Afterthought

Continuing to think about the notches in karabiners of the last post, I went back to the book by Levi, noticed most recently at reference 1.

He talks of the conservatism of the manufacturers of chemicals. They have a recipe X for chemical Y which has worked for years and years. No-one understands the recipe any more, but they don't change it. Don't mend what ain't broke.

But this sometimes means that the recipe might include something which is no longer needed, possibly even harmful. Perhaps years and years ago some small quantity of chemical P was added to the brew to mitigate the unfortunate effects of the poor quality of chemical Q, all that was available at the time. Then, after a while, the people making chemical Q get their act together, by which time the people using chemical P had forgotten the connection. So P gets left in, for ever and ever.

I imagine that evolution might work in much the same way. Some genetic chance, some mutation results in some feature F which improves the fitness of the host animal. But then, millions of years later, another chance results in some new feature G which makes F redundant. But F might hang around, perhaps in some reduced or vestigial form, for some more millions of years. Perhaps my notch is such a feature?

Reference 1: http://psmv3.blogspot.co.uk/2017/12/levi.html.