The Idle Theory of Evolution

The Survival of the Idlest

Life, both in biology and in conventional wisdom, is distinguished from inert matter through being busy, mobile, fecund. And the more active and busy life is, the more 'alive' or 'lively' it is held to be. According to this view, immobile plants scarcely qualify as life at all, and indolent slugs, snails, sloths, and the like are granted a lowly status. Pride of place is taken by ants, bees, and by the most active, busy, and mobile animal of all - humankind.

In Idle Theory, this scale of nature is inverted. The busiest and most hardworking creatures are those nearest the brink of extinction, rather than in the fullest flush of life. It is idle, indolent, do-nothing life which survives. The constant attempt of all creatures is to do as little as possible, rather than as much as possible. It is not the fittest - the strongest, fastest, or most fertile - that survive: it is the idlest. The process of evolution is one of the regular extinction of busy, hardworking creatures, and the development by the rest of ever more elaborate ways of doing the bare minimum.

Living creatures are unlike inert matter in that they work to maintain themselves, replacing worn-out parts. In this they are like houses which periodically need to have tiles, beams, and walls replaced or rebuilt. Living creatures grow because they tend to slightly over-maintain themselves, doing a little more work than is necessary. Reproduction is an extension of the resulting growth. Death - disintegration - overtakes the creatures when, even working as hard as possible, they are unable to maintain themselves.

In the primeval soup in which primitive unicellular life first appeared, more or less anything that could open its mouth and swallow could survive. But as the numbers of creatures multiplied, the soup thinned out, and all creatures had to work harder to survive. For some, life gradually became one long round of incessant work, and they died when, even working as hard as possible, they were unable to maintain themselves. The survivors lived on in a world where food was scarce, and survival depended on finding ways to minimize work.

Evolution is a continual process of minimizing work. All major evolutionary developments make life easier. Primitive unicellulars found that they could live a more idle life if they formed cooperative collectives - multicellular organisms - in which individual cells became specialised in particular work. The multicellulars developed eyes and other sensors which made finding food easier - something that was quite unnecessary in the good old primeval soup days. They developed limbs of various kinds to allow them to move easily towards food they had found - also unnecessary in the primeval soup. The primary effect of all these various developments was to reduce the amount of work needed to be done, and thereby increase their chances of survival.

Among the greatest of their innovations was to find ways of tapping the energy of sunlight. Once this had been discovered, early plants found that could live more easily from the constant stream of solar radiation than from what was by now more consomme than soup. As these plants multiplied, other creatures soon found that an easier life was to be had by consuming the plants. And as these herbivores increased in numbers, some of them found that an even easier life could be found by eating the herbivores. In this way, a system of plants and herbivores and predators emerged.

In this inverted scale of nature, plants - and trees in particular - are the most successful form of life, followed first by those animals which browse or graze on plants, and then by the predators that prey upon these grazing animals. Busy, hardworking humans come right at the very bottom, as the least successful extant life form.

The inherent (and unattainable) goal of the whole process of evolution is the development of creatures that do absolutely nothing. The goal is unattainable, in part because it violates intractable laws of physics, but also because the circumstances in which life finds itself are always deteriorating, forcing life to work harder, and hence to find ever more new and innovative ways of minimizing work.

Idle Theory rests upon a mechanistic and physical description of life. What distinguishes the Idle Life model from other physical models of life is that Idle Life continually cycles between idle and busy states, rather than maintains some stable level of activity. The adoption of a terminolgy of physical work and energy does not make Idle Theory a science: it is an exploration of another way of considering life.