What is nature? || The Nature of Nature

The nature is a truism of biology that evolution is conservative. When something evolves, it must build what nature has already produced. New features may be added, and old features may undergo some alteration, but most things remain the same.

Bats and human hands example: -

It is for this reason that the wings of bats, the hands remain the same. It is for this reason that the wings of bats, the hands of human beings, and the fins of whales look astonishingly alike in their skeletal form. They even have the same number of bones. Evolution laid down the cornerstones for basic physiology long ago.    

How Evolution works

Evolution works in large part, through variation and natural selection. Variation exists for many reasons, including gene-shuffling (to put it simply) and random mutation. Individuals vary within a species for such reasons. Nature chooses from among them, across time.  

What exactly is “the environment” to which animal adopt?

We make assumption about nature, about the environment, and there have consequences. Marke Twain said “It is not what we do not know that gets us in trouble. It is what we know for sure that just ain’t so.” First, it is easy to assume that “nature” is something static. But it is not making any simple sense. It is static and dynamic, at the same time. The environment of the nature that selects itself transformation

Example of yin and yang symbols of the Taoists capture:-

Being, for the Taoists – reality itself – is composed of two opposing principles, often translated as feminine and masculine, or even more narrowly as female and male. However, yin and yang are more accurately understood as chaos and order. The Taoist symbol is a circle enclosing twin serpent, head to tail. The black serpent, chaos, has a white dot in its head. The white serpent, order, has a black dot in its head. This is because chaos and order are interchangeable, as well as eternally juxtaposed. There is nothing so certain that is cannot very. Even the sun itself has its cycles of instability. Likewise, there is nothing so mutable that it cannot be fixed. Every revolution produces a new order. Every death is, simultaneously, a metamorphosis.  

Nature – “selection” and “fitness”

Considering nature as purely static produces serious errors of apprehension Nature “selects.” The idea of selects contains implicitly nested within it the idea of fitness. It is “fitness” that is “selected.” Fitness, roughly speaking, is the probability that a given organism will leave offspring (will propagate its genes through time). The “fit” in “fitness” is therefore the matching of organismal attributes to environmental demand. If that demand is conceptualized as static- if nature is conceptualized as eternal and unchanging – then evolution is a never – ending series of linear improvements, and fitness is some-thing that can be ever more closely approximated across time. The still-powerful Victorian idea of evolutionary progress, with man at the pinnacle, is a partial consequence of this model of nature. It produces the erroneous notion that there is a destination of natural selection (increasing fitness to the environment), and that it can be conceptualized as a fixed point.  

Nature – music

Nature is not a static selecting agent and it is not making any simple sense. Nature dresses differently for each occasion. Nature varies like a musical score.

Why music produces its deep intimations of meaning?

As the environment supporting a species transforms and changes, the features that make a given individual successful in surviving and reproducing also transform and change. Thus, the theory of natural selection does not posit creatures matching themselves even more precisely to a template specified by the world. It is more that creatures are in a dance with nature.

Nature-Dynamic

Nature is not simply dynamic, either. Some things change quickly, but they are nested within other things that changes less quickly (music frequently models this, too). Leaves changes more quickly than trees, and trees more quickly than forests. Weather changes faster than climate. If it wasn’t this way, then the conservatism of evolution would not work, as the basic morphology of arms and hands would have to change as fast the length of arm bones and the function of fingers. It’s chaos, within order, within chaos, within higher order. The order that is most real is the order that is most unchanging – and that is not necessarily the order that is most easily seen. The tree the tree can blind him to the forest. And some things that are most real (such as the ever- present dominance hierarchy) cannot be “seen” at all.