Sometimes I wonder if I don’t know a certain word, a certain word which, had I known it, would save me from describing something in a bizarre way. Natural selection, in essence, is a process by which candidates compete, and the environment (for some reason) favours a subset of those candidates over the rest. It’s most famous within the context of biological evolution: living things have offspring with marginally different genes, and over time some of those genes prove better than others while the less favourable genes die out. Why don’t we talk about this process outside of the context of life on earth, or do we, but using a word I’ve never heard? Perhaps the word I’m looking for is a mathematical one.
For example, the planets in our solar system are all different, and presumably they’re not created equal: some (in the long run) will persist for a longer time than others. This environment might favour proximity to the sun, in which case it’s night-night for Neptune, or size, in which case Mercury would be the first to go. Not everything can live on forever, but some things survive for longer than others: ideas, fashions, species, planets, solar systems, stories, spoons, sibilance… Even if it’s only lifeforms on earth that can really feel the competition against others, the framework of Darwinian selection — preferences from an environment shaping its inhabitants — is likely to be useful in everything.