The original story was found at Discovery News and was dated 25 August 2010. So this is another older bit of news.
It was BBC that originally posited the idea that competition might not be the driving force in evolution. It’s suggested instead that spaces, and exploiting those spaces better is the source of evolutionary change. Which makes sense, when you start to consider the major evolutionary changes that created the various shifts in evolutionary direction.
For example, the lines of smaller dinosaur species developed into birds. This shifted their environment from being land bound to being dominantly airborne, and while changes in the available food were killing the larger dinosaurs, these smaller and more inventive species continued to evolve and exploit new environmental niches. The same thing (and nearly the same bit of geologic time) caused the rise of mammals. Large dinosaurs couldn’t be supported anymore, giving small animals in smaller ecosystems a chance to thrive. and then eventually evolve larger to exploit the recovering and now abandoned former environments of the dinosaurs.
Darwin was being called “wrong” at the time the article was put out by many, many sources. Including sources not prone to freaking out and overstating things. But I personally don’t think that Darwin was wrong. I think that he was the first step in an evolving part of science. And if there’s one thing I understand well about science it’s the fact that one idea leads to another. and that newest idea might show that the previous idea was not as true as we once thought it to be. But, this change in point of view, this change in available facts, does not change the contribution to science of the original idea. However right or wrong it might have been.
