evolution & everything happens for a reason.
Okay, so pretty much everyone since Darwin has heard about evolution by natural selection. BUT this does nothing to change the fact that itās still such an interesting and exciting topic!! Iām not going to drone on about the theory of evolution - no, Charles did that for us. Instead, I really want to talk about how having some knowledge of that theory makes my time in nature that much more magical. In this way, I hope to bring the three guiding facets of interpretation together - education, recreation, and inspiration (Beck et al., 2018).
(Side note; I bought a copy of āOn the origin of speciesā when I got accepted to UofG, and still have not managed to make my way through it. No hate to Darwin, but I think we couldāve taken some notes from this class to make that read a bit more engaging - jokes, of course. If any of you have read it in its entirety, Iād love to hear your thoughtsā¦is it worth the read? did he include anything that would be deemed a āhot takeā in our modern day?).
In biological studies, we come back to evolution all the time, and we blame it for nearly everything. At this point, Iāve learned the more mechanistic view of evolution, the misconceptions about it, and where we see it in ourselves and the rest of the biological world.
And yeah, makes sense, right?
But for me, it all really clicked last semester in my Animal Behaviour class, which pulled a lot of ideas from economics, cost and benefit, and the prisonerās dilemma (cue loud groan). I know, I know, booooring.
But honestly, it really put it all into perspective for me ā Ā the grandiose concepts of evolution finally had a really solid foundation, such that the story of any natural sight I see is clearer in my mind.
Like, okay, why do parents take care of their young?
Silly question, right? But really think about it for a sec. Well, we know that offspring are genetically related to their parents ā if a parent doesnāt take care of their young, the young (and the parentās genes, and even potentially the act of providing for young) does not persist.
We also know that in some species, one parent (mother or father) puts way more energy into raising the young than the other parent does. Again, why? If theyāre both equally related, why isnāt this behaviour equal between the two?
There are a lot of āit dependsā here, but one example is that the mother can be 100% sure that those babies are hers, while the father canāt be quite as sure ā what if the mama snuck off with another fellow and those kids donāt have any of the āfatherāsā genes?
Basically, to hedge his bets, the father doesnāt spend his energy on raising young, and instead spends it looking for other potential partners.
who woulda thought that evolution would explain why there's so much drama and gambling in the natural world??
A Friend in NeedĀ (1903) by Cassius Marcellus Coolidge
My other favourite example has to do with food caching behaviour in red squirrels vs. grey squirrels. Grey squirrels hide food all over the place, spreading out their cache. Red squirrels make one big stockpile. So, if a grey squirrel defends its caches, it wastes a ton of energy, almost for nothing. It physically couldnāt manage to guard all its nuts at once, so defending one cache leaves an opportunity for other caches to be robbed.
A red squirrel, though, benefits a lot from defending its cache. If it does, it stands a much higher chance of keeping itself fed through the winter, and if it doesnāt, it has lost all of the eggs from its single basket. This explains why red squirrels are the angry little guys they are ā they arenāt just evil little devils whoāve escaped from hell. Instead, they just got out of their econ lecture!
Photo: https://www.flickr.com/photos/12144772@N06/1700328393
So, while it might seem that going through the mild pains of learning the theory and its economic/math-y/mechanistic intricacies would make nature as a whole feel less magical, I think it does the exact opposite. I feel like knowing these connections paints a really bright hue on my view of nature. āWhy is that thing the way it is?ā is such a cool, whimsical question to get caught up in, and I love it.
We've been educated, we've had some fun looking at some silly animal examples, and hopefully there was a hint of inspiration in here too!
Mother Nature really said āeverything happens for a reasonā and I think thatās super neat.
Anyone else have an "evolution epiphany" moment to share?
Beck, L., Cable, T. T., & Knudson, D. M. (2018). Chapter 3: Values to Individuals and Society. In Interpreting Cultural and Natural Heritage for a Better World (pp. 41-56). Sagamore Publishing.