What if evolution isn’t just about the strongest winning?

Astrobiologist Betül Kaçar explains that life survives by working together, not just by competing. To elaborate, she uses an example about microbes in the Black Sea that help other organisms by sharing energy. True evolution, she says, is not about being the best alone, it’s about connection, cooperation, and learning to live together.

BETÜL KAÇAR: Evolution is not just about natural selection.

I think when we think about survival of the fittest, we think about fitness being some sort of ruthlessness. Perhaps earlier depictions of evolution embedded some picture in our minds of a single organism being better or coming up with a solution that trumped everything around it.

But it says more about ourselves than how biology works.

Selection acts upon population. Everything that exists cooperates and learns and shares with each other. There's a lot of nuanced responses that life settled upon interacting with its environment.

I'm going to give you an example that is close to my heart about cooperation.

It comes from the Black Sea, which also is host to an amazing sardine—I think the best sardine in the world, but I may not be very objective about this. The Black Sea gets its name from its color. It's quite a dark sea. When you go down, there's hardly any penetration of sunlight. You may think that probably nothing is surviving in this place, which, as a fish lover, I will tell you, you would be wrong.

What we find are these microbes that have been residing in this seemingly inhospitable place for billions of years.

So how did they do that?

Well, they have proteins that look almost like solar panels that are sitting outside of their membranes. Not only do they survive, this invention ultimately benefits many other organisms. The microbes became the food source for the rest of the community.

We are able to connect their presence with the ocean, with the seas, with their atmosphere, because ultimately, survival is about learning how to share this good with the community. And I find this very profound.

So evolution is not a single organism that is the fittest, or that’s the best among all the solutions. It's more like a web of interactions.

We have to reckon with this fact.

There's no need for a new definition of evolution. Evolutionary biology has been defining the nature and the contours of what makes life possible around us for centuries. Evolution is evolution. We just need to understand it.