From the mailbox: Competition in nature is overrated

Steve Sparrow writes,

The more & more I think on Darwinism the more I become certain that left to itself Darwin's schema would have resulted in one single organism which would have eliminated all others and be constantly struggling with itself over survival - like one tree - a Sequoia - lording it over all everywhere no matter what the climate - just be smaller or larger. Following on from David Warren's essay a few weeks back talking of Alexander Skutch, I read two books of his and am struck by his allusion to co-operation in natural organisms - no "nature red in tooth and claw" there. So as I said here , it's all about desire - desire of the organism.

From his blog:

This principle of innate desire pervades the whole spectrum of life in all of its forms, but must (I think) be preceded by consciousness/awareness - a faculty shared to some degree by even the most primitive of organisms. Desire is expressed in appetites - food, sex, and additionally in the case of humanity, the desire to be comforted. Human beings crave comfort, presupposing the existence of some place or thing where that desire is satisfied, and this desire for comfort is intuitively embodied in the ascending realms of the physical, the psychological, and the spiritual.

Well, one thing I know for sure is that co-operation is the basis of the ecology, not competition.

Here's Warren on Skutch:

I recommend such works especially to those who have had their minds cluttered and abused by the sort of ideological indoctrination offered today, in place of real science, by the Darwinist biology faculties in most of our universities. Skutch persistently shows that there is more happening in nature than evolutionary obsessives can begin to imagine. For Skutch's view of nature is founded in the traditional way, on direct observation, rather than in the post-modern way, on grand, arbitrary, utterly unprovable evolutionary hypotheses. That is to say, observation preceding theory, as opposed to theory preceding observation.

Perhaps the best shock treatment, for the confused young Darwinized zoologist, would be a close reading of Birds Asleep, Skutch's pioneering investigation of what birds do with about half their time.

Find out why there is an intelligent design controversy: