New Perspectives on Understanding Evolution

I recently got a new thought about Darwinian evolution and couldn’t resist telling you about it right away. The theory of evolution has been the most important intellectual resource of the last hundred and fifty years, and everyone has said something about it. But there is still a lot of debate around evolution to this day, not least because there are so many misinterpretations.

This is because evolution is so easy to analogize to life in human society - and it is especially easy for ordinary people to use it as an inspirational sermon. In this talk, let’s put aside the theoretical disputes in the academic world and use the people’s favorite inspirational perspective to talk about how evolution should be understood. In particular, there’s a new argument for you to learn from.

Simply put, if we’re talking about motivation alone, there are two, or rather two, major misconceptions that laypeople have about evolution.

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The first layer of misunderstanding is called ‘survival of the fittest’. These two phrases are pretty much all that the average layperson understands about evolution, but the layperson doesn’t know two facts.

First, “The survival of the fittest” does not come from Darwin’s On the Origin of Species, and it has nothing to do with Darwin. It came from the British anthropologist Thomas Huxley’s The Theory of Acts of God. The Theory of Acts is Huxley’s interpretation of the theory of evolution, forcing the theory of evolution to play out in the realm of human society.

Secondly, ‘the survival of the fittest’ is also not an original quote from Huxley’s Acta Astronomica, but a paraphrased translation of Acta Astronomica by the Chinese translator Yan Fu, and to a large extent Yan Fu’s own understanding [1].

Yan Fu’s translation of The Theory of the Evolution of Heaven took place between 1896 and 1897, when the Qing Dynasty had just been defeated in the Sino-Japanese War, and the people of China woke up from the dream of a heavenly kingdom to realize that they could not even defeat Japan, and were all agitated and wanted to strive for strength. The new wave of intellectuals reflected on this and felt that traditional Chinese culture was no longer adapted to the new era, and Yan Fu was right in line with the trend.

The so-called “survival of the fittest” meant that competition should be organized on the basis of ethnic groups, with the strongest remaining and the weakest being eliminated. In Yan Fu’s words, “Species compete with species, groups compete with groups, the weak are always the meat of the strong, and the fools are always the servants of the wise”. How can an ethnic group be strong? According to Yan Fu, “Unity is strength”.

Today, this saying is diametrically opposed to Chinese culture, which originally honored the way of the gentleman, the gentle, the kind, the loving, and the merciful, and can be said to be a value of the weak and the strong. But at that time, because people were painfully aware that China was too pedantic and backward, they welcomed this kind of national inspirational slogan.

Whenever Lu Xun had time to spare, he ate foreign-accented cakes, peanuts and chili peppers as usual, and read The Acts of God. Liang Qichao believed that the Theory of the Acts of God should take the place of Rousseau’s idea of “natural human rights”. The young Mao Zedong even wrote down notes while reading the Theory of the Acts of God [2].

The Theory of Acts of God not only influenced that generation, but also continued to influence many generations after it. What we often say today, such as “backwardness is to be beaten”, “unity is strength”, including “struggle”, are all plays on Yan Fu’s saying. In fact, traditional Chinese culture doesn’t talk about this at all. “Struggle” was originally a pejorative term, such as Xunzi’s saying that “those who fight are in trouble.” …… So you can even say that Yan Fu’s version of The Theory of Heavenly Drama has put a steel stamp of thought on some people.

In fact, this trend of thinking is by no means only popular in China - Europe has gone even further. Many Europeans, including some intellectuals, have moved towards “Social Darwinism”. The Chinese say that “if you are backward, you will be beaten up” to themselves, saying that we must not be backward, and that people will come to beat us up if we are backward - this is just a kind of inspirational slogan. Some people in Europe, on the other hand, have taken the theory of evolution to the extent that “if you are backward, you are an inferior race and I should beat you up”. There was a surge of racism, totalitarianism, imperialism and even fascism, and Europe was really fighting, and fighting a world war.

