Hi there,
So naturally I can't post this in the Evolution forum just yet - they are just not mature enough to handle a concept like this - but I need to develop the "thought": if you could bear with me, a little, here.
The idea is this "Evolution is often described as uni-directional (a species sets out to have a certain number of offspring, some of them are similar, some of them are different), each generation setting out to make the same changes as their parents, and a little bit more", but there are interactions better one generation to the next, in the sense that some developments are more "conditional" than others - a very real threat to the species, will be anticipated and its similarities and differences will vary accordingly. This is to the strength of the species, that things like "balance", "perception" and "instinct" get given special treatment. So I say again, some developments are more conditional: a perceptive generation might decide to train its balance more deliberately, a generation with a lot of instinct, might stay "instinctive", instinct being a more versatile trait.
Over the generations then, the line between inherited and conditional, will blur and reshape - one generation might succeed at overcoming a predator through instinct, another might amass great numbers by remaining perceptive: these things do not write in stone, what the Evolutional direction will be, it may inform something - but not everything! This is basically the point I was trying to make, but there is a step further that you can take it: a predator may be conditional, about its prey species being conditional! If a predator finds prey after prey is relying on "perception" to add to its numbers, the appetite of the predator may increase - essentially wiping a species out, because of an Evolutional vulnerability... predators like variety in their meals!
The point of the idea then, is this: what will happen to the offspring of the predator that preys upon predictable conditionality? Initially, the offspring will benefit just as the parent benefits, and there will be much slaughter; then, down the track, the offspring of the offspring will find there is less conditionality in the prey species and it will cease to hunt on this basis, on this hunger. But it will have developed a narrow conditionality of its own, disaster for the offspring of the offspring! It behoves the later generations to be creative about their conditionality, at least to a degree, to ensure that the hunt is not becoming a trivialized pursuit.
So that is it: we must consider that conditionality can be refined, as much as Evolution can be driven full steam ahead. It is a difficult concept, why would a species avoid developing in the way that seems most obvious? But there are aesthetic quallities at play here, and the prospering of the species, is not limited to the predation of the past - the predation of the past may indeed be far more conditional than is sustainable! That really is the word for it, I think: Evolution must primarily be "sustainable", before it can be secondarily expressed. And that is the struggle for our time: how do we approve the sustainable, how do we nurture it? Nurtured sustainability, is greater than survival!
I welcome your most ardent reprove!
