Competition

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Contents 1 Introduction 2 Direct and indirect competition 3 Misconceptions 4 Related Articles 5 Appendix: Darwin on "the struggle for existence"

[edit] Introduction

One of the foundational observations of the theory of evolution is that in a world of finite resources (food, territory, mates and so forth) organisms occupying the same environmental niche (in particular, organisms of the same species) must necessarily be in competition with one another for these resources.

[edit] Direct and indirect competition

To many people, mention of "competition" in nature, and Darwin's phrase about the "struggle for existence", suggest what we might call "direct competition": a literal struggle between two organisms. We can see such a struggle, for example, in the battles for mates that occur in polygamous herd animals.

More often, however, competition is indirect. Spiders, for example, do not fight with one another over flies; but they are in indirect competition to catch flies, since the flies which are caught by one spider are not available to be caught by another.

In highly social species such as our own, we compete to cooperate. In a social species, good social relations with others are themselves a resource, and the man who cannot cooperate with his fellows would not long keep a job, a wife, or a friend, and could look forward to a life which would be, in Hobbes' famous words: "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short".

In symbiotic relationships between species, such as the relationship between bees and flowering plants there is another sort of competition to cooperate: the plants are in competition to cooperate with the bees. An analogy may be drawn between this sort of competition and the competition between businesses for customers. Businesses do not compete directly, by their shareholders fighting it out with knives and guns: rather, they compete in cooperating with the finite pool of potential customers. In the same way, flowering plants compete to produce better advertising (blooms and scent) and more attractive products (nectar) for which the customers (bees) repay them by transporting pollen.

[edit] Misconceptions

There are three common misconceptions concerning the notion of competition in nature:

• That the theory of evolution is predicated entirely on the existence of direct competition between organisms, and is therefore ill-founded.

• That the theory of evolution predicts that members of the same species will invariably be in direct competition, and so is falsified by observation.

• That the theory of evolution implies that human beings should ("should" in the ethical sense) be in constant direct competition with one another in a war of all against all, and is therefore immoral.

As we can see from the discussion above, all of this is very wide of the mark. We may add that the third of these mistakes combines either the first or the second mistake with the Naturalistic Fallacy: even if natural selection did favor the mugger over the businessman and the rapist over the family man, that would be no reason for us to give muggers and rapists our moral approval; natural selection gave us the bacteria which cause tooth decay, but that doesn't lead anyone to conclude that it's immoral to brush our teeth.

[edit] Related Articles

• Theory of Evolution
• Natural Selection
• Evolutionarily Stable Strategies
• Malthus and Evolution
• Biology

[edit] Appendix: Darwin on "the struggle for existence"

Two canine animals in a time of dearth, may be truly said to struggle with each other which shall get food and live. But a plant on the edge of a desert is said to struggle for life against the drought, though more properly it should be said to be dependent on the moisture. A plant which annually produces a thousand seeds, of which on an average only one comes to maturity, may be more truly said to struggle with the plants of the same and other kinds which already clothe the ground. The missletoe is dependent on the apple and a few other trees, but can only in a far-fetched sense be said to struggle with these trees, for if too many of these parasites grow on the same tree, it will languish and die. But several seedling missletoes, growing close together on the same branch, may more truly be said to struggle with each other. As the missletoe is disseminated by birds, its existence depends on birds; and it may metaphorically be said to struggle with other fruit-bearing plants, in order to tempt birds to devour and thus disseminate its seeds rather than those of other plants. In these several senses, which pass into each other, I use for convenience sake the general term of struggle for existence. (Charles Darwin, On the Origin of Species, chapter 3 [1])