I would drop this little diversion, Steve, but it leads us into an important alley in evolution world, so I will pursue it just a little further. It is not a matter of whether we are feeling or unfeeling about whether an individual survives, it is that the number of offspring directly alters the non uniform distribution of genes we agree is important. Now, at one extreme we have say grasses or locusts. Here instead of the pool containing a million copies of the gene it contains a million and one. whoopie! Yes, the distribution has altered, but a level that is for all practical purposes undetectable. But now let's go to the other extreme, such as tigers. Here there are so few individuals that the gene pool for tigers is tiny: an invidual gene might only have a handful of copies so every new instance is a very large change in the distribution.


And this is where we get to the new alleyway. There may only be say ten copies of that gene in the tiger genetic pool. But there may be millions of the same gene in, say, the domestic cat. So we need to make clear that the survival of the gene and the survival of the species are not as closely linked as one might at first think.