Cognitive Thrift 71 – Survival
Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner
Publication (Outlet/Website): Cognitive Thrift
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2018/06/01
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Scott Douglas Jacobsen: Evolution tends to have its presentation in the public sphere as species and their stories. However, there is another aspect to do with individual members, members of the species. Their survival is related to the species survival in low probability, extreme events.
Rick Rosner: The way people think about evolution is competing members of species with the – as competition among members of species with the most physically able members prevailing and sending their genes down the line, their lineage, and survival of the fittest to be a group of fairly interchangeable hyenas or gazelles and the best one’s survive to send their gazelle or hyena gens down the line, and the environment changes and still the gazelles still change with environment.
But there’s still another story that is just as important to evolution, little offshoots of species on the one hand or a set of a few members of the species find them geographically isolated or find a new geographic area and reproduce among themselves and become different from the parent species, and this is something you don’t get unless you’re doing cognitive thrift.
Evolution is also the story of the animal under stress. That the losery animal that takes a gamble that is forced to take on non-standard behavior and non-standard thought, and gets lucky that this pays off and that this, maybe, becomes part of the species’ repertoire long enough to put evolutionary pressure on the species the members that good at this particular behavior and it eventually becomes hardwired into the species.
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