Sustainability Calling

6A Continuous Survival of Species? Crisis and Consciousness Productions

6.1. Introduction and general considerations: what’s new behind life?

Although people are sometimes frightened by the discontinuities of concepts such as life and death, it should be noted that life is not a beginning and death is not an end. These are simply steps in a never-ending process. Each of them has its own characteristics and usefulness. In fact, one main concern is related to the notion of uncertainty; here, the distinction must be made clearly between discontinuity and uncertainty because the notions are not involved in the same way in a sustainable process. Now let us see how in life, birth and death are involved in this framework, and why they are so useful. The “survival of fittest” notion is widely misunderstood. Many scientists wrongly assume its meaning to be that evolution always increases the chances of a species surviving and growing ever stronger in a more sophisticated way, but sometimes a population may become less fit and lead to extinction [NS 07].

Indeed, in nature, any complex system is always a nonlinear dynamic system (NLDS) and comprises positive feedback loops as well as negative ones. This means that equilibriums are difficult to achieve and may converge, according to very sensitive conditions, either toward an attractor increasing the fitness of a species or toward a speciation including a major deviance which will be fatal when the environment changes. As for the structuring ...