Mainly, life is about play – just have a look at the animal world

At Cambridge University LibraryBesides all of the books, maps and manuscripts, there’s a baby’s drawing that the curators described as “The battle of the fruit and vegetable soldiers.”

The drawing shows a cavalry soldier with a turban fighting against an English dragoon. It's a bit crazy: the British soldier is sitting astride a carrot and the turbaned soldier is riding a bunch of grapes. Both the carrot and the grape are decorated with horse heads and stick appendages.

It is believed to be the work of Francis Darwin, the seventh child of The British naturalist Charles Darwin and his wife Emma and appears to have been painted in 1857 when Frank was 10 or 11 years old. And it’s on the back of a page of a draft of “On the origin of species”, Darwin’s masterpiece and the foundational text of evolutionary biology. The few sheets of the draft that also survive are pages that Darwin gave to his children as drawing paper.

Darwin’s biographers have long recognized that play in his personal and Family life. The Georgian style mansion where he and Emma raised their 10 children, featured a rope swing suspended over the primary floor landing and a conveyable picket slide that may very well be placed over the predominant staircase. The gardens and surrounding landscape served as an out of doors laboratory and playground.

Play also plays a task in Darwin's theory of natural selection. As I explain in my latest book:Kingdom of the GameIn his book “What Ball-Bouncing Octopuses, Belly-Splashing Monkeys, and Mud-Sliding Elephants Reveal About Life Itself,” there are lots of similarities—so many who if the processes of natural selection may very well be reduced to a single behavior, that behavior could be play.

No goal, no direction

Natural selection is the method by which organisms best adapted to their environment usually tend to survive and thus to pass on to their offspring the traits that helped them thrive. It is non-directional: In Darwin's words: “incorporates no vital and universal law of progress or development.”

Unlike foraging and hunting – behaviors with clearly defined goals – play can be undirected. When a pony frolics in a meadow, a dog wrestles with a stick, or chimpanzees chase one another, they act with out a goal.

Natural selection is entirely provisional: the evolution of any organism responds to the conditions prevailing in a specific place and at a specific time. Animals at play are also provisional. They always adapt their movements to changing circumstances. Playing squirrels change their tactics and routes when faced with obstacles corresponding to falling branches or other squirrels.

Natural selection has no end. Life forms will not be fixed but are always evolving. Play also has no end. Animals start a play session without planning when they are going to end it. For example, two dogs which might be playfully fighting won’t stop playing until one in all them is injured, exhausted or just loses interest.

Natural selection can be wasteful, as Darwin acknowledged.”Many more individuals of every species are born than can survive,” he wrote. But in the long term, he acknowledged, such waste can produce adaptations that allow an evolutionary line to develop into “fitter.”

Play can be wasteful. It requires animals to expend time and energy that would perhaps be higher spent on survival-critical behaviors corresponding to foraging and hunting.

And this extravagance has its benefits. Animals forage and hunt in certain ways in which don't often change. But a playful animal is way more prone to innovate – and a few of its innovations could be converted over time into latest ways of foraging and hunting.

Compete and cooperate

Darwin's first description of the “struggle for life” was largely a contest. But within the 1860s The Russian naturalist Pyotr Kropotkin Observations of birds and fallow deer led him to the conclusion that many species “essentially the most quite a few and wealthiest“, because natural selection also chooses cooperation.

Scientists confirmed Kroptokin's hypothesis within the twentieth century and discovered every kind of cooperation, not only between members of the identical species, but in addition between members of various species. For example, clownfish are resistant to anemone stings; they nest in anemone tentacles for defense and in return hold the anemones freed from parasites, provide nutrients and repel predators.

Play involves each competition and cooperation. Two dogs which might be playfully fighting are competing with one another, but to take care of their play they have to work together. They often switch roles: a dog that’s in a greater position may suddenly hand over that advantage and roll onto his back. If one in all them bites harder than intended, he’ll likely back away and do a play bow – essentially saying, “My bad. I hope we can keep playing.”

Natural selection and play can each involve deception. From butterflies coloured to resemble poisonous species to wild cats that squeal like desperate baby monkeysMany organisms use mimicry to deceive their prey, predators and rivals. Play – especially playful fighting – also provides animals with the chance to learn and practice deception.

Life is about playing

Darwin wrote that natural selection “infinite forms, the most beautiful and wonderful.” Play also creates beauty in countless ways, from the aerial acrobatics of Birds of Prey to the arched, twisting jumps of the dolphins.

In 1973 The Ukrainian-American geneticist Theodosius Dobzhansky published an essay with the uncompromising title “Nothing in biology is smart except in the sunshine of evolution.” Many biologists would agree. Perhaps essentially the most satisfactory definition of life just isn’t concerned with what it’s, but with what it does – that’s, life is that which evolves through natural selection.

And since natural selection has a lot in common with play, we are able to reasonably say that life is playful in essentially the most basic sense.