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Offered by David Apollo

Evolution, Random Resilience
Evolutionary Selection ... ensures Lineage Persistence (survival).

Evolution - The mechanism (awesome) that enables the Lineage of The Living to persist, despite changes to the environment that it is in synergy with.

[ white peppered moth pic ]
[ black morph moth pic ]
Click here for explanation of variation.
No One Thing ever exists in isolation. In fact, there is no One Thing. All exists as at least two things ... in relationship with one another (excluding That Which Was, the moment before The Big Bang, ... maybe.)

Thus, an "A" is always in relationship with a "B". If the relationship persists, then synergy between A and B exists. For The Living, this synergy is required for survival and propagation of the Individual. Survival and propagation of the Individual is how The Lineage persists.

Whether minor or enormous, random phenotype fluctuations within one member of a synergy grouping increases the chance that the synergy with The Other remains intact if "The Other" is also changing unexpectedly. For brevity, ConserveLiberty will leave the proof via rigorously credible statistical math up to the reader. Since "environment" is ALWAYS changing, then random gene changing is required for survival (persistence) of The Lineage.

[ DNA static pic ]
DNA double helix
For the "inheritance-based" living, inheritable traits are ultimately governed at the genetic level. Gene changing occurs predominantly during the replication process. That changes would occur during replication is consistent with the Fundamental Rule or Prerequisite of Variation - nothing is ever an exact duplication of whatever "the other" is. There will always be a difference, however slight.

The Ultimate and Fundamental Prerequisite Math (Big Math) that governs and ensures that the "difference (variation) boundary condition" is always met AND "is not fully predictable" is not understood (at all). ConserveLiberty thus refers to the mechanism of difference generation as "random".

ConserveLiberty regards Resilience as the manifestation of solutions-oriented behaviors and perspectives under many different circumstances. Evolution, which is not based on cognitive intent, is the ultimate Resilient behavior. Without evolution, life would have perished after the first one or few generations of its manifestation. Since the individual is ultimately "terminal" and is simply a stepping stone to the next individual in The Lineage, then reproduction is certainly important for Life. More importantly, evolution is of ultimate importance in order for reproduction to contribute in practical terms to the survival (Resilience) of The Lineage.

"Life is uncertain. Don't Sip!" - Advice on a Lagunitas beer label.

There are billions of examples of evolution as a necessary and required component leading to Lineage Resilience (Persistence).

Evolutionary Selection - a few selected examples below:

Evolutionary Selection - Example: Mosquito and mammal synergies

The challenge of malaria within the human population is a huge one ... from the perspective of the humans contracting the disease. From the mosquito's perspective, and the perspective of the Plasmodium that manifests itself as malaria when in a productive relationship with a human (its perspective) everything is going just fine.

Let's remind ourselves what "the living process" is all about, fundamentally. (The Secret to Life - in plain sight.): Malaria is caused by parasitic protozoans known as Plasmodium. In humans, the primary species causing malaria is Plasmodium falciparum. In a complex series of steps, the life-cycle of the Plasmodium is as follows:
One can see that there are several stages and environments that the Plasmodium moves through as it traverses its life cycles. In fact, "The Individual" doesn't persist throughout the entire life cycle. The "Individuals" are simply stepping stones along the way as the Plasmodium Lineage traverses through its cycle. Much like Human Lineages are composed of "Individuals" that are simply stepping stones along the way as a Human Family Lineage traverses its "generational life cycles."

Evolutionarily speaking, the Plasmodium simply go about advancing their Lineage generation by generation in a bit more clever way than humans or other mammals do.

Each Plasmodium stage requires its own ensembles of genes to make them work. And each of these genes are candidates for randomly generated genetic changes that may be useful for promoting continued Plasmodium persistence (Resilience!) when various aspects of the environment that it finds itself in changes.

These include the genes that govern Plasmodium behavior.

And, in a further twist, since both mosquitos and mammals are also involved, there are genes within each of them that are also important for Plasmodium persistence. For example, the instinctive target preference for the mosquito carrying the Plasmodium, or the time of day it prefers to acquire its blood meal!

A few of the genes involved in each of these Plasmodium stages, mosquito vectors, and mammalian targets have been seen to change in a way that correlates with various issues important for understanding and managing human malarial infections.

Example - "The Selection for Behavioral Resistance". (The selection of instinctive behavior mutations which improve the survival characteristics of predators or pathogen carriers due to actions undertaken by their targets.):

Evolutionary Selection - Galápagos Islands examples: (synergies rendered less complex, and thus more easily comprehended and observed, due to the more relatively restricted closed system).

[ Galapagos Islands topo map pic ]
Click on pic for larger image.
The Galápagos Islands are (were) a relatively isolated grouping of islands in the Pacific Ocean 600 miles off the west coast of Ecuador.

The islands are known for their vast number of endemic species and were studied by Charles Darwin during the second voyage of HMS Beagle, as his observations and collections contributed to the inception of Darwin's theory of evolution by means of natural selection.

