Odd conversations emerge when you’re doing tedious benchwork. You crave conversation to break the tedium, but you try not to dive too deep lest you lose track of what you’re working on. Despite your best efforts, some conversations undermine your best intentions.
In this spirit, we were discussing differences in languages across countries. Spain to Mexico, England to the United States, that sort of thing. My colleague stated that modern British English is the pure form of English and that American English is the changed form of the language. I thought this was an interesting take, but noted that British English today is significantly different from British English of 300 years ago. Just as American English today is very different from American English of 300 years ago.
She remained adamant that modern British English is still the pure form.
Neither of us had any real right to debate the veracity of our points, but nevertheless, we both persisted. I thought that surely we could find common ground through biology. I turned to Darwin for help and proposed that both modern dialects descended from a common ancestor. To my mind, this meant that both were equally altered by the forces of time in the interim.
When she cried out, “Exactly!” I thought victory was mine. But then she followed with, “British English is the original and American English is the changed version.”
At this point, I was at a complete loss. I could think of nothing else to say. Not because the point was settled, but because I didn’t even know where to begin. We returned to our benchwork, but the awareness lingered. I’ve heard variations of this misunderstanding countless times since.
For example, when people claim cockroaches are “less evolved” because they first appeared as a species a long time ago. Or when someone suggests that Homo sapiens were “more evolved” than Neanderthals because we survived and they didn’t. The underlying assumption is always the same: evolution is a hierarchy in which older equals less developed, newer equals more advanced, and survivors are superior.
But that would be like saying Polaroid cameras are outdated products with no market viability. An obviously wrong statement, given the enduring popularity of Polaroids despite the advent of digital cameras and smartphones. The camera didn’t fail because it was old. It didn’t succeed because it was new. The success of Polaroid cameras depends on the demands of the consumer market at any given moment.
The business world understands this clearly and calls it product-market fit. It’s also a very useful metaphor for understanding evolution by natural selection.
Product Success Depends on Market Fit
When a company releases a product, its success depends almost entirely on the context of the market. Does the product solve a problem that people will pay to have solved? Is the solution better than existing alternatives? Can people access it when they need it? These questions all point to the same fundamental principle: success is about matching context.
Product-market fit describes this relationship. A product achieves fit when it successfully addresses market demand in a way that’s accessible, preferable to alternatives, and at a price customers are willing to pay. What makes product-market fit particularly instructive is how dynamic it is. A product wildly successful today can become irrelevant tomorrow, not because the product changed, but because the context did.
Let’s take a familiar example: Blockbuster. Please note that everything I say about Blockbuster is said with fondness - my husband still has his Blockbuster card.
For decades, Blockbuster dominated because it matched the market context perfectly: people wanted entertainment at home, VHS and DVD players were ubiquitous, and driving to a store was the most convenient access point available. In this context, it was a brilliant product. That changed as broadband internet became widespread, enabling streaming technology to emerge and then mature from pixelated noise to high-definition video. Suddenly, the same product was catastrophically mismatched to market desires. Blockbuster didn’t become a worse product; the context changed.
Some products thrive in narrow contexts. Electronic health record systems, like Epic, are built to serve complex compliance needs. As a product, it is optimized for the specific context of healthcare and is not well-suited for other data management needs.
Other products succeed across remarkably diverse contexts. Microsoft Excel works for financial analysts, wedding planners, data scientists, and small business owners. It’s the cockroach of software; it can survive nearly anywhere and is seemingly impossible to kill off.
It’s a strategic choice for each product to specialize or be versatile, and making the right choice depends on understanding your context. Specialized products often dominate their niche because they’re precisely tuned to specific needs. But if that context shifts, they’re vulnerable. Generalist products sacrifice peak performance in any single context for the ability to remain relevant as contexts change. Neither strategy is inherently superior.
What separates enduring products from failed ones isn’t age or novelty. It’s whether they continue matching their context. Products that last for decades either serve remarkably stable needs or they evolve continuously to match changing markets. Photoshop has survived since 1987 not because digital image editing is unchanged, but because Adobe has relentlessly adapted the product to match evolving professional needs, file formats, computing capabilities, and user expectations.
The real insight is this: a product released long ago and still successful today isn’t succeeding because it’s old. It’s succeeding because it remains one of the best available solutions. The context either stayed stable enough, or the product changed enough, to maintain fit. Age is irrelevant; context is everything.
Species Success Depends on Environmental Fit
Evolution by natural selection operates on similar principles. The success of a species depends on the context of its ecosystem. As market changes drive product adaptation, environmental changes drive biological adaptation. The organisms that thrive are those best suited to their current context, regardless of how long they have been around.
