(March 25, 2018 at 2:00 pm)Hammy Wrote:(March 20, 2018 at 4:01 am)Mathilda Wrote: Indeed. The neutral gene theory holds that duplicated genes which are not detrimental to the fitness of the agent are retained because there is no pressure to get rid of them.
It's why I think that ultimately it's not 'surivival of the fittest' it's survival of the survivors. Or IOW literally any organism that can survive for whatever reasons survives, even if it maintains many unfit elements or gets lucky. It's merely that fitter survivors tend to be better on the whole at surviving.
I completely agree with you. It means that the population is performing a search of all the possible strategies for surviving. Like water expanding out and finding each cavity to pool into.
This why who the fittest is keeps changing. The best strategy for survival keeps changing and it's the fittest who are better at surviving leading to more time and potential to breed..
(March 25, 2018 at 2:00 pm)Hammy Wrote: Imagine a predator so efficient at killing and eating all its prey that all its food sources become extinct so it becomes extinct itself. Such a predator would become extinct after its food sources did, but a predator that was slightly less efficient and didn't make all its food sources extinct, would stick around.
The overly efficient predator sounds like humans.
It has actually happened on some of my earlier evolutionary runs when all my agents would eat all the food and then go extinct once they had evolved enough.
Evolved enough? Sounds like humans again ...
