Sunday, March 8, 2015

Vehicle of Evolution: A Microbus Analogy



Imagine a bus. A bus filled with passengers, tones of them! 

I was in jam packed bus this morning, barely had an inch to move, though I was in a seat, and not standing, it was still very hard to move. Few hours ago I was talking to a professor about what I want to do for my PhD research. I was thinking about something related to Evolution, something about Evolutionary stable state or the questions of Tinbergen. I was trying my best to think of a Topic! But of course I wasn’t able to do that. Then I started playing with ideas in my head and it struck me!


An Ecosystem is like a bus, it has various components, various factors and most of all it species interacting with each other. There's an Ecologically or Evolutionary stable state inside and unstable ones. There's struggle, way too much of it, the struggle is not for survival but for the seat, the seat, hereby, can be analogous to survivor. And the struggle begins before anyone occupies the seats. 

Let’s say we're at RNAC (NAC at present) in rush hour!! You have to fight your way through at least 30 passengers to just get into the micro bus! Forget about getting the seat! It doesn't fit into the evolutionary state in my analogy, I mentioned it just to show that the struggle of the fittest beings way before they're into a system. The race to get into the microbus is like the race of the sperm to reach the eggs! The fastest one gets in and the slower ones are left behind. The struggle doesn’t end there, the beings! The genes now have a platform to stay secure for as long as they are programmed to, well technically it doesn't happen so here, it gets mixed! 

Most of you must be bored by now and started to wonder where the hell am I headed? Well it’s a bit complex and I guess complete wrong, but it’s just my imagination so for those who don't get it, take it as a fiction work, but for those who understand what I'm saying, it’s just Science in arts.


The door is closed, the normal seats are taken and an additional 8 people are inside the bus, more than the proper seats of the of bus. Those people sitting in seat comfortably are in stable state, they feel no pressure from the Nature. Nature in this case is the driving force, or the driver! Who stays comfortably in his chairs and drives the genes, the humans, to their destination, which is natural selection in real world. So the comfortable ones, specially the front seat'ers and the last seat'ers, who get to sit there most comfortably, face no pressure from the external factors driven by the Nature (Mr Driver) not lets go towards the first front row, the first seat'ers, the one on the right side faces a little trouble but the one right has to go through adaptive radiation to adapt to a situation where he/she has to turn their legs in a different direction just because of peer pressure of factor of the driving force, the conductor in this scenario, he can be genetic drift in my analogy. The left one on the first seat has to modify itself in order to be accepted in the place. If not, he/she is not accepted. These are the animals that are facultative resistant. I know it’s not a word but what I mean is when faced with struggle they can be resistant to the factors affecting them, unlike the vulnerable ones, they can make changes and adapt to the scenarios. The Obligatory resistant but within a comfortable zone are those sitting behind the driver’s seat, they are the alters, because they're facing the wrong direction. They are the alter species with weird characteristics fast adapting and with ability of rapidly changing

Now we're left with Vulnerable ones, who are the people who have to stand crouched up against 7 other people, the most struggling species, the most vulnerable ones in a regard that they must go through all the challenges within the system, they need to grasp on to the state, remain stable or they'll fail, and a new species, a new person here, who comes into the system will be a vulnerable one because he will find very little space and lots of competitors. But gradually with time, the new species will either be adapted and will get a seat or gets extinct i.e. gets off the bus without getting a seat. And the cycle runs when an established species goes and gets replaced by a new species. Some survive and some die off. And the species can be arranged hierarchically the most comfortable ones being on the top of the food chain and the lowers ones on lower side, but I think it requires a new article with some changes! Will think about it later!