Defragging Darwin

There is Darwin debris everywhere – time to reorganize! My interest to clean and reorganize has been inspired by the new year, but more so, sparked by current events. What a mess! It’s as if we haven’t cleaned the house of our collective consciousness in years. Piles of promises and propaganda everywhere, and that’s on the topside of events. Try looking at the underside of matters and it gets murkier. This is not a political rant, nor is there a religious slant. I am simply questioning what's in the deep corners and closets of our shared thinking, and how it affects individuals personally.  While searching and rummaging around in my thoughts, I found Darwin.

I’m not alone in the ideas I’m sharing, but perspectives, like connotations to definitions take their own bend. First, let’s look at defragmentation or defragging - here’s a simple tech definition from Meriam-webster.com. “To reorganize separated fragments of related data on a computer disk into a contiguous arrangement.” Other technical dictionaries explain why this is required for effective performance and speed to load and open files. TechTerms.com sums it up with, “After all, a defragmented hard disk is a happy hard disk.”
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Back to Darwin. To be sure, I am not a Darwin scholar, and I’m not a computer Geek. That said, I do like to play with ideas and use computer terminology as an overlay to explore subjective experience.  Putting science to the side, consider for a moment a popular cultural view of Darwin’s evolutionary theory of “the survival of the fittest” and how it bleeds through to color our view of the world and our personal experience. I’m not referring to healthy competition, but how the theory “survival of the fittest” can become a brutal claw-your-way-to-the-top, dog-eat-dog competition at almost every turn. Even the word “survival” feels threatening.  You can sense how the concept fragments into other ideas that have scattered all over the place. It’s in sports, business, education, politics, even personal relationships.   Specific words may not be spoken or thoughts considered on a conscious level, but it’s there growing like a black mold.  It has the potential to influence and become a foundation for assessing experience and making important decisions.

In my view, the theory has indeed become splintered and separated from the original meaning.  The resources on Wikipedia (this is just a blog, not a dissertation) presented many ideas that back this idea. Here are two: “The factor in determining survival is often not superiority over another in competition but ability to survive dramatic changes in environment conditions, such as after a meteor impact,” and “There is little evidence that competition has been the driving force in the evolution of large groups.”
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There are many other thoughts and ideas in examining Darwin’s theory that show how we’ve taken fragments of a concept and misapplied them in our thinking and view of the world, which in turn builds an unstable (messy) environment. We need to collectively reorganize all of the related data on Darwin’s Theory and file it into a “contiguous arrangement” as it was meant to be. We need to clean it out of our social and cultural environment, and file it appropriately in our thoughts and expectations - not deleting, simply defragging.

As I search my personal experiences, I find most to be cooperative, supportive, and hopeful.  I’m not trying to portray a Pollyanna Positive view of the world.  It is my direct experience, and I realize each individual’s experience will be unique.  I consider everything else I see or read (internet, TV, books, others’ perspectives) as secondary experience, so these will have less impact in my personal considerations – they are not my immediate experience and not necessarily how I relate to the world. And this is why I am reorganizing my thoughts and expectations by defragging Darwin.  I’m cleaning up and filing away the Darwin debris strewn about my thinking. This mental and emotional defragging will assure that my performance will be effective, and not be slowed down as I work to load constructive thoughts and open to new ideas.   

Hopefully, I’ll have a happier heart, head, and hard disk.  And as long as I’m reorganizing, I’ll make a new file to collect evidence for  “Cooperation: An Exploration in the Subjective Evolution of a Species” theory. It's just a theory, join me.