species may die out, but new ones will replace them. That isn’t to say that climate change is good (or bad). Nor is it to say that human beings don’t have an impact on the environment, because we quite obviously do, and it is usually a negative one. Being the most powerful lifeforms on the planet, our impact has always been outsized. But we shouldn’t be hubristic about that. Much of what goes on across the planet is still entirely outside of our control. And likely always will be.
Which means that our approach to climate change will likely need to balance protecting our own interests (after all, we are players within the environment and we have interests) with minimizing our harm. Once again, Taleb’s work is relevant. The best way to make something less fragile and more antifragile is Via Negativa, or the negative way: remove the sources of harm, subtract from the system rather than adding to it, eliminate rather than intervening. In the case of the environment, we should be skeptical towards major interventions and humble about our role. Better to remove the things that cause harm (ex. pollution), than to try to redesign the Earth’s ecosystem.
After all, there is still much about the natural world that we don’t know. We have a lot to learn.
The “Theory” of Evolution:
One of the implications of saying that natural selection is a misnomer is that the theory is not the same as the real thing. Too often in science, we mistake descriptions of reality for reality. In truth, the theory of evolution is just the body of knowledge we have about the way the natural world works. The extent of our knowledge isn’t the extent of existence. If we don’t know something, that doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist.
Really, the theory is evolution is just the words we use to describe the natural process by which order and complexity and diversity emerge spontaneously out of the chaos of life.
And life on Earth is chaos. Nothing human beings have ever done has really changed that fundamental fact. We haven’t imposed order. We can’t improve chaos, not because chaos is perfect but because it flows around every feeble attempt to pin it down.9
We can live in and with that chaos (indeed, we always have). Would that chaos be better off without us? I doubt it. What does that even mean? Better off? It would simply be different. Evolution is indifferent to us, much as our self-importance would like us to imagine otherwise.
Humans disturb other lifeforms on Earth. But every lifeform disturbs other lifeforms and every lifeform has impacts on those around it. We aren’t unique in that regard. And, hey, it’s our planet, too.
Where Does That Leave Us?
Whenever human beings try to intervene in the environment, we make mistakes. When we erect barriers, life goes around it. Evolution is simply the process by which life succeeds in going around the constraints the environment places upon it. When we create support structures, life goes around them, too. (Sometimes it dies because we’re clumsy and ineffective and our support can be a cure worse than the disease.)
If there is nothing we can do to “help” or “improve” the evolutionary process,10 the best thing for us to do is not to try. When there is nothing you can do, usually the best course of action is to do nothing, lest your actions prove futile failures, or actively harmful. Sometimes something isn’t better than nothing. Sometimes it’s worse. Via Negativa rather than via positiva.
What, in the end, is our role?
I believe that human beings – as the most powerful creatures on Earth, the creatures endowed by God with reason – are called to be good stewards. But good stewards govern with a light touch, and the best stewards barely have to govern at all. And all stewards must be humble about how little they can actually do.
Humility is a good posture towards many things in life, not just the origin and evolution of species. For there is much that is beyond our ken, and there are many aspects of the world that bear resemblance to what I have been describing today. Fatalism feels harsh. But humility doesn’t. If anything, it should be a relief that life is out of our control. That means our stewardship is easy and our burden is light. And imagine how frightening the alternative would be: to have the very fate of all life in the world dependent upon our proper management. What a comfort it is to realize that life goes on with or without us, that chaos rules, but that chaos isn’t so bad after all and there is much to love about it.
We can live with that.
God has agency. Nature is not God (much as some would like to believe that it is), merely his creation.
As we will come to see, sometimes agents (namely, us) do pick favorites. And, from time to time, the principal agent (the Creator) makes determinations and intervenes. But while He is aware of the fall of every sparrow, He has also given much freedom to living creatures.
Evolution isn’t God, in the same way that a timing belt isn’t the engineer who designed it.
I’m not going to comment here on whether or not evolution is acting upon human beings, other than to point out that there is some evidence that our brains have been getting progressively smaller over the past 20,000 years.
I would argue that we should really thank God for our existence, but I believe strongly that one of the ways that God does his work is through evolution (and physics, chemistry, etc.).
Which isn’t to say there haven’t been attempts to do just that.
Modern wilderness fire prevention blends minimalism/a light footprint with minor interventions (controlled burns, brush clearing, the creation of fire breaks), which often mimic natural processes, in order to keep forests as pristine and wild as possible while also protecting roads and tourist attractions and areas of human habitation. The primary goal is protecting human interests, but fire services work hard to have a light touch and minimize the harm they do to the forest. Sadly, the same can’t always be said for other human visitors to the forest.
Although we had a hand in that. But a changing climate also played a role.
Before we go on, I need to point out that my fatalism is not an argument in favor of re-wilding activism. I don’t believe in returning to barbarism. I’d like to see human beings stop trying to govern the evolutionary process, because I don’t think we can. If anything, we should minimize our impact while self-consciously operating within the natural world as light-touch stewards and self-interested participants rather than Platonic guardians. Forest fire management is a prime example. With the rise of civilization, we can now be self-aware about our impact on the environment. But Homo-sapiens has been causing extinctions since we first set foot on the planet. We’ve only just recently been able to notice. Any intelligent or powerful species would do the same, but we’re the only species that can make a conscious choice not to. Or at least we can try.
Someone will tell me that nobody thinks that’s what they’re doing. But what does it really mean to “save” the planet? Or to save a particular species because it looks “cute” to us? Or, on the other hand, what have we thought we were doing for much of our time as an agricultural, herding, and industrial species, if not “managing” life on Earth? And what are the dreams of many in the scientific enterprise, especially those who want to generate life in a test tube, if not that humans will one day master life and the Universe? Improving upon evolution is precisely what humans try to do all the time.