Evolution by natural selection was once called “the greatest idea anyone ever had.” In the 19th century, Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace simultaneous realized that species evolve through random mutation and differential survival rates. If we call human intervention in animal-breeding
In a physical world governed by thermodynamics and competition for limited energy and resources, any biological organism that was wasteful with energy would be at a severe disadvantage for survival. Thus, we see in most instances that behavior is governed by a
Species tend to adapt to their surroundings in order to survive, given the combination of their genetics and their environment – an always-unavoidable combination. However, adaptations made in an individual's lifetime are not passed down genetically, as was once thought: Populations of
Competition tends to describe most biological systems, but cooperation at various levels is just as important a dynamic. In fact, the cooperation of a bacterium and a simple cell probably created the first complex cell and all of the life we see
All creatures respond to incentives to keep themselves alive. This is the basic insight of biology. Constant incentives will tend to cause a biological entity to have constant behavior, to an extent. Humans are included and are particularly great examples of the