Evolution, the only science of success on earth

Pineapple said

Recently, I was locked up at home for more than a month, and I happened to be studying. I just finished reading my friend Liming's "Evolution Lecture Notes" during the May Day holiday, which is really wonderfully written, and it is one of the best original popular science books I have read in recent years, so I can't wait to share it with you today.

At the end of the article, there is a book donation benefit~

Text | Wang Liming

The term evolution is certainly not unfamiliar to you. Some of the basic concepts in evolutionary theory, such as "survival of the fittest," "survival competition," and "natural selection," may be cited from time to time in your daily life and work. French biologist Jacques Mono once said something very interesting: "There is a strange feature of evolution, that is, everyone thinks they understand evolution."

But I must say that most people's perceptions of evolution are rife with obsolete, controversial, and even subversive things. For example, "man is a monkey", "Man is just a slave to genes", "Nature is a battlefield, survival competition must fight for your life", "living things must evolve from low to high", and so on. Some people also challenge the theory of evolution with all kinds of doubts. For example, "the structure of the human eye is so complex that it cannot be evolved" and "biological fossils exist in a time gap that cannot be explained by evolutionary theory" and so on.

Also, many people like to move their evolutionary thinking to other fields, such as economics, psychology, war, and business. This in itself is a good way to think, but it is precisely because of the above cognitive biases that it is easy to oversimplify the theory of evolution itself in the process of migration, and even fall into the trap of misusing and misusing the concept of evolution. The infamous social Darwinism is one example.

In this regard, I must say that in the more than one hundred years since the publication of The Origin of Species in 1859, evolution has evolved from Charles Darwin's personal genius (which is full of errors) to a modern scientific theory with a solid theoretical foundation and a large amount of experimental evidence. Today, many universities have specialized faculties and majors that study evolutionary biology. But if you just think of it as a scientific theory, as a subdivision of the life sciences, then I must say that you underestimate the value and impact of evolution too much.

The easiest thing we can think of is the confrontation between creationism and evolution. Since the birth of civilization, the question of the origin of the earth's creatures and human beings themselves has long plagued us. Prior to evolution, the discussion of this proposition always boiled down to some supernatural force beyond the capacity of human understanding. It can be the God of Christianity, the Brahma of Hinduism, the Pangu and Nüwa in Chinese folklore, or it can be an alien life with super high intelligence, or it can be some formless and insubstantial mysterious force, such as Tao, such as qi. After the theory of evolution, it was generally believed that the origin and change of all life forms ( including humans ) could be explained by naïve scientific laws.

This change in perception is often interpreted as a triumph of science over religion, but evolution is not just for religion. In fact, the change from creationism to evolution has played an extremely critical role in the upgrading of human self-perception.

Evolution breaks down the theory of human particularity: we are not darlings made by God or Nuwa in her own image. Like other living beings, and even other inanimate matter, human beings are products of the laws of nature. But at the same time, it further strengthens the theory of human particularity: you see, no one is a natural superior to the creatures of nature, but only we humans have developed wisdom and civilization, and can in turn ask a series of questions about nature and about ourselves. This unique self-perception—that human beings have no more noble lineage (and without the responsibilities, constraints, and ties that come with them of a noble bloodline), but do have the most powerful abilities—may be the basis of modern ambition, desire, and responsibility.

In the face of a complex real world, evolution points to a completely opposite path of transformation. It tells us that complex systems can form spontaneously, and that complex problems can always find solutions on their own. Even if there is no road, and more people walk, it will become a road. All we need is clear boundary conditions, sustained evolutionary thrust, and patience.

It proves the great power of this path with the phenomenon of life, but also tells us that this path has some unavoidable troubles, such as strong path dependence, inescapable rigidity and death, which require us to remain vigilant.

Make a simple summary.

As a scientific theory, evolution has profoundly changed the face of modern biology, connecting a large number of disaggregated and scattered biological knowledge with unified logic. In today's biological research, scientists are very natural and skilled in explaining their findings with the idea of evolution.

But beyond biology, the impact of evolutionary theory may be broader and far-reaching. It liberates mankind from the world of the gods, so that mankind has the initiative to explore, transform, advance, and reflect; it makes mankind give up its obsession with the mechanical world and have to accept a chaotic world without purpose and certainty; it has also become an important tool for modern man to understand and transform the world, allowing us to walk out of a country path of our own in the wild countryside. Human ancestors began to walk upright 6 million years ago, and the apes parted ways; and it was only after the theory of evolution that modern people really stood up spiritually and put themselves on an equal footing with the objective world.

Evolution is so important, but because of its complexity and cross-border nature, and because of the lag in updating our knowledge, it is difficult to thoroughly understand and explain it. Because of this, on the day I spent two years conceiving the outline, writing, and completing the first draft, a somewhat nonsensical thought popped into my head: I finally made the evolutionary thing clear, and this life is worth it.

My own ambition is that the work I have completed is not a popular science of evolution, nor a quick introduction to evolutionary biology, nor is it simply to tell you "why evolution is right and creationism is wrong" (this is the most important value of evolution as a popular reading in the Western world, but it seems less important to our Chinese). Probably very few modern Chinese really believe that man was created by God). What I really want to do is to prepare a tool of thought for people from all walks of life to understand complex systems and solve complex problems.

I particularly like the saying, "Evolution is the only reliable success science on Earth." That's because, over the course of 4 billion years of evolution, life should have encountered all types of challenges we can and can't, and generations of lives have gone through astronomical random trial and error and path choice, and should have traversed all the solutions we could and couldn't. From evolution, we can find the success stories and failure lessons we need, and find the guiding lights and vehicles for the future. Because of this ambition, this Evolutionary Handout will probably be different from all the evolutionary books and courses you're exposed to.

In the first part of the book, I will first establish the "axiom system" of evolution. You will see that, driven by the contradiction of "the selfish instincts of living things and the relative scarcity of environmental resources," the four chains of evolutionary tracks—heritable variation, competition for survival, natural selection, and reproductive isolation—continue to roll, establishing the order of life in the chaotic nature, growing from a seed into a leafy tree of life.

The second part of the book will discuss the basic features of the tree of life: where its roots are, how it is growing, how fast it is growing, and some of the systemic risks that the tree of life will inevitably encounter as it grows, such as why path dependence cannot be overcome, why patches and historical baggage are everywhere, and why death and extinction are inevitable.

In the third and sixth parts of the book, I will disassemble important and conceptual nodes in the evolutionary process based on the system of evolutionary axioms. At the beginning of life, how does evolution construct the order of life from scratch and ensure the stable inheritance of order? After the birth of life, how does evolution drive the continued growth of life phenomena in terms of number, diversity, and interaction? In the face of an ever-changing environment, how can evolution help life cope with environmental changes and reserve contingency plans? Also, as life phenomena become more complex, what laws of organization and cooperation have evolved within complex systems?

In the seventh and eighth parts of the book, the impact and value of evolutionary ideas outside the biological world are also discussed. In particular, how it subtly transforms the human mind and its application scenarios in the business world. We will see that evolutionary thought also has enormous power in dealing with issues related to morality, culture, competition, innovation, etc. in the human world.

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