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Color blindness was certainly not elected | blogjou

Daniel S. Milo

Good Enough - The Tolerance for Mediocrity in Nature and Society

p. 64
11 Oct 2023

Color blindness was certainly not elected


But while color blindness was certainly not elected, it is not so bad that the afflicted have to be eliminated. Had Darwin gone with natural elimination and exploret its implications, the persistence of these mutations would cause no theoretical difficulty. He would have inoculated the theory of evolution against most of its lingering contradictions, the misunderstandings it provokes, and the resistance it encounters. Where natural selection follows clear rules of breeding at odds with the products of evolution around us, natural elimination allows the idiosyncrasies observed in nature. At the risk of importing the subject even here, one might say – metaphorically – that natural elimination sometimes closes one eye and naps, allowing lousy variations to endure. And sometimes it closes both eyes and takes its shot, killing off the good and the bad alike. Natural elimination has no direction, goal or bias; it is as volatile as it is indifferent.