"Life, in a Most Fundamental Sense, is Playful"

The central idea behind Charles Darwin's Theory of Evolution is that it is driven by survival and "chance variation." 

The survival part, and "survival of the fittest" in particular, is the aspect we tend to celebrate in popular culture, such as law-of-the-jungle reality game shows, sporting events, beauty pageants, and all sorts of other winner-take-all competitions. Our economic system is theoretically based upon meritocratic ideals (even as those ideals rarely show up in real life). We joke about handing out so-called "Darwin Awards" for acts of stupidity.

Of course, Darwin wasn't talking about competition, but rather adaptability: organisms that are most successfully adapted to their environment are the ones most likely to survive and reproduce. Adaptability might involve competition, but it more often requires collaboration, cooperation, and coexistence. I mean, without the bacteria living in our gut, for instance, neither we, nor the bacteria survive, not to mention the entire web of life in which all parts are interconnected. As Rachel Carson wrote in her 1962 book Silent Spring, "nothing exits alone."

The part of Darwin's theory that we don't think about as much are the random mutations and what they mean for us. There's nothing fair about mutations. Most of them tend to hurt an individual's chances of survival, but when we step back from considering individuals, we see a kind of trail-and-error process in which each chance variation is tried, and then dropped or retained, depending on whether or not it helps a species adapt to its environment. And our environment, which is likewise the product of this kind of trial-and-error randomness, is constantly changing. A crippling mutation in one circumstance, might be a kind of superpower in another. As the Ancient Greek philosopher Heraclitus is purported to have said, "The only constant is change."

I can't help but think about preschoolers at play in this context. When we permit them to engage life according to their curiosity, we see Darwin's theory, at least metaphorically, in action. Yes, there is sometimes competition, but most of what happens is this kind of trail-and-error process of constant change that characterizes adaptability. Children are drawn to novelty (a "mutation" in their environment). They experiment with it, they taste it, they feel it, they throw it, they wrestle with it, they hide it, they destroy it. We call it play and like with the constant, random, and irrepressible mutations that drive evolution, there is no goal or purpose. It happens because it is in the nature of things for it to happen.

As science writer David Toomey puts it in his book Kingdom of Play: "Play gives us a hint not of the nature of all Nature, but perhaps much of it. Although we can’t say with certainty what play is, we can say what it is like. It is like natural selection. Both play and natural selection are purposeless, ongoing, open-ended, and at any given stage provisional. In the short term, both are wasteful and profligate even to the point of extravagance. Both experiment, producing many outcomes that are useless or detrimental, but producing a few that in time prove beneficial and necessary. Both bring order from disorder, establishing basic patterns that are reshaped and reused, but seldom discarded completely. Both create beauty. Both hold forces of competition and cooperation in a dynamic equilibrium. Both employ deception. And both can operate without a material form . . . To many biologists, the best definition of life is that which evolves by natural selection. Since natural selection shares so many features with play, we may with some justification maintain that life, in a most fundamental sense, is playful."

Or as the late, great novelist Kurt Vonnegut put it, "We are here on this earth to fart around, and don't let anybody tell you different."

It delights me to consider, from this perspective at least, that evolution is just the universe farting around. And it humbles me to consider that when I watch children play, I'm seeing into the center of how nature works.

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Hi, I'm Teacher Tom and this is my podcast! If you're an early childhood educator, parent of preschoolers, or otherwise have young children in your life, I think you'll find my conversations with early childhood experts and thought-leaders (like Lenore!) useful, inspiring, and eye-opening. You might even come away transformed by the ideas and perspectives we share. Please give us a listen. You can find Teacher Tom's Podcast by clicking here or finding us anywhere you download your podcasts.

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