Bioquote of the week #1

I’ll not only try to revive a weekly tradition of good words, but go fishing quotes, biological quotes, from wherever, whatever. This is the first shoot (however).

Natural selection will tend to render the organisation of each being more specialised and perfect, and in this sense higher. Darwin, 1859

I like this one. Context certainly matters, and this tells us a lot about history. Higher and Lesser organisms and features are concepts that were heavily in use in biology, until disgrace but still occasionally revived though in much less vaporised heat. Indeed, there’s this idea that one can judge between basic features and more elaborate ones. For a long time, natural scientists were enclined to think organisms could fit on a scale with lower and higher at both ends. Darwin and his work probably shifted the scale where it did not merely expressed a rank in creation anymore but a direction in evolution. Probably that’s where scientists started using the earlier scale within the new framework, higher and lesser reflecting primitive and evolved features (historian of sciences would confirm this, I’m not a specialist in science history). Quite interesting here is that Darwin is issuing a way of understanding that long lived notion of a scale between organisms: natural selection can result into such a ladder. Whatever he thought about the ladder worldview that was generally accepted at this time is not expressed here, all he was doing is pointing to evolution by natural selection resulting into differences from less fit to fitter.

Of course, there are two things that are today known as misconceptions: first, natural selection doesn’t necessarily work toward increased specialisation (it could also undo things way out whenever undoing is going to be fitter solutions to specific life issues –as long as things may be “undone” but this is another debate). Second, natural selection (adaptive evolution) cannot produce perfection, merely things that are better, among the available alternatives. Which translates most of the time as improved characteristics, but almost never as perfect ones. Save for the spandrel debates…