At that time, many people realized that there was something wrong with the law of the jungle of “survival of the fittest”. Dr. Sun Yat-sen once said in a speech in 1912, “Before the twentieth century, the European countries invented a new doctrine of competition for survival. …… From today’s point of view, it’s a kind of barbaric learning. …… It’s true that although the strongest power is compatible with the evolution of the celestial evolution, the axiom is difficult to be obliterated by the innate conscience. It is true that although power is compatible with evolution, axiology is difficult to be obliterated by the natural conscience.”

He’s right, but such a perception, probably because it’s not inspirational enough, doesn’t sink down to the common folk. And when you look at that period of history you get a sense of why these people were so focused on Yan Fu/Huxley’s Theory of Divine Evolution, and didn’t bother to find out what Darwin’s original theory was?

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*The Genuine Evolution has 0 inspirational content.

The core idea of evolution is random mutation of genes and natural selection of the environment. Whether the next generation of an organism becomes this or that is the result of random mutations in genes, and has nothing to do with “effort”. It’s not like you can get stronger just because you want to try, or taller just because you want to get taller. Genetic mutation is not a program where you can use your initiative.

And evolution doesn’t exclusively advocate being “strong”. Whether or not a mutation survives and spreads is not a matter of being “strong”, it is a matter of adapting to the environment. If the environment requires you to be a predator, you are indeed stronger and faster, but if the environment is harsh and you have to hide a lot, you may be able to survive by keeping a low profile, such as mimicry, playing dead, traveling at night, and living in small caves.

Essentially, the adaptability of a species is not in competition with another species, but in adapting to the environment. The environment includes other species, but more than that, it includes climate, water, temperature, and other factors. The factor that affects sheep the most is not wolves, but grass.

Natural selection is not driven by strong values.

Misread evolution as ‘survival of the fittest’ and you’re only seeing competition, not cooperation. Nature has many - perhaps more - ‘symbiotic relationships’ besides competition. Bees collect nectar and help pollinate flowers; cleaner fish eat parasites and dead skin from larger fish and help keep them healthy; hermit crabs, being crabs without hard shells, let anemones grow on them: anemones provide protection for hermit crabs, and hermit crabs provide mobility for anemones ……

There is competition and cooperation, the weak do not necessarily have to be beaten, we want to think of the main is not to compete with rivals but how to solve the more general survival and development issues - this genuine evolutionary picture, not only more like the relationship between the company and the company in the market, but also more like the relationship between China and the country of international politics.

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So now the mainstream narratives in China and abroad are no longer taking the ‘survival of the fittest’ inspirationally …… And evolution doesn’t sink as far as it used to. But the analogy of evolution to market competition is still appealing. Some entrepreneurs, such as Ray Dalio, take great delight in using evolution to explain the survival of their businesses [3].

There is no major problem with this analogy. But I wanted to get up and write this column because I heard about a new interpretation of evolution that I thought might shed new light on entrepreneurs, policy makers, and parents, including individuals.

Two artificial intelligence experts, Kenneth Stanley and Joel Lehman, came out with a book in 2015 called Why Greatness Can’t Be Planned[4] that explains a bit about innovation through the lens of AI algorithms. As a byproduct, they reinterpreted the theory of evolution. The book is about to come out in Chinese, I wrote a recommendation preface, the core idea you can read my preface at that time. Here I would like to talk about their new interpretation of the theory of evolution.

Don’t worry, biologists, these two men are not debunking evolution, nor are they saying that evolution is wrong in any way. The facts are still the same, but your interpretation of the facts can be subjective.

There is a school of AI engineering that specializes in inventing new algorithms in a way that mimics the evolution of life, which is what these two did. Then they got inspired by the evolution of AI and fed back into evolution.

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Natural selection is about survival and reproduction. Genes that favor survival and reproduction are easily passed down, and genes that don’t favor survival and reproduction are easily eliminated, and those are fine.

The problem is that some people may tacitly assume that living organisms are just busy surviving and reproducing all day long, and that any trait, any gene, that gets passed down must be because it is conducive to survival and reproduction …… That’s the second layer of misunderstanding.

The reality is that many genes that have little to do with survival and reproduction, or are even harmful, have been passed down. For example, different people have different blood type distributions, different eye colors, different susceptibility to different genetic diseases, lactose tolerance or intolerance, how do these differences come about? It’s randomly generated. The traits and genes that make up these differences have little effect on survival and reproduction, so natural selection didn’t intervene to regulate them, they just arose.

