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Evolution is not just about natural selection
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I think when we think about survival of the fittest, we think about fitness being some sort of ruthlessness
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Perhaps earlier depictions of evolution embedded some picture in our minds of a single organism being better
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or coming up with a solution that trumped everything around it. But it says more about ourselves than how biology works
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Seduction acts upon population. Everything that exists cooperates and learns and shares with each other
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There is a lot of nuanced responses that life settled upon interacting with its environment
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I'm going to give you an example that is close to my heart about cooperation
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It comes from the Black Sea, which also is a host to an amazing sardine
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I think the best sardine in the world, but I may not be very objective about this. Black Sea gets its name from its color
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It's quite a dark sea. When you go down there hardly any penetration of sunlight You may think that probably nothing is surviving in this place which as a fish lover I will tell you you would be wrong What we find are these microbes
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that have been residing in this seemingly inhospitable place for billions of years
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So how do they do that? Well, they have proteins that look almost like solar panels
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that are sitting outside of their membranes. Not only do they survive
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This invention ultimately benefits many other organisms. The microbes became the food source for the rest of the community
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We are able to connect their presence with the ocean, with the seas, with the atmosphere
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because ultimately survival is about learning how to share this good with the community
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And I find this very profound. So evolution is not a single organism that is the fittest and that's the best amongst all the solutions
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it's more like a web of interactions. We have to reckon with this fact
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There is no need for a new definition of evolution. Evolutionary biology has been defining the nature and the contours
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of what makes life possible around us for centuries. Evolution is evolution. We just need to understand it