Reply to comment

What has stayed with me since class on Thursday is our closing discussion on the assumption of competition in Darwin's theory of speciation. I think this has something to do with a misinterpretation of what “survival of the fittest” means. I have taken it to mean the elimination of competition, however, I have been thinking of this in too narrow of a way. Eliminating competition doesn't necessarily mean defeating a competitor. It can mean (and in the case of natural selection does mean) the elimination of competition through the avoidance of it.

In doing some homework for another class (shocking, I know) I've just started reading The Evolution of Cooperation, by Robert Axelrod. Chapter 5 “The Evolution of Cooperation in Biological Systems” talks specifically about this. Building relationships of reciprocity (i.e. cooperation) between species are actually more likely to guarantee successful reproduction. Rather than an adaptation, cooperation or symbiotic relationships can be seen as an evolutionary result, creating a “evolutionary stability;” that is to say that a population using a strategy of cooperation can't then be infiltrated by another population using a different strategy (a mutant within the population perhaps). This means once a population reaches this level of cooperation, it has become a separate species. It's based off of a theoretical game known as Prisoner's Dilemma. I'm still wrapping my head around it, so I'm not doing the best job explaining it.

Here's a GREAT lecture on the topic (beware; it's an hour long): http://academicearth.org/lectures/evolutionary-stability