Survival Of Whoever

Evolution and Capitalism have a lot in common. They can produce highly efficient solutions to problems, they're ruthless, and they act slowly. It's also weird what they each choose to hone to ultimate efficiency. Did you know that an eagle's eyeball is warped slightly so that whatever is at the centre of its field of vision appears magnifed? But on the other hand, manatees.

And what about peacocks? Five million years ago, one female had a tail-feather fetish; now look at them. Meanwhile, they're are so many living things that obviously need fixing. You just have to look at your own body for examples (asuming my blog is only read by humans.) As any sports fan can tell you, the human knee could use a good redesign.

But it's the same with capitalism. It can produce efficient solutions to problems. There are companies like Amazon and Walmart that have developed highly efficient systems to move items around the world. But then there's that phone cases and printer cartriges kiosk at the mall that no one ever seems to buy anything from. It's capitalism's panda, eating one plant, not really interested in breeding, yet somehow hanging on and surviving.

And both capitalism and evolution can be agonizingly slow. A lot of human health problems, from knee injuries to sinus infections, are a result of our bodies not being adapted to walking upright, even though we started doing that five million years ago. And there are so many products that need work. Like, when you buy a package of six muffins at the local grocery store, they come in a plastic tray. The label has a sticker wrapped around it. But because the plastic case doesn't have flat sides, the sticky side of the label is exposed in several places. That means it ends up sticking to any bread or produce bags that come near it.

Eventually, the design will be fixed. But that's only motivated by the supermarket losing enough business, just like evolution is only motivated by creatures' survival rates. So our sinuses might cause us pain, but it won't change unless it causes people to die. Say, they get eaten by a lion because they were distracted by pain. But even that might be faster than lost sales causing a change in the muffin tray design. So put some thought into the products you choose; you're helping businesses evolve.

Great Interest In All The Motorcrashes

Recently, there were some stories online about an Australian publicity stunt to promote car safety: they created a modified human body to survive car crashes. And they named him Graham. They described the project as the human body catching up to automobiles, since we really haven't had time to adapt to them. So in some hypothetical world where cars have been around for millions of years, we'd end up looking like Graham.

That's interesting, because I've always wondered how evolution would change modern humans. See, contrary to what you may have heard from your biology teacher or Marvel Comics, evolution doesn't make living things "better." It responds to their environment to make changes to make them more likely to survive. Or at least, to reproduce. For instance, a creature won't just suddenly become a faster runner unless there's some reason why running faster will make them more likely to live (say, by outrunning predators.)

So, for modern humans, it's hard to say which way evolution will take us. To use that running example, it's unlikely we'd evolve to be better runners, since we rarely have to outrun predators anymore. However, if you can run fast, you'll be successful at athletics, which will increase your likelihood to reproduce.

To be clear, I realize that this discussion is moot. It would take tens of thousands of years for any evolution to be noticeable, and it's increasingly clear that long before that we'll have either destroyed ourselves or transcended biology.

But it's interesting to contemplate, because there's all kinds of ways modern life might change us, and not necessarily in positive ways. For instance, it takes a certain maturity and forethought to make the decision to use birth-control. And people who have that maturity and forethought will be less likely to reproduce, thus breeding it out of the human race.

And Graham's creators have a point: since car crashes are one of the things most likely to kill a person before they can reproduce, surviving them would probably be a big influence on our evolutionary path. The only other factor that would have such an impact on our chances of reproducing would be impressing the opposite sex in high school. And I think the idea the idea that we would evolve to become a fifteen-year-old's ideal is even more horrifying than Graham. Suddenly the choice between apocalypse and uploading our consciousness to computers doesn't seem so bad.

Domesticated Animals

I wonder: if a fly enters a house, does that increases its chances of survival?  On the one hand, it will have access to food, and protection from the elements.  But on the other, it is now locked in an enclosed space with one or more large mammals that will try to kill it.

I'm wondering this because we could be breeding them one way or the other.  I've heard evolutionary biologists say that if a mutation helps a living thing survive even one in a thousand times, that will be enough for the mutation to become standard throughout the population.  So given the short life-cycle of insects, you'd think that by now, we would have caused them to evolve either an aversion or attraction to our houses.

It's disappointing that humanity has caused so little evolution in animals.  You'd think that:

• Squirrels would be more decisive, either running across the road or staying away, instead of going into the road and then becoming uncertain.
• Insects and spiders would become cuter, so we'd be less likely to squash them.  Though it occurs to me that this could go the other way: the scarier they look, the more likely we are to run out of the room and hope they go away on their own.