The received wisdom is that the natural world is competitive. I have my doubts about this.
For example, take a population of different types of frogs living around a small area such as a pond. In a David Attenborough film, it was remarked that frogs of one species ‘sang’ together and then when they stopped, frogs of a different species used the gap for their ‘song’ . In the next gap the first species would start singing again, stop, and then the other species would fill that gap with their singing, and so on. The species seemed to operate a sort of round-robin system for singing. Far from being competitive, that behaviour seems highly cooperative.
it’s like when the lemmings line up together and jump off the cliffs… the frogs are gathering together and singing to the crocodiles and alligators, “eat me! eat me!”
as far as round robin style singing, you are committing the anthropomorphic fallacy
Haha, I’ve never heard it called the ‘pathetic fallacy’ before. That’s a damn shame of a fallacy to commit.
That fallacy aside, even if we assume that the frogs are cooperating, it doesn’t mean that nature isn’t by-and-large competitive. Simbiosis is commonplace, but it is a tactic that species use to gain a competitive edge. In a limited scope, they are helping each other, but the broader context is competitivep: against predators, against each other for mates, etc. Frogs might not compete against frogs, but as Imp said they compete against alligators. And their decency probably runs out when resources become scarce.
Nature must have balance if the prime directive of life is to be fulfilled, (“make more of your kind”), and if a behavior maintains the balance of an ecosystem, then it will happen because the environment is conducive to such behavior.
If the environment is not conducive, then as Imp stated, you’re just singing your eulogy.
You are also not taking into account that the species involved are not predatory. Their competition, the very song they sing, is for mating dominance. They also compete to stay alive versus the predators that are in that environment.
Imp is also correct in stating that you are anthropomorphising the instance. The behavior works for those species because of the environment; if all frogs croak at the same time continually, then no mates will be found, breeding falls off, the species die. Frogs also have a rhythm to the croaking, (croak, croak, listen, croak, croak, listen), so the possibility exists that it isn’t a certified behavior, but a matter of happenstance.
Short answer: In the largest sense it is simply causation. In the more general sense I believe it to be in many ways as competitive as it is symbiotic. Not sure they are a true dichotomoy again, they certainly don’t play out that simply.
Between animals, there is almost no necessity for competition. However, watch two lions fight for 15 minutes over a warthog carcus and tell me they aren’t competing for that bit of meat.
However, the pursuit of perfection invariably leads to competition and conflict. Still, all of nature would prefer to avoid conflict if possible, so long as it doesn’t inhibit it’s pursuit of perfection.
organisms compete with each other even if they don’t mean too, the result is some die and some don’t and theres differences that make that happen, and in plenty of species outright competition is a garentee, most species compete.
I was reading some Steven Pinker today, and he spoke of this very subject. Darwinian competition is in the form of Natural Selection. Co-operation is also a form of natural selection. A hunter-gatherer human kills a large animal as a source of food. Is it in the hunters best interest to keep the animal all to himself and let the large quantity of caloric intake go to waste, as the carcass rots due to non-consumption? The alternative is that he shares with a fellow hunter whom may return the favor at a future date. The humanly attributed natural process with which the decision is made allows the species to out survive it’s competition, whom lacks the cooperative trait.
Survival of the fittest is not concerned with how you win, only that you do.