Every now and then I think about David Attenborough's brilliant narrative strategy, and how to apply it to my own writing.
I remember a nephew, when young, happily watching baby seals, then happily watching baby polar bears, & then... having his love for both brought into conflict.
Or following a chick's struggle to fly off a cliff face - cheering when he didn't crash! - just to get snapped up as prey.
To hold it all in tension & not despair is one of the greatest challenges of being human.
(History nerd aside:
In the early 19th Century, Malthusian ideas about exponential population growth & natural overshoot took hold, haunting people with the reality that nature was not "designed" for all to thrive.
Darwin was a sentimentalist about this, too - he hated what evolutionary theory suggested about natural cruelty, saw zero sign of a benevolent creator in nature's torturous ways, and suggested that readers try to imagine that death usually came quickly and the "happiest" survived.)
"Social Darwinism" (the policy of 19th & 20th C eugenicists) never did grasp the fundamental fact of natural selection: that what makes one the "fittest" is contextual.
20th-century research built more accurately on this concept by illustrating the evolutionary benefit of so-called altruism, & other facets of herd species life. Discovering the acculturated difference between bonobos & chimps solidified this understanding: we are evolutionarily better together, in many contexts.
Also: We shan't mention how TERRIBLY the Star Trek franchise depicts evolutionary theory the vast majority of the time. 😉
@MLClark And most of those episodes were written or at least edited by a certain writer infamous for his weird crap scripts. 🙄
@MLClark @WordsmithFL Yes! Theorists who believe that competition and cooperation exist exclusively as an either/or polarity have missed a key component of reality.
The cold, calculating imperviousness of their scientific theories disregards nurture which coexists with struggle.
This to be seems driven by prioritising rationality over emotion, a project that goes back 1,000s of years. Many scientists have been swept up in this project without even realising the arbitrary choices they've made.
👍🏻Historically, it comes from reading data through one's cultural moment. The junk science of evo-psych (not to be confused with the better work of behavioural studies) starts with preconceptions & works backward. Arguments for competitive evolution rise & fall with the researcher's culture: its fixation on specific demographics & views of masculinity.
Scientific method will correct for error over time, but individual scientists are *always* vulnerable to cultural subjectivity.
🏳️🌈
@MLClark The death of the one makes the many stronger. Without such struggles, life for the whole ceases to grow and entropy drags it toward extinction.
@MLClark I have sometimes contemplated that the true test of a species' evolved sentience is its ability to leap beyond Darwinism by helping along the weaker in its species.