This phenomenon is called “genetic drift” [5]. The theory may have been proposed as early as 1929, and is now accepted by the mainstream academic community.

And Stanley and Lehman’s insight is that actually *genetic drift is a much more general phenomenon than natural selection: organisms that undergo all kinds of evolution in all directions are not adapted to natural selection - they are simply able to evolve. It’s not that natural selection drives the diversity of organisms, it’s that natural selection allows the diversity of organisms. *

To put it bluntly, organisms are so diverse because natural selection hasn’t bothered to care much of the time.

If survival and reproduction were the goal of biological evolution, then Earth would be a world of lower organisms, because lower organisms have done a good job of surviving and reproducing. The reason there are higher organisms on Earth is because organisms don’t just survive and reproduce, they genetically mutate in all directions, they are naturally variable.

And often a change stands up not because it intensifies competition, but because it allows the creature to avoid competition. For example, leaving the oceans for a life on land, suddenly having the ability to digest something that was previously inedible, and being able to fly …… These creatures left the old red sea competition and opened up new ecological niches to enjoy the blue sea life going forward.

In the words of entrepreneurs, this is called “from 0 to 1”, or “open up a new track”.

In fact, the biological world is not always and everywhere in fierce competition. If that were the case creatures would be so exhausted that they would not have a chance to evolve all kinds of beautiful and peculiar elements. The reason the world is so colorful is that competition is localized, there are new ecological niches waiting to be opened up, and you have the leisure to drift in a direction that may not necessarily enhance your competitiveness for the time being.

That’s why Stanley and Lehman argue that *for a species to evolve rich in character, evolutionary competitiveness must not overpower the creative drive. *

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Let’s think about whether the same is true for markets and societies. If you have to work ten hours a day to get enough to eat, you’re not going to think about science or art or technological innovation. You have to have enough spare time and spare money, and sufficient security, to have the mind to engage in whimsical inventions.

There’s a saying that “Competitiveness undermines competitiveness”, and therein lies the fundamental principle. Creativity comes more from freedom than from competition.

If you interpret the theory of evolution as “if you don’t adapt, you will be eliminated”, and if you think about “integrating” and “getting on board” all the time, then you will only be heading towards mediocrity. Yes, poor people’s children are early starters; but rich people’s children are more likely to be inventors [6].

It’s like the game My World: your company is in 996 all day long, forcing its employees to play “survival mode”; you don’t know that a more advanced company is playing “creation mode” in a relaxed manner.

If you don’t find a good ecological position and the conditions really don’t allow it, that’s no way; if you obviously have the resources but intentionally create internal friction all day long, that’s the concept is too outdated.

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In this era, still hold all day “natural selection” “backwardness will be beaten” concept of the gang, I would say you know that these days even Putin have learned to say “win-win cooperation”.

To those who still regard all activities as a struggle for survival and reproduction, I would like to say, do you know that even the animal world is not like that?

Get to the point

1. genetic drift is a much more common phenomenon than natural selection: organisms undergo all sorts of evolution in all directions, not in order to adapt to natural selection - they simply can evolve. It is not natural selection that drives the diversity of organisms, it is natural selection that allows the diversity of organisms.
2. for species to evolve that are rich in character, the competitive nature of evolution cannot override the creative drive.

Annotation

[1] For more on this quote and the variety of the Theory of Acts of God in China at the time, see the book China and Darwin (Jiangsu People’s Publishing House, 2009) by the American historian Jiamin Pu; see also https://m.jiemian.com/article/7342139.html

[2] https://www.toutiao.com/w/1738741730825224/?target_app=1455

[3] Elite Daily Lessons, Season 2, Principles 1: The Tycoon’s Greatest Doctrine

[4] Joel Lehman and Kenneth O. Stanley, Why Greatness Cannot Be Planned: the Myth of the Objective (Springer 2015).

[5] Elite Day Class, Season 2, Silo Produced Geniuses

[6] Philippe Aghion et al., The Power of Creative Destruction: Economic Upheaval and the Wealth of Nations, 2021.

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