Competition for resources is only the first step towards understanding competition. The second, which can be easily seen, is collaboration, which is a positive form of competition. Again it’s obvious that it is recommendable for distant relations to collaborate. For example, small fish clean the teeth of sharks or little birds clean the ticks from rhinos, and both collaborative partners are happy. It is easy to understand these examples, but associations can also be more difficult to understand. We do not understand how people collaborate with viruses, because half of our genetic material contains them. And this same evolution began to develop rapidly only before some 650 million years, when a virus attack began in the genomes of our collective forefathers. Here it is not always possible to establish when collaboration is occurring, and when it is an infection. Competition is not just struggle, it also manifests itself as friendship.
Nevertheless competition for well-being, simply for food, has a subordinate role in nature. What advantage does this have, if you have no children. The right to leave behind successors is the strongest driving force in natural competition. If you don’t have successors, then you are out of the competitive struggle.
To be successful in competition, you have to choose your strategy. Should you compete for a place where many want to bask at once, or look for a less populated corner? This is also a topical question for science. The research priority for every country is currently information communications technology and biotechnology. Nanotechnology is recently also a priority, attempts are being made to use tiny structures to replicate natural forms or to make new hybrid structures, where inanimate and live natural elements are harnessed together. For example, DNS is used as a wire, rather than a carrier of genetic information. Biomedicine, which is a subject very close to me, is already overcrowded. All sorts of big stags and wolves are in the fray, butting, ripping with their teeth. In this environment a small dormouse – a Latvian scientist – has few opportunities: he’ll be trodden into the ground immediately. All right – if he was like a little bird to a hippo, which picked off the ticks, then he would still be accepted. But, if you wish to be individually significant and self-confident, then you have to search for a place that has not been yet found by others. Some deepwater geyser, a hot spring, even a pool in a swamp. A place where you can be unique. Just like in nature, all sorts of strange creatures live in places where we don’t even see their brilliance, but we can’t do without them.
Would the world be poorer without Latvian art or science? No, it wouldn’t be! But at the same time each small blue flower in the field is unique and necessary, it hides unknown possibilities. When all the dinosaurs die out, then the small rat crawls out of the undergrowth and takes over the world. Competition is positive in the sense that it encourages diversity and doesn’t allow the easy road. It’s not important if the competition is for a place in the food chain or for genetic inheritance or the use of territory.
After Darwin it was considered that evolution was evenly proceeding in a direction unknown to us and also to itself. Nevertheless development or changes don’t really want to occur if there is no push, some cataclysm. More contemporary ideas about evolution can be more precisely described by the so-called theory of punctuated equilibrium. This suggests that there are periods when nothing changes – a time of quiet – which can also be useful in creative self-perpetuation, in terms of occupying territory. And then there is a volcanic explosion or a comet, or a new virus appears which is a result of mutation, which destroys everyone, and competition for the dominant niche begins again. If those commercialised dinosaurs hadn’t become extinct or hadn’t been forced to change into storks, then people would not exist today. Dinosaurs would already have eaten our early ancestors.
The moment of catastrophe in competition is very important, so that every now and then a new field for competition is made available. Forest fires not only have a destructive, but also a creative significance. They clean. In broader terms, war can be seen as a creative stimulus for the development of technology. Armament or growing horns is one of the most characteristic features of competition.
We are talking about competition on an ecological level, but competitions also occur in more refined places. Genes also compete amongst themselves. In what way? They try to gag each other. We know that in most cases genes are inherited both from the father’s and mother’s side. Each parent contributes one gene with the same function (except one sex chromosome). So this means each gene has two copies. Which gene will be active, which one will have speaking rights – this can be observed not only in families, but also in cells. There are special biochemical methylation mechanisms, which slightly modify the structure of genes and force one to remain silent, but the other one to speak. At first there is a creative moment, in which all genes have the same rights and there is the merging of two gametes. It has already been determined who will win at the time of the first division, and whatever follows after this. This is accomplished with the molecular silencing method, where one of the pair of genes has a ‘Do not disturb’ flag hung onto it. How does this happen? I don’t know. This is a question which doesn’t relate to competition, but to what it is that genes are actually doing. Today we are creating genome projects and read primary information in huge volumes, but we still don’t actually understand what these texts mean. It’s the same as reading a novel in a foreign language – some words are familiar, you can sense the plot line, but can’t fully understand it...
Competition should not be individualised. Like in Asia – there you are part of the social group first and foremost. And in terms of competition there is an advantage here, where the most important thing is not your own successor, but the number of successors of your group. But how do you define the boundaries of your community – can this definition be related to not only hippos similar to you, but also to those little birds which pick the ticks, and eventually to computers and robots which help the community? Also robots can be included in this social grouping. There is a large difference between Western and Eastern attitudes to ideas of evolution and competition. In the West, particularly in Protestant countries, the general view is much more egocentric. From the perspective of nature – the group, not the individual, rules in the competitive struggle.
Sacrifice for the greater good is also a manifestation of competition. In nature you can observe moments of self-destruction and self-sacrifice for the greater good. This happens in bacteria, to widen their living space – there is a special mechanism to destroy those of their comrades who do not have special code access. One bacteria who has this code access suddenly begins to manufacture a substance which is not dangerous to the other bacteria who have access, but which destroys the others. At the moment of production of the substance, however, the manufacturing bacteria itself is also destroyed.
Alongside the above-mentioned components of competition (food, successors and territory), there is one more driving force, which is often ignored in biology and other life spheres. I am often annoyed that we pretend not to see that the wish to assert ourselves is a stimulus for battle on many various levels both in nature, not to mention society. Self-assertion is expressed in many different ways, which can be bad for your health, but is useful in the demonstration of status and power. It would be interesting to clarify how bacteria show off – they must have some way. Lets look at deer: bigger antlers means a higher status. In Malaysia there is a type of beetle which has its eyes on stalks. The length of the eye stalks is proportionally similar to the antlers on stags. In competition, the adversary is not killed, but put in its place by the method of comparison: whoever has larger eyes, and the longer eye stalks. Eventually the same thing is achieved as is by battle – just with the mediation of critics.
Text prepared by Sandra Krastiņa and Anna Iltnere