I thought I would throw in my $0.02 worth on this. I
thought it best to return to Russell's original message,
which I've left intact since it's been awhile since
it was posted.
First, it's hard to find fault with someone who views
competition as the essential ingredient of natural
selection since it is certainly sold that way by many
folks, especially in popular level writings. Both
Eldredge and Gould have argued that this was not Darwin's
view. I think Wesley has also made good arguments in this
regard also. Regardless, I think a little reflection
should make it fairly obvious that cooperation will
promote survival.
A few weeks ago I was reading a book
that contained short excerpts from a wide variety of
sources on the general theme of man's place in the
universe. There was an excerpt from a book written by
a biologist back in I believe 1906 or thereabouts. Sorry,
I don't have the book in front of me so I can't give a
lot of details. Anyway, the main thesis of this author
was that while competition certainly played a role in
evolution, cooperation was far more important. The author
argued that those species that we generally regard as most
successful are those that learned to cooperate. He also
said that from his observations there is almost like a
law of nature that says "don't compete, cooperate. compete
only as a last resort". Well, my main point here is that
the importance of cooperation in evolution goes way back.
Now I would like to turn to Eldredge's book <Re-inventing
Darwin>. In this book Eldredge argues that the Ultra-
Darwinians [the folks Gould refers to as Darwinian
Fundamentalists] introduced a subtle but significant
shift in the role of natural selection wrt Darwin's
original view. Darwin (according to Eldredge) viewed natural
selection as being passive, like a book keeper passively
recording successes and failures. Eldredge also uses the
metaphor of a filter, which to my mind may be better.
The book keeper and the filter are both blind to the
future and they are also passive. The Ultra-D's wanted
to maintain natural selection as being blind but transform
it into an active process. We see this I think in the
Blind Watchmaker [calling natural selection the blind
book keeper leaves a different impression altogether].
The Watchmaker may be blind but she's still a watchmaker,
actively shaping apparent designs. Another common metaphor
is that natural selection is a tinkerer, as opposed to
designer. Again with this metaphor we get the image of
natural selection being active instead of passive.
OK, my point in this digression is that, for the Ultra-
Darwinian, this activity is always the struggle to
leave more offspring, more copies of itself, and further
that this struggle is always competitive. Organisms
(or even genes) are always competing to leave more
offspring. Even cooperation is competitive in this sense,
since an organism cooperates only if it results in leaving
more copies of itself. And so, in this view, the
characterization of natural selection as purely competitive
seems appropriate. But this would only apply to the
Ultra-D view of natural selection and not the original
Darwinian view, at least according to Eldredge.
Now I would like to return to the quote of Robert Augros
given above. Augros' quote of Eldredge is of the type which
leaves me with a funny taste in my mouth. Here's the quote
of Eldredge:
>[Niles] Eldredge points to the many 'ecologists skeptical of the very
>concept of the competition between species...who claim they simply cannot
>see any evidence for such raw battling going on nowadays in nature.'
Why does Eldredge point to these ecologists? Augros supplies nary
a clue to this. Augros quotes Eldredge only insofar as to identify
the problem but gives not even a hint of Eldredge's explanation of
said problem which can be found in the very same paragraph.
Brian Harper
Associate Professor
Applied Mechanics
The Ohio State University
"If cucumbers had anti-gravity,
sunsets would be more interesting"
-- Wesley Elsberry