Adapt or Die, Or…?
Those few who grasp the crisis in its entirety have been marginalized, and those who are left are drifting downstream, unable to move the mass of self-interested inertia even if they wanted to.
In eras of stability when little changes, the capacity to adapt takes a back seat. As noted in Why Political “Solutions” Don’t Fix Crises, They Make Them Worse, absent any pressure from tumultuous change, nature is hard-wired to keep the genetic instructions unchanged, as there is little selective benefit in modifying what’s working well and potential risks in messing with it.
In other words, nature is conservative in eras of stability and low volatility. Since its genetic instructions are working pretty well, the shark genome is relatively stable over millions of years, with a few tweaks here and there to adapt to changes in its environment.
But adaptative churn takes the driver’s seat when the ecosystem changes rapidly and the existing instructions are failing. This is the adapt or die moment, when species must experiment by churning out modifications (semi-random mutations in the instructions) and test them in trial-and-error: the ones that add selective advantages live, the ones that don’t die.
If this period of intense adaptive experimentation is ultimately successful, the species’ rate of change spikes and then drifts down to
Article from LewRockwell
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