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What exactly is it that earns survival through being fittest?

By Clark Nida

Still munching slowly through Charles Darwin’s Origin of Species. Found it too heavy-going as a printed book to persevere with. But audiobooks have given me a stomach like a stegosaurus: capable of digesting dense bulk. Particularly on bus journeys and other low-quality time.

I can be back with Charles as he breeds his pidgeons, surveys his strata – and quotes unceasingly from his extensive correspondence with other biologists, whom he never fails to admire for their diligence.

I’m beginning to get a feel for the problems of evolutionary theory, and for how the “Darwinism” of the Social Darwinists differs markedly from genuine science, which advances by asking hard questions of itself.

Darwin asks the reader: how did Natural Selection evolve sterile worker ants? If, as he aims to show, all species have arisen by some given individual’s descendants gradually accumulating features which are beneficial in different environments, isn’t a sterile individual an evolutionary dead-end?

Darwin cheerfully admits the fact nearly knocked his theory on the head. He concludes however that natural selection acts on the family as well as on the individual. Separate castes of ant (sometimes three in a nest) would not have been able to become so specialised unless they were sterile. Otherwise they’d have had progeny, which thanks to inevitable regression towards the mean would only imperfectly pass on the parents’ success at specialisation.

Far from wrapping the matter up, this opens a chink on what may be the most interesting question facing evolutionary theory today. Survival of the fittest... what?

Gene? Individual? Family? Species? Colony? Ecosystem? Biosphere?

There is a whole spectrum of life-forms to choose from, with Gene at one end and Gaia at the other. And if you fancy the idea of Panspermia it doesn’t have to stop at Gaia: DNA-based life may be just one of many life-forms competing to colonise the galaxy. Or indeed the universe.

(It’s around this juncture the top of my head blows off!)

Richard Dawkins (The Selfish Gene) plumps for the Gene as being the only unit on which natural selection acts. But the audiobook version I’ve listened-to has him grudgingly accepting one critic’s judgement that this was a Youthful Work of his.

No gene wins its war of survival alone, as he freely admits, whereupon he begins to talk of alliances between genes. Virtually all species are only viable thanks to a substrate of other species they can live on, or which create the ecological niche they exploit. Without grass, ungulates would not be viable: without ungulates, big cats. Without a host of species we’re all hard-at-it making the world unfit for, there would be no “us”.

As to the prime target of evolutionary pressure, I feel emotionally attracted to the Gaia end of the scale... and beyond! (...as Buzz Lightyear says.) But emotional attraction isn’t science. Dawkins’s idea must be hammered to death (in the sense of pushing it to its limit, not knocking it on the head) before we can advance in rational understanding of the world we find ourselves in, by answering Darwin’s implicit question: what exactly is it that earns survival through being fittest?