[ExI] ‘Survival of fittest’ is disputed

[Mike Dougherty]

On Tue, Aug 24, 2010 at 7:16 PM, The Avantguardian
<avantguardian2020 at yahoo.com> wrote:
> A good metaphor for understanding this is to think in terms of the fitness
> landscape as being an actual landscape of hills and valleys. Hills represent
> high fitness and valleys represent low fitness. Selective pressure can be
> thought of as the "water level" on the fitness landscape. During "hellish"
> phases, the water level is high, and you are better off climbing the hill you
> are already on to its peak and hope it is high enough in case the water level
> rises higher, rather than going down and potentially drowning. During "Eden"
> phases, the water level is low, and you are able to go down into the valleys and
> search around for other potentially higher hills elsewhere. Thus during "Eden"
> phases, many more "hills" become occupied and you get mass speciation or
> adaptive radiation.
>
> That's Nat Hallinan's Eden Hypothesis in a nutshell. Now I gotta go.

It also sounds like a computer science major explaining a genetic
algorithm exploring a solution space.