The Greatest Show from Darwin 16. Captain non-obvi

To the beginning: http://proza.ru/2022/06/26/1108

16. Captain non-obviousness.

Let us turn to the most severe prose of life. Imagine a sinking ship and yourself on board it. Besides you, several hundred more people are eager to be rescued, and there is only one lifeboat and it accommodates a maximum of sixteen passengers. Now imagine that you are not rushing around the ship and are not hysterical, but calmly waiting for the results of the selection of candidates for survival.

Now imagine that all the other passengers are also reasonable and calm. No one is raging, crying or tearing their hair out. If you like TV shows about uninhabited islands and other survival, then it will not be difficult for you to imagine it.

The selection is led by the ship's captain. By the way, he did not escape from the sinking ship with the whole crew, using a single boat. Is it hard to imagine such a thing? Especially in view of the frequent cases when the captains of ferries and other watercraft abandon drowning passengers and flee? They say that before the glorious captains of frigates had the concept of honor, and now no one needs honor. Right now, only survival is on the mind.

Dispel doubts. The reason is that this is not a real captain, but a hypothetical one. The captain's name is Natural Selection, and his ship bears the sonorous name "Evolution".

So, a storm is raging outside the borot, the ship has leaked, tilted and is about to sink, and our captain Natural Selection is calm. He walks along the rows of passengers and vigilantly selects the smallest variations that can be useful for survival.

The captain knows a lot more than everyone else. That's why he's the captain. He knows that just a few miles away is a pretty decent island with fresh water, vegetation and everything that is necessary for survival. In addition, he was informed that the radio was out of order, that the storm had carried the ship far from the trade routes and, therefore, it was not worth hoping for a rescue expedition. So, it is quite possible that several generations of survivors will have to spend their lives on the island.

Based on this introductory, the captain must make the right choice. There were strong and weak, high and low, fast and not so fast, agile, sharp-sighted, clumsy and short-sighted lined up on the deck. There are hereditary builders, hunters, fishermen; professional athletes and the like. There are rowdies on the ship, alcoholics, lazy, cowards, stingy and narrow-minded. Captain Natural Selection must take into account "the smallest variations, discarding the bad ones, preserving and composing the good ones, working inaudibly and imperceptibly," so as not to alarm passengers ahead of time and sow panic.
It would seem that the choice should take place according to the best survival indicators, such as dexterity, endurance, vigilance, and the like; the differences between the lucky ones from others should be significant and preferably noticeable to the naked eye. Otherwise, the choice is not obvious.
If we apply a strictly scientific methodology, positive "variations within the current population" should give an advantage in survival, say, from ten percent and above. Such an increased survival rate is possessed by a dexterous athlete who is able to escape from almost any predator, a hereditary hunter who is able to provide offspring with game, a dexterous builder who is able to build a hut from any improvised materials that will protect from heavy rains and frosts, a wonderful swimmer, a fisherman and a dozen strong and hardy ones.

However, our captain Natural Selection is going to choose a passenger who does not stand out so noticeably from the crowd. Strictly speaking, his variations (differences) from other passengers are such that they gave him a survival advantage of about five to seven percent. Let, for example, this mutation help its owner to digest vegetarian food better.

Why should our captain prefer a vegetarian to many, many others, more agile, strong and hardy? Maybe because the captain knows that Podarcis sicula lizards have recently moved to the island and very soon there will be no game there at all, except for the lizards themselves, of course, or because the undercurrents will soon change so much that even a magnificent fisherman will not be able to catch fish off the coast of the island, or that the climate on the island so dry and warm that there is not needed to build huts, and there is nothing from.
There is nothing outstanding about the right candidate yet, he is not much different from everyone else, his chances of surviving in this generation are lower than many others. However, it has a small but very useful variation (mutation – it is necessary to emphasize). This variation is still completely invisible, but after some hundred or two generations it will give such an advantage that we all never dreamed of.

A reasonable question arises. Can Captain Natural Selection see the future? And if not, how does he manage to choose the lesser from the greater? How can he distinguish a less noticeable utility, but evolutionary, from more noticeable, but not carrying evolutionary changes in the future?

I will assume that Natural Selection does not have the gift of foresight, and bases its choice on those factors that prevail at this particular moment. He doesn't care what will or won't happen in thousands of years. After all, if the current generation does not survive, then in a thousand years there will be no one to choose from.

Considering only the above factors, it turns out that the choice of the captain (in the event that he still stops at a vegetarian) is completely accidental.
If we recall the quote of Dockins that "every gene pool of every species tends to be filled with genes that create the best equipment for survival and reproduction," it turns out that evolutionary variations, which, according to Dockins himself, are smaller than the usual variations within the current population, do not have much chance.

Translating into the language of mathematics, on the right side of the equation describing the theory, there remains a random selection of random mutations. Or double uncertainty.

* - I apologizes for my English. I would be grateful for the corrections.

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