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Nature Wins by Wasting
Everything Nature is not efficient.
That’s the first insult. The second is worse: it doesn’t care. We like to imagine a
lean, optimized universe—clean lines, minimal loss, purpose baked into every
atom. Instead, what you get is a drunken factory running at infinite scale,
dumping prototypes into a void and keeping whatever doesn’t immediately
break. Seeds? Millions—most rot. And we still talk about
“design.” The trick is brutal and
simple: throughput beats
perfection. Nature doesn’t solve
problems; it floods them. Variation in, selection out. No sentiment, no
refunds. If something works for a minute longer than its neighbours, it gets
called “fit.” If it lasts a geological blink, we call it “successful.” That’s
the bar. Even your finest ideas
follow the same conveyor belt. Philosophies, religions, nations—launched with
fanfare, quietly scrapped. The ones that survive don’t do so because they’re
true; they replicate well under
current constraints. Change the constraints,
watch the truths expire. And you? You’re not the
exception. You’re a high-cost test run with a decent error-correction loop.
You feel special because the system installed a narrator in your head. It’s a
useful feature—keeps you moving, mating, defending.
Call it “meaning” if that helps you sleep. Here’s the punchline:
waste isn’t a bug. It’s the method. The only way to cover an unknowable
search space is to burn through possibilities at scale. Efficiency would
stall the process; extravagance drives it. So yes—nature wins by
wasting everything. Not because it’s cruel, but because it’s the only
strategy that doesn’t pretend to know the answer in advance. Local contradiction, Global resolution |