The ocean is evolving, and it’s not based on the ‘survival of the fittest’

Music

Evolution is not just about natural selection

I think when we think about survival of the fittest, we think about fitness being some sort of ruthlessness

Perhaps earlier depictions of evolution embedded some picture in our minds of a single organism being better

or coming up with a solution that trumped everything around it. But it says more about ourselves than how biology works

Seduction acts upon population. Everything that exists cooperates and learns and shares with each other

There is a lot of nuanced responses that life settled upon interacting with its environment

I'm going to give you an example that is close to my heart about cooperation

It comes from the Black Sea, which also is a host to an amazing sardine

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

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

that have been residing in this seemingly inhospitable place for billions of years

So how do they do that? Well, they have proteins that look almost like solar panels

that are sitting outside of their membranes. Not only do they survive

This invention ultimately benefits many other organisms. The microbes became the food source for the rest of the community

We are able to connect their presence with the ocean, with the seas, with the atmosphere

because ultimately survival is about learning how to share this good with the community

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

it's more like a web of interactions. We have to reckon with this fact

There is no need for a new definition of evolution. Evolutionary biology has been defining the nature and the contours

of what makes life possible around us for centuries. Evolution is evolution. We just need to understand it