Archive for November, 2008
Something I’ve Never Understood About Darwinism
Thursday, November 20th, 2008
The idea that the evolution of life was driven by a will to survive seems odd to me. There is definitely a sense of progression towards more complex, more sophisticated forms of life, but does complex always mean better adapted or better able to survive?
I mean, really, if evolution operates according to the principle of bettering survival, why didn’t it stop with, say, bacteria, which seem to be surviving just fine? Or even more complex organisms – algae, fungi, arthropods, rats, fish – are all quite well adapted and thriving. That is, to say, as one ascends the ladder of evolution from simple to complex, one does not find anything like an increase in survivability.
This is the conundrum of The Spider and the Starfish. Business organizations, according to this book, should consider operating more like a starfish, which is simpler, has more redundancy, and is hence much harder to kill and has a far easier time spreading. The spider, on the other hand, being a highly centralized organism, is crippled by the loss of a limb and destroyed by the loss of its head. Well, when you put it like that…
The trouble with this metaphor is that the spider does a lot more than a starfish. If you want to be able to build a web, you need differentiated parts working together to achieve a coordinated end.
Getting back to evolution, we are fully aware that the spider is a more complex organism than the starfish. Yet, the starfish is better at proliferating and surviving. So in what sense is the spider more “fit” than the starfish? It’s more interesting, certainly. It can do more. But who cares? If the whole goal of evolution, insofar as a blind process can be said to have a “goal,” is the improvement of survival, there is no reason for a spider to evolve when much simpler organisms can and do survive as well – if not far better.