Sublime

Then, in 1962, the Scottish ecologist V. C. Wynne-Edwards, a careful observer of his country’s native red grouse, concluded that these birds sometimes sacrificed their reproductive privileges to keep their flock from starvation. The grouse, Wynne-Edwards contended, gauged the amount of food the moors could provide each year and adjusted their behav

Polygamy: individuals of one sex have just one reproductive partner, but individuals of the other sex have multiple partners. Subtypes include: Polygyny: (poly—many, gyn—female): One male and multiple females Polyandry: (poly—many, andr—male): One female and multiple males.

Males without “certainty of paternity” are unlikely to stick around to pair-bond with a female and help raise the kids. Male birds tend to have high certainty of paternity, but male mammals are rarely certain at all. As a result, male mammals tend to abandon mates and offspring when—if they could just be confident of their paternity—selection would

The neo-Darwinian perspective, which still dominates the popular understanding of biology, isolates individual organisms or genes from the context of the living matrix that sustains them. Scarcity, competition and individual success are seen as the main drivers of evolution. This is an outdated perspective, based on outdated metaphors like Richard

When nonhumans act in accord with a distant future, like hiding seeds to eat next season, it is primarily as a result of genetic programming.

When they are in orientation mode, looking out for if there is something to potentially hunt and they don’t come across something interesting, frustration quickly kicks in. Because they have been carefully bred to find wildlife for their human hunter, if there is nothing around, then they will try even harder! This means that they will move faster,

Belyaev moved to a Siberian research institute, where he decided to test his ideas by conducting a simple breeding experiment with foxes. Rather than selecting foxes based on the quality of their pelts, as fox breeders would normally do, he selected them for tameness. Whichever fox pups were least fearful of humans were bred to create the next gene