Efficiency vs Resilience

The key thing about the idea of evolution, that a lot of people get wrong, is that it’s backward looking, not forward looking. It’s not about the individual; it’s about the environment. The common interpretation of “survival of the fittest” has it backwards because it mistakes the meaning of “fit”. Evolutionary fitness is about adaptation to ecological niches, about fitting into a role. It’s not about abstract qualities like strength or speed or intelligence. Darwin was looking at finches. If the finches lived on nuts, the fittest birds were the ones with the strongest beaks, for cracking their shells. A bird that can crack nuts faster will get more of the available food, and thus be liklier to survive.

But that predictive value is very limited, and not really the point. If the nut trees die out from blight, and are replaced by fruit trees, those strong beaks won’t make much of a difference. Maybe the finches that survive will be the ones that get good at identifying poisonous fruit by smell. The point is not even that we can figure out which species will survive by looking at the environment; the point is that we can learn about the environment by looking at which species have survived. Evolution is about the history of the environment, not the future of the individuals.

That said, understanding the environment does give you some short-term predictive value. If you look at which species have prospered, you can figure out what it is about their environment that made them successful, and extrapolate that out. If survival is all about how fast you can crack nuts, the birds with the stronger beaks will get the most food, be most likely to survive food shortages, and win the most appealing mates.

That will only be true until the food supply changes, or something other than starvation–like disease or predators–becomes the main cause of mortality. It may also change if finches, like crows, figure out some even more efficient way of cracking nuts.

There are two important observations to draw from this. The first is that, as long as the environment is stable, the species that survive will be the ones that become ever more efficient, ever more specifically adapted to the environment. The characteristics that helped them survive will become more and more exaggerated. The environment pushes them toward ever-greater specialization.

The second is that the most highly adapted species are the most vulnerable when the environment changes. If nut-cracking selects for birds with heavy beaks and powerful neck muscles, and that makes them aerodynamically awkward, they’re in trouble when some avian predator shows up and survival is suddenly based on how fast they can fly.

In short, the environment will encourage you to become ever more specialized, and the more highly specialized you are, the more completely screwed you are when the environment changes. Efficiency is the enemy of resilience. Short-term prosperity may come at the cost of long-term survival.

All this, of course, is not really about finches. These are general principles about the relationship of any organism to other organisms and to its environment. They apply to both natural ecosystems and social ones. This is why most of the big companies in the early mainframe computer industry have either gone out of business or mutated beyond recognition. This is why modern industrial agriculture, with its super high yield monocultures, scares the crap out of Michael Pollan.

The point here is not specific cases. It’s the mental tool, that understanding of how evolutionary pressures work, and that there is this tension between efficiency and resilience, short-term and long-term, profitable and sustainable. It’s double-edged. You need to be asking both, “are we painting ourselves into a corner if the situation changes?” and “how is this going to survive long enough to be viable?”

Personally, of late I’ve been applying this tool in my thinking about jobs and careers. I’m an organism in an economic ecosystem. I need to balance short-term with long-term, “having a job” with “building a career.” What’s my niche, and what other niches could I jump to if this one goes away? Even in my ears, that sounds a bit like academic bullshit, but it’s actually a useful way of thinking about the situation. There are jobs where I’d be comfortable, but I wouldn’t be developing transferable skills; I’d be painting myself into a corner. I also need to keep an eye on the environment: Are my skills becoming obsolete? Is this kind of work going to get offshored? Is this company going to go out of business? What new opportunities are opening up?

That perspective also lets me be a bit more philosophical about taking or leaving a job (one way or another). It’s not about deserving it, fairness, or loyalty; it’s about fit, in that evolutionary sense.