John Z,
Thank you for your response. In a way I am arguing the exact opposite.
Imagine for instance, the time period when the dinosaurs became extinct.
First of all they did not become extinct because of competition from mammals. They became extinct because of climate change and the warm swampy environment that nourished them and gave them plenty of food disappeared. Thus they slowly died out for ecological reasons.
So what happened in these transformed swamps that the mammals inherited. Mammals were readily able to adjust to these new plants, climate, and species, because they were smaller, worm blooded, had fur, etc, but this did not happen automatically, but by small steps, so as the climate, insects, and vegetation changed, so did mammals so that eventually mammals and other new species fill all the ecological space vacated by dinosaurs and beyond, because as a group they are more versatile, more adaptable.
To summarize individual plants and animals are attracted into new ecological niches because a)they offer new sources of food, and b) there is always population pressure to encourage looking for new sources of food. There was an extensive study done a few years ago which points to this correlation between the opening of new ecological niches because of climate and landscape change, and the development of new species. The only problem was that while those who wrote up the study for the press recognized this correlation, the authors of the study refused to accept
It.
Another evidence for this view is the fact that life forms do adapt to their environmental niche by changing that niche. Of course beavers are prime examples, and also human beings. Niche construction theory has pointed out many others.
Thus the reason that species develop and change is because the environment changes, as with the end of dinosaurs and the Ice Age. This is the opposite of Darwinian Natural Selection where genetic change leads to adaption as opposed to the need to adapt leads to genetic and other change.
In the case of the lions, when their prey flourishes, they flourish. When their prey does not have enough to eat, then then they also do not flourish, so the ecology evens things out.
I hope this explains how my view of natural selection is different from the Darwin’s and how the ecological understanding of “survival of the best adapted” explains how natural selection works much better than “survival of the fittest.”