“Even if you don’t try hard, even if it’s not enough,
“All life deserves to live!”
The law of nature that evolves through waste and excess, not through rationality and hierarchy.

Daniel Milo, the bestselling author of "The Invention of Tomorrow," which revealed the causes of human development, returns with a story that goes beyond his previous work and deals with nature, society, and life.
This book begins by challenging the law that has long guided nature and society: "Only the fittest survive."
By critically exploring Darwin's theory of evolution, it reveals why most living things in nature are not specialized species optimized for their environment, but rather general species with flaws, and that ordinary species can also survive without problems.
Furthermore, by applying this to human society, it provides an opportunity to look at life in a new way for modern people who live with the compulsion to improve in the midst of endless competition.

Human society is not ruthlessly competitive, and neither is nature.
Both are tolerant of excess, inertia, error, mediocrity, and failed experiments.
In places where great success occurs in society and nature, luck can play a far more important role than ability.
But still, many people say that in nature and human history, the only thing that matters is ability (sometimes expressed as fitness, sometimes as advantage), and that everything follows the laws of Darwinism.
I am trying to destroy this very dogma.
--- pp.022-023, 「Preface」

The claim that giraffes' long necks give them an advantage in foraging turns out to be a concept invented by evolutionists who have never seen a giraffe in the wild.
During the dry season, giraffes mainly eat leaves from bushes or lower than shoulder height, and rarely eat leaves from higher places.
They spend about half their time foraging on leaves at or below 2 m, overlapping their foraging grounds with larger herbivores such as the gerenuk (Litocranius walleri), kudu (Tragelaphus imberbis) and greater kudu (Tragelaphus strepsiceros).
As if harboring a grudge against Darwinists, giraffes are more likely to forage for leaves from higher elevations during the rainy season when food is abundant.
--- p.087, Chapter 1: Giraffe: Science Begins with Wonder

It is more accurate to say that breeding was the cornerstone rather than the stepping stone in Darwin's argument.
Darwin never deviated from the logic of the domestication analogy, nor did he have the heart to do so, because he never saw it as a problem.
Natural selection was modeled after artificial selection, and natural selection worked in the same way as artificial selection.
Since then, this analogy has stayed with us, fostering the illusion that natural selection is an agent that endlessly optimizes species' performance in the struggle for survival.

--- p.099, "Chapter 2: Domestication Analogy: Darwin's Original Sin"

Those who study life can approach common properties even if they study only one organism.
However, the organism must be a true 'model' organism that helps with the problem being investigated.
Finches are excellent model organisms for studying natural selection, but that doesn't mean that beak evolution followed a typical, let alone common, path.
--- p.122, Chapter 3, The Galapagos Islands and Finches: Two Icons, Not Representative

From an evolutionary perspective, it suggests that the Homo brain is detrimental to all its owners.
The brain makes reproduction, both birth and postnatal growth, incredibly difficult.
A large skull can threaten the birth canal of the mother, putting the health of both mother and baby at risk.
Slow brain maturation further reduces the adult's reproductive potential by leaving the baby in a helpless, dependent state.
The brain has enormous energy demands, placing a heavy burden on available resources.
It is therefore not surprising that Homo sapiens has lived on the brink of extinction for a significant portion of its history, while all other species of the Homo lineage have long since gone extinct.
--- pp. 157-158, "Chapter 4: The Brain: Our Ancestors' Greatest Enemy"

Neutrality is also important in phylogeny, the process of development of species and their characters.
Neutrality is the raw material of invention.
All traits are the product of mutations that are born in a neutral state.
Most die neutrally, but one of the countless others plays a small but necessary role in the basic structure of life.
If biological mechanisms did not make replication errors, mistaking A for G or C for T, there would be no evolution.
Every trait is the most recent offspring of a series of replication errors.

--- p.206, Chapter 5: Accepting Neutrality

“Consider the enormous number of variations that every generation of every species offers.
Therefore, the number of useless mutations must also be enormous.
There will be hundreds of times more useful mutations than useful ones.”62 There is no room for natural selection to intervene here.
As stagnation continues, the extremes are eliminated.
But because natural selection can't keep pace with the generation of mutations (think of 88 million genetic variations), the extremes continue to fall out, and the range continues to widen.
Positive selection events occur during normal times, but they are very rare.
--- p.255, Chapter 6, Strange Scope: Bias for Excess

The safety net is so strong that the genetic lottery could create all sorts of sustainable deviations.
all.
The Horned Cicada's helmet proves that the deviance was very extreme before "the sentence of unfitness was read and the penalty of extinction was carried out."
The safety net is nature's safeguard for both the rich and the poor.
Excellence is neither harmful nor necessary.
Even the ordinary can be quite wonderful.
--- p.273, Chapter 7: Nature's Safety Net

Only man can escape the chains of fate, because only man can strive for something completely different.
(Omitted) Every ‘here’ has a corresponding ‘there’, and every ‘now’ has a corresponding ‘next’.
Every 'yes' is followed by a 'but', because the first 'see you tomorrow' meant the end of 'I had no choice.'
Because we have a future we can manipulate, humans can always do things differently, or at least imagine doing things differently.
--- p.297, Chapter 8: Inventions of Tomorrow

Our future-orientation can create opportunities for endless waste, anxiety, and boundless dependence.
But it also makes our species invincible.
Natural selection provided the basic infrastructure for the genus Homo, a model destined for extinction because of its wasteful brain.
But before that could happen, the future kept both the fittest and the mediocre alive by trapping Homo sapiens within its safety net.
No matter how much our bubbles inflate, no matter how far our minds wander from the concerns of choice—survival and reproduction—we will always be here.
--- p.334, Chapter 9, Humanity's Safety Net

It is absurd to think that nature demands excellence from each of us or rewards anyone for it.
What is considered excellence and what is rewarded for it is chosen by society.
The human world is a vast, almost borderless room that can accommodate the smart and the stupid, the experts and the dilettantes, the hard workers and the lazy, the champions and the mediocre.

--- p.369, Chapter 10, The Conspiracy of Excellence: A Critique of Evolutionary Ethics