Thursday, February 15, 2024

Survival of the fittest

Was Tyrian Lannister the physically strongest character in Game of Thrones? The fastest? The most agile? Was he perhaps the mentally strongest or the most intelligent?

No. But he did survive.


Why? Because he was the fittest.

===========================

Want to read (more of) my short stories? My author page: Terrence Weijnschenk at Amazon
A donation (click) is much appreciated:
==============================
In the famous phrase 'Survival of the fittest', attributed to philosopher Herbert Spencer upon reading On the Origin of Species by Charles Darwin,
he never meant 'the most fit' but rather 'the one that best fits'. The circumstances, conditions, surroundings and sudden changes. 
The dinosaur may have ruled the planet for a while but was gone in almost an instant when disaster - well, an asteroid - struck, leading to cataclysmic changes is weather conditions. A bit like fossil fueled (...) climate change is doing in our days.

The only 'dinosaurs' that survived were not the ones with the jaws that could bite in two a Tesla or end Elon Musk and all his ex-lovers and their children simply by urinating on his house, causing it to flood and collapse. 

Nope. It were the birds, frogs and - the ones most resembling the giant dinosaurs in picture books - alligators.

Whether it's a plant, a virus, a human or some other animal, the one best capable of adjusting wins in the end. If I could wager on which living being has the best chances of surviving the next mass extinction event, I would not bet on humankind. 

I would rather put my bitcoins, NFT's, Rubels or CBDC on the scorpion and cockroach. Both equipped to withstand drought as well as a nuclear winter. "Okay, but scorpions surely would die in a flood, right?" You may want to rethink that assessment.


"Yeah, but...but cockroaches surely won't survive a next Great Flood, right?", he asked with a tiny voice.
Sorry:

Only one single creature survived all five known mass extinction events: the tardigrade.

What do you think will the next mass extinction event look like and do you think humans will survive?

No comments: