“Winning” Evolution is Bad, Actually

 What happens when you kill all the wolves in an environment? I remember this example being given quite often, both in school and online by hunters trying to justify why they need to be allowed to hunt, that if you kill all the wolves, the deer population will grow unchecked until they eat all their food, then starve to death. This is probably not the best example to start with for this essay, because of its common politicized use by hunters, and because I’m not actually sure its proven true - we did kill almost all the wolves, and while deer are common, I don’t think they are actually in danger of overpopulation - either the hunting or cars are managing them, or coyotes have picked up the slack by forming into larger packs and hunting, or some combination thereof. Which is to say, a new ecological balance was found, and the deer population seems mostly to stay in check without wolves. Of course, I could be wrong, maybe some deer scientist is reading this and fuming right now, but nevertheless of whether it is true or not for deer, it is a commonly cited and well known example of something that absolutely can actually happen in an ecosystem to a species - some check on their population is removed, their population grows too fast, and then they suffer and possibly even go extinct.

It happens pretty regularly with algae. We flood an area with extra nutrients from runoff or pollution, algae blooms, which depending on where it happens can render a body of water eutrophic and anoxic and kill everything living in it, often including the algae. In oceans, usually what happens is something else blooms in response to the algae and eats it, like jellyfish or krill, because it’s large enough to be able to absorb localized blooms without crashing out.

In some ways, this could be seen as what is happening to humans now. We have transcended our ecological limitations. We have the capability to grow enough food to feed every human alive and then some, and we only do not do so because it is not profitable to do so. In developed nations at least, the majority of the population can expect to die of old age. There aren’t any real practical limits to our ability to expand, except somewhat invisible ones intrinsic to Earth’s ecosystem taken as a whole. We still rely on clean air produced by plants and algae and coral, we still rely on food from our crops and livestock, we still rely on our gut bacteria to digest food, we still rely on bacteria and fungi to break down our garbage and waste and even plastic debris increasingly. We have beaten evolution, but like any population who finds itself able to practice unchecked growth, eventually it will lead to collapse. Thus it is technically counterproductive to “win” evolution in this way - we may grow unchecked for now, but we rely on other life to survive, and if we take up too big of a slice of the life pie on our planet, we will ultimately die, because we rely on things produced by the other life forms. All life does.

Darwin’s theory of evolution led to the idea of survival of the fittest, that nature is an inherently competitive arena where only the strong survive. That is true, to an extent, although “best adapted to the current moment” or “best adapted to current existing niches” or “best able to exploit currently existing niches” would all be better phrasings. But life is also fundamentally cooperative, relying on other life to survive, be it plants and mycorhyzzal fungi and nitrogen fixing bacteria, or all aerobic life and photosynthesizers, or cows and their gut biome, or predators and their prey, or frogs and beavers creating wetlands, etc, etc. All eukaryotic life was formed by a bacteria and an archaea working together to form a new form of life, and all multicellular life in turn was formed by multiple cells choosing to work together, and all ecosystems are formed by different life relying on one another. It’s one of the fundamental principles of life. Its one that should get more emphasis, as although Darwin’s theory was transformative scientifically, social theories like social Darwinism that have buttressed capitalism and fascism have done countless harm. We could use a counter theory, and one comes straight out of nature, that competition is not only not the only way to survive, but winning just leads to losing. You need to cooperate to survive, and thats the actual goal of evolution, not winning.