A while back, Steven Den Beste wrote
Darwinian evolution by natural selection is inelegant, inefficient, very cruel and wasteful and, it turns out, true.
He right, Darwinian evolution is true. It is also cruel. But it is wrong to characterize Darwin's five laws of evolution as inelegant, inefficient, and wasteful. The judgement categories do not fit.
Think of a robotic society, such as that in James P. Hogan's science fiction novel Code of the Lifemaker 1. The society evolved from a somewhat broken — in biological terms, `mutated' — automatic mining machine. It is made up of self-replicating, `Von Neumann' machines.
Self-replicating machines make as many copies of themselves as they can. This is because those that made fewer duplicates have fewer descendants. Indeed, those ancestors that made fewer copies may not have any descendants at all. In any given activity — an ecological niche, which humans call a `profession' — the more common descendants will crowd out the fewer.
Consequently, in a society of self-replicating, Von Neumann machines, all the energy and resources that can be used is used. (Some resource runs out before the others; it limits the number of duplicates that can be made. The resource may be an ore or other physical input, the amount of available space, or energy.)
The characteristic of `using all the energy and resources that can be used' applies not only to societies of self-replicating, Von Neumann machines, but to any ecology, including a natural, biological ecology.
Think of a forest, of a biological, Earthly forest, not one produced by Von Neumann machines: if any species or portion of a species in this forest produces fewer descendants than it could, it will surely be outgrown over the generations, by a different species or by a more prolific portion of its own species.Absolute efficiency is not an issue; only relative efficiency. Plants convert a small portion, I think it is about 2%, of incoming solar energy into biomass. Those solar energy users that reproduce themselves more successfully will, over the generations, grow in numbers more than others. As an idea, this is nearly tautological: `those that have more descendants, have more descendants'.
The idea is not a tautology in practice because the simple statement as quoted leaves out a huge factor, the environment. The environment may change from one generation to the next. Moreover, the `environment' includes not only non-living resources and dangers, and living instances of other species, but others of the same species and of parts within oneself.
Suppose there is no change from one generation to the next in the non-living resources and dangers, nor in the living instances of other species. Even then, the population of individuals of the same species may increase: if that happens, important new relations occur, whether friendly or otherwise, not only with the non-living environment and with individuals of other species, but with conspecifics.
From a genetic point of view, the set of genes of one or other individual will be more likely to survive. After all, two trees cannot both take up the same sun light. The genes of one tree must vanish. So the tree with genes that make it more likely to produce defendants that survive and reproduce will have more defendants.
Efficiency does become a concern when you farm. The ecology is not concerned: you are. Your question is which action of yours is better than another. For example, when you consider harvesting energy from things that grow, you become aware how inefficient plants are in converting sun light into biomass.
But if you are not a farmer, efficiency is irrelevant. Is forest is efficient? The question does not apply.
The question of `inelegance' is similar.
In Darwinian evolution, many copies are made, but only some reproduce. Those that reproduce are more likely to be better adjusted to the environment they were in than those that did not reproduce. Since copies are not always identical, even when the environment changes, some copies may survive to reproduce. When you are not concerned about waste, but about the overall process, then the process of adaptation that is Darwinian evolution looks quite elegant. It is a way for a group of self-replicating entities to adapt to different conditions over generations.
As for cruelty: yes, evolution is cruel. But then, any and every form of life is cruel. Living entities die. Species die. And some species are aware of pain. Darwinian evolution is no more cruel — and no less — than any other way of thinking about life.
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