3 Environment

All life is biology.

All biology is physiology.
All physiology is chemistry.
All chemistry is physics.
All physics is mathematics
.

Life Is: Mathematics

Lecture to the American Academy of Cosmetic Dentistry

April 29, 2004

It’s All Relative(s)

Evolutionary processes occur within an environment through which their effectiveness is judged, an environment termed an ecosystem. The name ecosystem brings into focus the fact that living things require a number of conditions to support life and that when many different species are present, these conditions and species all form an interrelated system. Within such a system, the elements often exhibit the characteristics of one or more mechanisms, and each of the various mechanisms in a system can impact the others’ operations. Hence, the constituent elements of an ecosystem impact one another, perhaps simply through their existence or perhaps through the operations of their mechanisms. The boundary of an ecosystem is formed by the set of characteristics that makes it distinct from other ecosystems, and it provides a relatively closed space to constrain the conditions and mechanisms of the living species contained. Within this space, that is, within the boundaries of an ecosystem, the efficacy of each mechanism, relative to its supporting conditions and to all other mechanisms, is judged.

A popular term for the judgment or evaluation process is survival of the fittest. While this expression might be apt if one delves sufficiently into the meaning of the word fittest, we will prefer the appellation natural selection. Survival of the fittest may be construed as meaning that the bigger and more powerful the entity, the more fit it is to survive (an extreme abuse of the term has been found in the XIX^th Century with the Social Darwinism movement, that took exactly this understanding to promote supremacist ideas that would foster some of the worst events of the XX^th Century). If that were the case, then one rightly ponders, “Where are the dinosaurs today?” An atypical, perhaps even cataclysmic event, can always take a species or a collection of species to the brink of extinction; perhaps even take them over the brink. In such a case, one might surmise that if the infrastructure for life itself survived the event, then why would not the same dominant species re-emerge, albeit slowly, through the same evolutionary processes that proved to their benefit in ages past? The answer is found by noting that fittest is a relative term that must be derived on a case-by-case basis. Its situational definition is constrained within the scope of an