You Never Know What Will Help or Harm You

While doing the reading, I was immediately struck by an example Darwin gave in the chapter on use and disuse. He gave the example of beetles in Madeira which were not able to fly. He states, "For during thousands of successive generations each individual beetle which flew least, either from its wings having been ever so slightly less perfectly developed or from indolent habit, will have had the best chance of surviving from not being blown out to sea; and, on the other hand, those beetles which most readily took to flight will oftenest have been blown to sea and thus have been destroyed" (86). What I found so amazing in this example is that the variation that was so beneficial to these beetles would, initially be determined as a defect, either physical or behavioral. One would expect an organism who was born with wings "slightly less perfect" to encounter more trouble in the world than one that was perfectly formed. Also, one would expect an organism that suffered from "indolent habit," which might be understood as a kind of laziness, to be less successful than an industrious one. Yet, in the case of the beetle, it is completely the opposite. That which should have been deleterious ended up being an advantage. You never know what will help or harm you and the beetles in Madeira are a perfect example.

For some reason, this more than anything else made me so aware of how wrongly Darwin's idea of "survival of the fittest" is generally understood today. What makes a species "fit" has nothing to do with anything that it itself does to ensure its own survival or creation of offspring. Instead "fit" simply means those that by chance have received traits that make survival, and thus the creation of progeny, more possible in the particular situation that they find themselves in.

In our previous classes we have discussed what is philosophical about this work. I believe it is philosophical because it presents a world which seems mostly to be driven by chance and circumstance. In nature, it is not the actions of any individual that has any power to create change, but instead it is the relationship of a random variation and how that variation allows one to interact with one's environment and circumstance.