Most peoples understanding of evolution in capitalist countries, unfortunately, is quite Victorian in nature. Particularly when it comes to survival of the fittest.
We are taught very vague notions of the strong winning and the weak losing in some grand death match, that evolution is a dog eat dog, every man for himself type affair. That superior and inferior are objective and that evolution is the culling of the inferior towards some sort of goal of the perfect being.
Most egregiously, we are taught that this is the case with individuals within a single species. It shouldn't take much thinking to understand why that is a terrible survival strategy even for the most brutal predator, as if wolves and pirhana would suddenly be more efficient survivors if they ate one another instead of working together.
And yet we in capitalist societies will often make assumptions based on outdated and pseudoscientific, even fascist, ideals of superior and inferior. In media, the fascist societies are often portrayed as evil, yes, but almost never as being impractical. Fascism, social Darwinism, whatever you want to call it. It is evil, sure, but it also doesn't work because it is based on a flawed understanding of reality in the first place. That is something I almost never see discussed in history education or in media.
Which brings us to our little herbivore I mentioned in the title. That dorky little pig lizard is called a Lystrosaurus. He doesn't look much, and he's not particularly strong or smart. He doesn't have any real unique talents aside from being decent at burrowing. He's not even a dinosaur, despite the saurus suffix (it just means lizard) he's a protomammal from before dinosaurs even existed, during the Permian period. This was an age of primitive reptiles and protomammals that weren't quite lizard, weren't quite mammal.
252 million years ago, at the end of the Permian period, Earth underwent the worst extinction event in it's known history, the Permian–Triassic extinction event and it was much worse than the exctintion even that ended large non-avian dinosaurs 65-66 million years ago. This extinction event was so severe that it is referred to as The Great Dying. Exact causes are not certain, however the scientific consensus seems to be that massive eruptions started a chain reaction that unleashed a lot of greenhouse gasses, causing a sulphur poisoning and oxygen depletion. 90% of Earths species became extinct. It was also the only known extinction event to significantly impact insect diversity, with 9 entire orders (yes orders, not species) becoming extinct.
It took 5 million years for Earth to recover.
Big, strong, brutal and cunning saber-toothed gorgonopsids and other giant predatory animals? All gone.
But our little tunnel digging, vegetable eating lystrosaurus? It not only survived, but it ended up representing 90% of land fauna after the extinction.
Why? No one really knows, some say grouping behavior, or that carbon dioxide tolerance was high because it lived in burrows. But one thing is for certain, it wasn't because it was it was the perfect evolutionary machine winning in the marketplace of life. It just happened to be a silly little guy that liked digging holes.
Anyway I hope this rant was readable, I am very sleepy.
