:Analogies for Sustainable Development/Selection as winnowing

Analogy Map

Winnowing	Selection in evolutionary theory
Force of the wind	Selection pressure
Mix of grain and chaff	All the existing variants of a trait
Chaff	The variants that are not selected
Grain	The variants that are selected
Absolute “fitness”: all the material that is heavier than what the wind can blow away is retained	Relative fitness: the variants that are better than the other existing ones are selected

Quote Bank

Wilson (2015):

“Centuries and even millennia of cultural evolution were required to winnow the self-organizing processes that work, like needles from the haystack of self-organizing processes that don’t work!”

“Most regulatory processes in biological organisms are self-organizing, but a selection process was required to winnow the self-organizing processes that work from the many that don’t work.”

References

Analogies for Sustainable Development