The Top Ten Myths About Evolution

Myth Seven, Nature’s Perfect Balance, explores the misunderstandings of what exactly ecological balance is, and what role--if any--evolution plays in maintaining environmental equilibrium. An excerpt is found below:

For as long as humanity can remember, Earth has been a pretty safe and benign home. We’ve endured some crises, but we’re still here, and the natural world we venerate in everything from our myths to our art is characterized by balance and order. The Nile rises every Spring--as it has for millennia--irrigating its fertile banks; the global average temperature hovers around sixty degrees Fahrenheit, which we can offset with a little clothing; salmon spawn and run on a predictable schedule that sustained Native Americans for thousands of years. We marvel at the harmony we see among communities of plants and animals. When undisturbed by humankind, it seems, Earth is at peace, in balance. It’s no wonder that we’ve long believed that nature itself--often personified as "Mother Nature"--tends to our wants and wishes, carefully managing ecological communities, carefully maintaining nature’s perfect balance (1). Since all living things are the product of evolution, many feel that evolution has purpose of tailoring species--even entire ecosystems--to carry out specific roles in a vast, complex, harmonious self-regulating system.
But, like waking from a dream, centuries of research have shown us that this conception of purposeful, natural harmony is an illusion, a fabrication of our species’ recent and selective memory. Although writing and oral traditions have given us a better and longer memory than any other creatures, our memory still only goes back a few thousand years (2). Since life on Earth appeared over three billion (that is, three thousand million) years ago, our cultural memory samples only about one thousandth of 1 percent of the history of life. We’ve only just started using science to investigate that history, and what we’ve found is that the past was rife with calamity and extinction, and very different from the harmonious balance we revere today.
If nature was trying to maintain balance, it would mean that evolution has purpose and intent, and that would be very important to know. If this was true, we should see that intent in the unfolding of evolution, both in the way communities of plants and animals coevolve and in the history of any individual species (3). In short, we should see clear intent in the workings of an immense and complex living thing, known to some as Gaia. Luckily, generations of biologists and other observers of nature have accumulated countless reams of information on the natural world as it is today and as it was in the past. We can sift their findings to evaluate the phrase the "balance of nature."

Notes to Myth Seven: Nature's Perfect Balance
1. Catastrophes occur, of course, but on the human timescale, they’re rare by definition. The term Mother Nature is first traced to 1601, and "Mother Earth" to 1586. See Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd ed., vol. 9 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), p. 1125.
2. Some kind of information was stored as notches on European bone and antler "batons" over fifteen thousand years ago. See F. D’Errico, "Palaeolithic Origins of Artificial Memory Systems," in Cognition and Material Culture: The Archaeology of Symbolic Storage, ed. C. Renfrew and C. Scarre (Cambridge, UK: MacDonald Institute for Archaeological Research, 1998), pp. 19-50. However, the first records we can actually read are the first written languages of about five thousand years ago. See S. D. Houston, The First Writing: Script Invention as History and Process (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004).
3. The term coevolution refers to organisms whose evolution is intimately tied to that of others. Symbiotic species, as well as parasites and hosts, for example, coevolve. The term can also be applied to larger systems of "coevolving community members."

Excerpt from The Top 10 Myths about Evolution by Cameron McPherson Smith and Charles Sullivan, pp. 107-108, (Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books). Copyright (C) 2007 by Cameron M. Smith and Charles Sullivan. Reprinted with permission of the publisher.