Natural Selection Everywhere

Natural selection is one of those concepts that, once you're looking for it, seems to show up everywhere.

The classic (of course) is biological evolution: the variants of a species which are best adapted to survive and reproduce in a given environment become a larger and larger share of the population until that advantage no longer holds.

There's no guiding hand and nobody is deliberately doing anything (although we sometimes informally talk about it as if it did). The only requirements are some natural variation and a reproductive advantage for some of those variations over others.

The same dynamic applies to businesses. I think there's a misunderstanding of capitalism where it only works if businesses (in general) are accurately predicting What People Want, and delivering it.

While businesses can act strategically, that's not required for markets to work: a whole bunch of people can start different companies for various stupid reasons, and so long as one of them delivers more value than another, that one is more likely to survive and reproduce into the future.

(As with animal evolution, the upshot can include huge inefficiencies: so long as one overall package is evolutionary fitter than another it will become more prevalent, even if it includes components that are entirely wasteful).

The same is true about staffing within organizations. Managers who stick around get to hire more employees (and to eject other managers they dislike, or feel threatened by), and over time the organization becomes more and more staffed by people who share the evolutionarily fittest traits within that organization. There's nothing claiming those traits will be good traits, only that they will be fit ones.

Perhaps weirdest to think about is natural selection within your only personality and behavior. For example, think about the things you say in public: the things that get most encouraged by friends and family are most likely to survive and be said again, and have "offspring" thoughts and utterances, while the things that get killed by other people's responses are more likely to disappear from your mindscape. It is not the strongest thoughts that survive, nor the most intelligent, but the best adapted to their environment.