issue #7
Every organism has as many descendants as it can.
I don't think this is a direct quote of anyone. Certainly individuals have their own strategies. Species too fall into a spectrum of either having the greatest possible number of offspring at one time that their metabolism can muster, or to have fewer and save some of that energy to nurture and protect the offspring they have.
For it was always obvious, to everyone who understood his theory, that a universal striving-to-the-utmost-to-increase is an essential part of that theory:
No, this is only obvious to those who mis-understand the theory. One of the delights of studying evolution is looking at the usual cases and then the exceptions.
Most creatures do tend to have a larger next generation than the current if conditions permit. There are some, however, which control the size of the next generation much more closely. For example there are several creatures which are good to eat, but they have evolved to look a whole lot like creatures that are bad to eat. They get some protection from predators who have experience eating the bad ones. If, however, the good to eat ones become too numerous the predators will begin taking more chances and eat more of them. They have evolved to limit their offspring if they see too many of their own kind and not enough of the bad tasting creatures they are mimicing.
while it is or may be true of most species of organisms, is obviously not true of ours.
This is just flat wrong. The human population on this planet has been growing and growing and growing. Humans have more ability than most to control their breeding but quantity is still winning out to quality.
TP |
