Being the father of twin ten-year-old basketball fans has given me plenty of opportunities to observe the consequences of competition among humans, adults as well as children. When I watch a game with my sons, I can’t help but see that today’s nba players are incomparably better than they were during my childhood 50 years ago. Clearly, unrelenting competition at every level is what has driven those rising standards.
Having devoted much of my career as a biologist to studying competition among animals, I was well prepared for that observation—equally unrelenting competition has driven rising standards throughout the biological world. Modern dominant animals are improvements over those of hundreds of millions of years ago: they can occupy much colder climates, sustain much higher metabolic rates, and run faster.
The ways in which competition operates can be subtle. It’s not always as obvious as one elk goring another or John Stockton elbowing Michael Jordan. I recently had the good fortune to observe a fascinating biological contest in New Guinea. It involved parrots and fruit trees, two groups of species familiar to us but not thought of as fierce combatants. Yet the race between the parrots and the plants has led to both superior parrots and superior plants. I see their battle as a model for all other battles that have driven evolution during the several billion years of life on Earth.
The scene of magical beauty that greeted me in New Guinea hardly suggested a battlefield. My colleague David Bishop and I had set out to survey birds in the uninhabited and unexplored peaks of New Guinea’s Van Rees Mountains. Since there were no people, roads, or trails in the area, the only access was by helicopter. It’s impossible to land a helicopter in tall, dense rain forest, so we were delighted to spot, just a mile below the highest peak, a small area where a landslide had left the ground bare. Our helicopter pilot dropped us off with three New Guinean field assistants—Robert, Peter, and Bennie of the Ketengban tribe—and half a ton of supplies, then waved good-bye, promising to return three weeks later. Surrounded by gorgeous rain forest, birdsongs, clear streams, and clean air, we felt as if we were in heaven.
