Hypothetically speaking.....Let’s say 50% of the palm trees in the Bahamas survive Dorian. Of that, 1 out of 2 trees survive because of chance(luck) and the others because they were genetically better equipped to ride out the storm. Maybe their roots were stronger or the tree wouldn't break as easy, idk. Over time and with environmental changes that create more storms, will the chance survivors’ genetics eventually be wiped out? IOW they wouldn’t be as lucky next time . I’m just questioning this because I’ve read where Natural Selection sometimes favours the fortunate but my thinking is that chance survivors are more at risk should the same situation present itself over and over again.
If that seems logical then does selection by luck really determine an evolutionary path for a species? I understand that since life began that billions of animals have gone extinct and in the end evolutionary adaptations don’t keep pace with changing environment, good genes or not. I suppose luck could also wipe out the genes required to survive the changing environment through accidental death. So how does selection by chance/luck benefit a species or does it?
Disasters offer a sudden, radical alteration of the environment which can potentially affect the future of a population in a significant way, especially if a change in surrounding conditions also resulted in great loss of numbers. Disasters are a window of opportunity for inherited characteristics that are not necessarily a benefit. They can seize upon the advantage of misfortune and spread themselves as they never could before. (Likewise, rare or novel traits which are helpful can also get a boost in proliferation if they were sluggishly oppressed by the previous regularities or norms.)
An example is how (depending upon the source) as much as 10% of the population of the island of Pingelap has complete color blindness. Legend-wise, that's supposedly due to "a population bottleneck in 1775 after a catastrophic typhoon swept through the island, leaving only about 20 survivors. One of these, Doahkaesa Mwanenihsed (the ruler at that time), is now believed to have been a carrier for the underlying genetic condition."
Of course, if the environment eventually returns to its previous state or a population is not isolated, then the eccentric characteristic (of no or even some detrimental benefit) can only temporarily exploit the circumstances.
Natural selection itself -- though minus deliberated goals -- isn't primarily randomness, chance, luck, or unpredictability. It is two processes looping back and into each other: Replication of the organism's structure and a sorting/filtering of the organism's interactive characteristics with the surroundings. It does depend upon random replication errors and changes in the environment to provide "creative" options that the preserved organizational patterns and operations filter (select/reject by enduring or not in future generations). But the stored and inherited order and selective system itself is just that: Order, not disarray and irregularity.
Palm trees (especially the coconut kind) survive by playing the odds. Namely they produce a large bounty of coconuts that will drop into the nearby water and float on the tide to eventually reach land and hopefully for the palm, take root.
The only time this isn't really the case is when the tree has been grown and/or planted by man, as the seeds (The coconuts) would otherwise find it hard to propagate over distance. It's the main reason they tend to be coastal trees (or near a river)
I watched something some time ago that followed the voyage of a coconut and expressed how it could land on the leeward side of a small sandy island and take root, and within some years it would become a tree, produce more coconuts and then eventually succumb to the sea through erosion (meanwhile behind it on the leeward side yet more coconuts would take root shifting the root system for the sandbar)
Luck only exists as a perception. For instance you could draw a card from deck and attempt to guess what card it is, it would be lucky to guess the right one, however if you could draw more than one card and use them to go through a process of elimination you turn chance into mathematics with statistical probability, luck at that point no longer exists.
Quote:Luck only exists as a perception. For instance you could draw a card from deck and attempt to guess what card it is, it would be lucky to guess the right one, however if you could draw more than one card and use them to go through a process of elimination you turn chance into mathematics with statistical probability, luck at that point no longer exists.
I think this is what I was aiming at. Eventually good luck catches up with a species. Can’t expect good fortune to continue, and eventually a point is reached where there’s no chance. I think about a species like the Dodo, having the good fortune of not having to deal with predators for so long that it became flightless and unaware of predatory danger. This in a world stuffed with predators. It rolled along nicely for who knows how long until the luck ran out. A lack of predation actually was fortunate IMHO, but evolution eventually changed the odds by placing the bird into a high risk zone.