--- Wojtek Sokolowski <sokol at jhu.edu> wrote:
> Joanna:
>
>
> Well, yes and no. Because you do get animals who not
> only adapt to the
> environment but who adapt their environment to their
> needs -- in other
> words, "intelligence" is a trait that raises the
> odds of survival and,
> whoever wins at the survival game wins at
> "evolution." And that's not
> just a popular representation.
>
>
> [WS:] Interesting point. However, the ability to
> change the environment to
> needs does not necessarily increases the chances of
> survival.
Quite right, and you don't have to to the !Kung. Consider in our own case global warming. Jared Diamonds's book Collapse -- which only considers the survival of societies, not species -- is full of examples of people who changed their environments, in many cases rationally, at least in the short run, and ended up destroying their societies. N-person prisoner's dilemmas/collective action-public goods problems are pervasive.
If we look to the nonhuman world, all species change their environments simply by being there, using resources, producing waste, creating alterations. The there is nothing in orthodox Darwinism comparable to the Central Dogma of molecular (roughly that Lamarkianism is false); organisms affect the environment to which they adapt. But not always positively from the point of view of adaptive fitness. A virus or micro-organism that always and rapidly kills its host and has a high communicability destroys the environment that enables it to survive, and the the characteristics that cause those effects thereby are selected against. (People have proposed this a partial explanation of the decreasing virulence of various epidemic diseases that are initially terribly destructive to new populations.)
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