The introduction of the cane toad to Australia is illustrative of the impact of context. Cane toads are native to Central and South America, but were introduced to Australia in 1935 to control beetles that were destroying sugarcane crops. In their native habitat, cane toads are just another species competing with predators, parasites, and diseases that keep their population in check. But in Australia, the context was radically different.
Australia’s native predators had never encountered animals with the cane toad’s toxic skin secretions, and the native parasites weren’t adapted to cane toad biology. The toads found themselves in an ecosystem where their existing traits, unremarkable in their native context, became overwhelming advantages. The population exploded across the Australian continent not because they evolved into something new or superior, but because the Australian context made their existing traits extraordinarily effective.
This dynamic appears across every ecosystem. Arctic foxes with white winter coats perfectly match snowy landscapes, making them nearly invisible to both prey and predators. But put that same arctic fox in a forest, and that brilliant white coat becomes a liability. The reverse is true for the red fox that thrives in the forest.
There is no Hierarchy of Evolution
Just as products can be general or specialized in their market strategy, you can also think of species as being generalists or specialists in their survival strategies.
On this axis, polar bears are extreme specialists. Their entire hunting strategy revolves around sea ice: waiting at breathing holes for seals, traversing frozen ocean to reach hunting grounds, and timing hunts with seasonal ice formation. Polar bears are the Epic of the Arctic: brilliantly optimized for their specific niche.
But just as Epic could be vulnerable to large regulatory changes in healthcare, polar bears’ position as the apex predator is vulnerable to climate change. Later freezes and earlier thaws shorten the hunting season for polar bears, and survival becomes harder. They’re exquisitely adapted to a context that’s shifting beneath them.
Contrast this to generalist masters like rats and pigeons. Both have expertly navigated the transition to urban ecosystems. Rats eat almost anything and adjust their behavior rapidly to human patterns. Pigeons, evolved as cliff-dwellers, now thrive on the precipices of buildings. Their generalist traits didn’t just let them adapt to cities, but also across different climates with different activity patterns and different food sources. They’re the Excel of urban wildlife.
Neither strategy is more evolved. Both represent successful context-matching under different circumstances. Specialists dominate stable contexts through optimization. Generalists survive variable contexts through flexibility. When context shifts, specialists either adapt rapidly or decline. Generalists often weather changes more easily but rarely dominate any single niche the way specialists do.
This reveals the fundamental misconception about evolution. There is no hierarchy of more or less evolved. A cockroach that first appeared 300 million years ago and still thrives today isn’t “less evolved” than humans. The cockroach’s body plan, behavior, and resilience to environmental toxins work brilliantly in the contexts where cockroaches live, and it successfully evolved to match modern contexts. That’s what evolutionary fitness means: matching the context well enough to survive and reproduce.
Species that existed long ago and persist today, like cockroaches, have successfully adapted to the environmental shifts across millennia. The horseshoe crab has maintained a similar body plan for 450 million years, not because it stopped evolving, but because those traits continue to enable its survival.
When a predator develops a new hunting strategy, the prey population shifts toward traits that counter that strategy. Faster prey survive better when predators get faster. Camouflaged prey survive better when predators improve at detecting movement. Sometimes the prey cannot adapt fast enough - as in the case of the passenger pigeon, when it became the object of human sporting obsession.
In evolution, there is no progress toward some ideal form. It’s continuous context-matching as the context itself keeps changing.
The vast majority of all species that have ever existed are extinct. Some appeared a long time ago, some more recently. Some survived for a long time, others for less. In all cases, they went extinct not because they were old, but because they couldn’t adapt when the context changed.
Clarifying Biology in Day-to-Day Life
Coming back to British English and American English, the point I had hoped to make to my colleague is that both modern dialects are different than the form of English spoken when the Pilgrims came to the United States. British English changed to match the context of British society, influences, class distinctions, and cultural shifts. American English changed to match American contexts, immigrant influences, geographic separation, and social patterns. Neither dialect remains unchanged from when they diverged hundreds of years ago. Both are products of continuous context-matching.
Understanding evolution by natural selection as context-matching instead of progress impacts your daily life. When you read about antibiotic resistance, bacteria aren’t ‘outsmarting’ antibiotics. It’s the natural result of bacteria surviving when their context changes due to antibiotics entering their environment.
Similarly, invasive species aren’t strategizing to take over ecosystems. They’re species whose existing traits happen to thrive in the new environment, where predators haven’t evolved to contain them.
When you consider your family’s health history, most genetic traits aren’t good or bad in absolute terms. They’re matched or mismatched to your specific context: your environment, your lifestyle, your circumstances.
The question is not “which is more advanced?” but rather “what context does this match?” Instead of equating age to obsolescence or novelty to superiority, you evaluate fit. This clarity is essential for sorting through conflicting health advice, understanding medical information, or making decisions that involve biological systems. Understanding context lets you cut through the noise to focus on the information that is important to you in that moment.
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