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> It’s a long, ascetic journey, undertaken with an existential resolve that cannot be explained. But once an eel reaches the Sargasso Sea, it has, once again, f
by danmaz74 6y ago
> It’s a long, ascetic journey, undertaken with an existential resolve that cannot be explained. But once an eel reaches the Sargasso Sea, it has, once again, found its way home. Under swirling blankets of seaweed, its eggs are fertilized. And with that, the eel is done, its story complete, and it dies.
I know this should be read more as poetry, but the existential resolve can be explained perfectly well: if an eel lacks it, it will never reproduce and its genes will be lost. Thus, only genes which guarantee that resolve are left in the pool.
- im3w1l 6y agoWell to really see the issue I think you need a contrast: Why do eels make an enormously long journey, when other species don't? Why can we do it closer to home and they not?
- danmaz74 6y ago"Why" can be a confusing word when talking about evolutionary history, because the answer is necessarily self-referential: eels do it this way because it's a successful adaptation, and they got to this point through a series of successful adaptations that worked at each step.
- im3w1l 6y agoYes, why is an open ended question, but there are better and worse answers. In this case we might ask, are they better or worse off making the journey than they would be staying at home? Do they gain something from all of that effort? A more genetically diverse mating pool? Or could it be that it is worse, but they are stuck in a nash equilibrium where any single deviant would be worse off, so there is no viable path to better behavior. Or is it their behavior suboptimal, even for the individual, but remains because so much is built on top of it that it would be hard to "refactor" the genome to remove the assumptions of a journey?