Play is How We Survive

There are some who say that if there are humans in the distant future, we'll have to exist without our cute little pinky toes. The rest of our toes still play a role in balance and movement, but the one that goes "wee wee wee all the way home" isn't a significant part of that. Combine this with an increasingly sedentary lifestyle that is making balance and movement less and less important to survival, and it's so long little toe.

Not every evolutionary scientist predicts this, but it makes sense because that's the way Darwinism works: those aspects of a species that help it survive tend to continue to be reproduced in future generations, and those that don't, don't.

There are those who don't "believe" in evolution, but farmers have been taking advantage of the principles of evolution since the beginning of farming, long before Darwin. The difference is that instead of it being "natural selection" in charge, it's we ourselves who pick "survivors" based on what we perceive to be desirable traits. There was a time before crops were cultivated, when most wheat grass plants produced a single head with, at most, a handful of berries (kernels). Under human farming, the typical wheat plant grows five heads containing 22 berries per head. Humans made that happen.

Our farm animals have also undergone a similar process of "human selection." Breeding practices have brought us meeker, meatier cows, and chickens that produce larger quantities of eggs. 

So whether or not one believes in evolution, the process postulated by Darwin does happen, virtually right before our eyes.  

Indeed, we're even trying to steer our own evolution. When we choose our mates, we are choosing for the survival of certain traits. Eugenics movements sprang up as a direct result of Darwin's theory, as racists sought to "perfect" our species through "unnatural selection." Today, there are high IQ sperm banks, artificial selection, IVF, and even genetic modification to "select" for preferred traits, like good health or blue eyes.

From one perspective, our dabbling could well be viewed as a kind of Tower of Babel cautionary tale, in which humans have displeased the gods with our ambition and pride. Some of this sounds like a horror movie. Some of it is a godsend. And much of it, seems, well, normal.

We have been steering our own evolution, one way or another, through the choices we make for much of our human existence. Even the plants and animals we modify, in turn modify us.

The theory of "organic evolution" suggests that one of the primary ways steer our own evolution is through play. Through the exercise of free will, the theory goes, which is to say through play, animals, including humans, discover adaptive behaviors that are then adopted by others. I think of this as "viral learning." 

A family once donated several boxes of intravenous fluid bags. I left a box of them near our playground cast iron water pump for several days. The children had no idea what they were, of course, but one day, a boy tried filling one with water. This then went viral as child after child filled bags. Not long after this, another child discovered that under certain circumstances, the water would shoot out of the nozzle attached to the bags. Then, over several days, through trial and error, they figured out that it only worked when you held the bag higher than the nozzle, a discovery that was soon common knowledge. 

Will knowing how IV fluid bags work help these children survive? I don't know. Obviously, the specific skill may not be widely applicable, but understanding how fluid works, how gravity works, how learning from others works, definitely is. That a clutch of children in a single preschool figured this out may not directly impact their ability to procreate, and they won't pass these behaviors along through their genes. But as these children go out into the world, the behaviors they learned through this process may very well come into play.

The theory of "organic evolution" holds that we evolved to play, at least in part, in order to adaptively steer our own evolution. And like with Darwinian evolution, not all the "mutations" prove fruitful, but the ones that do, survive by helping us survive. In all likelihood, the children's viral learning around IV fluid bags will be forgotten by time, but it's also possible that scientists 40,000 years from now will look back on this moment as a turning point in our evolution, like the advent of the opposable thumb or the development of language. It seems doubtful, but you never know. Evolution is a long game.

And it's not just Homo sapiens. Other mammals play as well. As do birds and reptiles. There is even evidence that invertebrates, like snails, engage in play behaviors. In her book Braiding Sweetgrass, Robin Wall Kimmerer cites evidence that might suggest that even plants play. Forest scientist Peter Wohlleben makes similar claims in his book The Hidden Life of Trees. It wouldn't at all surprise me at all if we one day conclude that play is as essential to our definition of life as reproduction and respiration. 

Play has a reputation for being frivolous in that it has no obvious purpose other than, perhaps physical exercise. According to this theory of "organic evolution," however, play is central to our species' evolution. It's how we came up with such essential human survival behaviors as dance, music, art, engineering, math, literacy, and even animal husbandry. Play is how we've evolved to discover new things, how we learn, and, ultimately, how we survive.

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I've been writing about play-based learning almost every day for the past 15 years. I've recently gone back through the 4000+ blog posts(!) I've written since 2009. Here are my 10 favorite in a nifty free download. Click here to get yours.

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