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‘Natural elimination’ instead of ‘natural selection’ | blogjou

Daniel S. Milo

Good Enough - The Tolerance for Mediocrity in Nature and Society

p. 63
03 Oct 2023

'Natural elimination' instead of 'natural selection'


Had Darwin not been under the spell of fanciers, he may have called his discovery “natural elimination” and reserved “selection” for the rare cases of fixation and stabilization of advantageous varieties. What is eliminated? The lethal and the luckless. In this alternate universe, the history of biology, and its contemporary predilections,would be vastly different. Instead of fitness, we would speak of chance. The recipe for escaping natural elimination? Take normalcy and add luck. Luck is the necessary ingredient for the good enough; often it is the sufficient one, too.