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A start-up is, in Peter’s definition, “a small group of people that you’ve convinced of a truth that nobody else believes in.” This is a fitting definition of what has assembled here
Martin Luther King Jr. spoke eloquently about this phenomenon. “In a real sense, all of life is interrelated,” he said. “All persons are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly affects all indirectly. I can never be what I ought to be until you are what you ought to be, and you can never be what you ought to be until I am what I ought to be. This is the interrelated structure of reality.”
Eleven Rings
Phil Jackson, Hugh Delehanty
He began with the topic of variation among domestic animals, noting the obvious point that individuals differ slightly from one another in size, weight, color, and other ways. Because some of those differences are heritable, human breeders have been able to perpetuate and even amplify desirable traits by carefully selecting which animals to pair. With enough selection over long stretches of time, breeders even produced new races—speedy horses versus dray horses and tallow cows versus beef cows, for instance. This was the setup for Darwin’s crucial analogy. From variation among domestics he moved to variation among wild creatures, and to what he called here “the natural means of selection.” Variation in the wild might not be as common or as extreme as variation among domestics (so he thought), but under certain circumstances it did occur. What caused it? He didn’t know—and, for the present, that didn’t matter. Some of those variations, like the ones among domestic animals, were heritable. Given the inherent rates of population increase and the enormous excess of insupportable offspring, to which Malthus had awakened him, wild creatures would be subjected to an automatic sort of culling, based on their capacities to compete for survival and for mating opportunities. By now he had hit upon not just his analogy, with domestic breeding, but his chosen term: “natural selection.” The net result over thousands of generations, he wrote mutedly, would be to “alter forms.” He had described a physical mechanism (or at least, part of it) by which new species could be produced.
The Reluctant Mr. Darwin
David Quammen
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