The Galápagos are interesting, among other things, because their relative isolation from other nearby land masses created a geographic barrier restricting the interaction and breeding with other species not endemic to the islands. It also limited predation from abroad, including predation from humans for a time. The result is that the subspecies that evolved in symbiosis with the Galápagos environment are relatively unique, found only on the island.

The first recorded visit to the islands by humans was in 1535. However, archeological evidence exists suggesting the islands were inhabited by South American peoples long before that. After found by the Europeans, the Galápagos were exploited for hundreds of years for all the things humans take control and manage the land and seas for. Charles Darwin did not arrive at the Galápagos until 1835.

The Galápagos were not designated a national park until 1959. Still, the island's endemic plants and animals continued to be displaced, harvested, or driven to extinction by the introduction of non-native plants and animals and the hunting by humans both for food and commercial trade until the mid-2000s. For example, in 1959 1-2,000 people lived on the island. By 2000 the figure was more than 25,000.

More on the current environmental protection policy for the Galápagos
→ [can be found here] ←

The species evolution that occurred on the Galápagos is another example of Resilience in Action. And the mechanism of action responsible for the Resilience of The Lineage was Random Evolution itself. Examples of such resilience manifested thru "evolutionary selective persistence," both in regard to physical adaptation and the adaptation of behavioral instincts (both driven genetically) are:

What is so fascinating about the Galápagos are the examples it gives with regard to the Resilience of the Living process when it is "challenged" with differing environments that are not easy to change and yet need to be adapted to. In this case, the environment, while changing, changes fairly slowly. And the living that are found there, while mobile, are prevented from easily relocating to environments that are more symbiotic with them. Thus, the random changes that occur with each incidence of reproductive "renewal" have provided the mechanism of action to be resilient within the Galápagos environments they found themselves in.

The changes are random, and "randomness" by its nature is not self-directed. The resiliency is in reality a "statistical resiliency." Reproduce enough, with each reproduction generating a random change, and if The Lineage is "lucky", then a random change will occur that is more symbiotic with the environment that an individual from The Lineage may find itself within. In that case, The Lineage survives, being a little different than the individuals that came before. And for those individuals reproduced with changes that were not symbiotically improved, then if there are sufficient mismatches between the individuals and the environments they find themselves in that do not promote further survival before the next replication ... that branch of The Lineage will cease to live. Termination. Extinction.


Evolutionary Selection - The Timeline of Life on Earth:

[ timeline life on earth pic ]
Click on pic for larger image.
To illustrate the Resiliency of the Living, we focus here on major challenges to the continuation of living phenomenon throughout Earth's history, which spans 4.5 billion years.

The Major Extinction Events.
Note that with each extinction event, all life did not go extinct.

The way life works (The Secret of Life) is it is reproductive, and randomly adaptive. The Individual is not the objective. Rather, the individual is the stepping stone along The Living Lineage to the next individual, which is ... ??

Random mutations dispersed among all individuals helps insure that at least one of them will be sufficiently adapted to what comes next with the next step, which cannot be foreseen.


Evolutionary Selection - Snakes:

[ Indian cobra pic ]
An Indian Cobra.
Much is known regarding the appearance of snakes in the fossil record and their various phylogenetic relationships with one another. What is generally never known in the fossil record is "who came first." Thus, it could be possible, but has not been validated (and may not be) that snakes (which are reptiles without legs that have appeared independently within the fossil record several different times) may have begun their evolution from lizard to snake first with a mutation in the Zone of Polarizing Activity Regulatory Sequence (ZRS) region of the sonic hedgehog (SHH) gene.

[ Najash drawing pic ]
Najash rionegrina, lived in Patagonia.
Among other things, SHH is critically required for limb and digit development. This would not have been just any lizard mutant (i.e. changed, genetically different). It may have evolved from burrowing lizards, such as the varanids (or a similar group) during the Cretaceous Period. The bodies may have already been streamlined for burrowing, and the loss of legs was just one more random event.

[ Anguidae pic ]
The slowworm - a legless lizard.
If the special mutant maintained the fortunate instinct of Resilience and continued to mate and reproduce, then one or more offspring from this SHH mutant may have been rendered, over hundreds of generations, sufficiently able to survive in whatever environment it had wound up in ... as snakes.

Other hypothesis are also credible. The primary message is ... "Branches of The Grand Lineage either find a way or they terminate right there and then."

That "Life" is always unfolding in a way that could find a way (i.e. it is always mutating a little, randomly) is why ConserveLiberty asserts that Resilience is manifested within the process of Evolution itself. Again and again and again.


Non-genetically Determined Behavioral Adaptations

Are these embraceable behavioral options actually specific adaptability features that the "Essential and Resilient Me" is built with? Are these "habits and addictions" which develop? Or are they evolved optional preferences, and thus latent instincts?

The short list of examples below (relevant to animals) also stimulates the Reward System, leading to habituation and addiction. Question: "Are the "addictions" that can be generated via the Reward System (and all of them are!) simply accidents of neurobiochemistry and physiology, or are they informative because perhaps they are coincidental with "The Essential Me?"

→ The Evolution section was last updated 24 May 2018 08:45 PDT ←



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