:Analogies for Sustainable Development/Major transitions as a boat race

Analogy Map

Boat race	Biological evolution
The race	The evolutionary process
Selection pressure (that which is selected for): Being fast	Selection pressure (that which is selected for): surviving and reproducing
Several people in one boat	Cooperation between smaller units for a common purpose
Winning	Surviving and reproducing better relative to all the other ones in the race
One defined winner	No defined “winner”, many winners occupying different niches
Defined finish line	No defined finish line

Quote Bank

Haidt (2012):

“Suppose you entered a boat race. One hundred rowers, each in a separate rowboat, set out on a ten-mile race along a wide and slow-moving river. The first to cross the finish line will win $10,000. Halfway into the race, you’re in the lead. But then, from out of nowhere, you’re passed by a boat with two rowers, each pulling just one oar. No fair! Two rowers joined together into one boat! And then, stranger still, you watch as that rowboat is overtaken by a train of three such rowboats, all tied together to form a single long boat. The rowers are identical septuplets. Six of them row in perfect synchrony while the seventh is the coxswain, steering the boat and calling out the beat for the rowers. But those cheaters are deprived of victory just before they cross the finish line, for they in turn are passed by an enterprising group of twenty-four sisters who rented a motorboat. It turns out that there are no rules in this race about what kinds of vehicles are allowed. That was a metaphorical history of life on Earth.For the first billion years or so of life, the only organisms were prokaryotic cells (such as bacteria). Each was a solo operation, competing with others and reproducing copies of itself. But then, around 2 billion years ago, two bacteria somehow joined together inside a single membrane, which explains why mitochondria have their own DNA, unrelated to the DNA in the nucleus. These are the two-person rowboats in my example...A few hundred million years later, some of these eukaryotes developed a novel adaptation: they stayed together after cell division to form multicellular organisms in which every cell had exactly the same genes. These are the three-boat septuplets in my example.”

“There is an important flaw in my “boat race” analogy: the new vehicles don’t really “win” the race. Prokaryotes are still quite successful; they still represent most of the life on earth by weight and by number. But still, new vehicles seem to come out of nowhere and then claim a substantial portion of the earth’s available bio-energy.”

References

Analogies for Sustainable Development