Andreas Wagner notes the long time that elapsed between the first appearance of grass and its ecological dominance. He argues that delayed success holds a profound truth about new life forms
.
Evolution works across enormous timespans. Regarding humans as the pinnacle of evolution only works if you forget this.
During the COVID-19 pandemic, some people offered predictions about where and in what form the virus would end up
, without considering the fact that everything would change and mutate many times before anything ended up
anywhere. And some people thought that we didn't need to worry about the less efficient or effective variants, because they would eventually disappear.
It is said that a Chinese leader (perhaps Mao Zedong or Zhou Enlai), when asked about revolutionary action in France, opined that it was too early to tell, and this quote is often understood to refer to the French revolution two hundred years earlier. Even if this actually referred to the much more recent events of the 1960s, the story accords with the belief that the Chinese government is able to take a much longer view of such matters than democratically elected governments can.
But even a few thousand years of Chinese history is nothing at all in evolutionary timescales.
Andreas Wagner, Sleeping beauties: the evolutionary innovations that wait millions of years to come good (Guardian, 18 April 2023)
Related posts: Rates of Evolution (September 2007), Explaining Natural Selection (January 2021)
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