The Argument-
Humans are able to use failure to build their own character and skill set. According to David Shenk, "weaknesses are opportunities; failures are wide-open doors" (142). But are humans the only species that can make such use of failures? For many organisms, one failure could mean death. How can failure factor into the evolution of organisms other than humans? For example, if an animal loses a fight and fails to win a mate, can that animal learn from its failure to eventually be able to survive and reproduce, or will that animal inevitably die off? What are some other examples of the impact of failure on evolution? Is failure by means of competition a mechanism for improving individuals during their lifetime or only a mechanism of natural selection that kills off weaker individuals? Furthermore, can failure be looked at as positive on a community scale, such as with a natural disaster allowing for ecological succession? Focus on the biological theme of evolution. Use Chapter 54 in Campbell on Community Ecology regarding competition and ecological succession.
Aaron Zalewski (bitquest@yahoo.com)
Failure is most certainly not only a means for development in humans. Some of the most complex forms of learning in animals come from learning from failure. One form of complex animal behavior, operant conditioning, is learned through failure. Animals can learn from failure and not repeat the same mistakes. For example, a mouse that eats a non-edible caterpillar and fails to get food can learn from that experience and avoid similar caterpillars in the future (Campbell 1127). B.F. Skinner was another scientist that showed that rats could also learn through failure in lab tests where the rats were challenged to find food. Learning from these failures has everything to do with evolution, for if an organism doesn’t die from failure, then it will most likely teach its offspring to avoid making similar mistakes. As the offspring develop, it will soon become instinct to avoid things that past ancestors failed from.
ReplyDeleteFailure also has huge impacts (outside of just killing off weaker individuals) on a community scale. Resource partitioning and character displacement are both examples of how failure can lead to an organism changing to adapt to the failure experienced. In the example of resource partitioning, if one organism fails to live in its ecological niche because another organism has the same niche, then the animal that was displaced can learn from failure. Instead of continually trying to live in the same niche, it can find a new realized niche by learning from its failure and become developed at living in that new niche. If an organism becomes particularly good at living in its realized niche, it might soon develop new characteristics to help it thrive even more in that new niche. For example, because G. fortis failed to compete with G. fuliginosa for seeds, it has developed a larger beak in order to be able to pick up larger seeds (Campbell 1200). Failure ended up helping its long-term survival.
Brad Tiller (brad.tiller@comcast.net)
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DeleteWhen Shenk says that “failures are wide-open doors,” he refers specifically to the remarkable plasticity of the human brain – a plasticity incredibly rare and extremely developed. Therefore, it becomes difficult to apply the human mechanism for learning and developing from failure to other organisms with less developed intelligence. Some comparisons do not quite match up, but there certainly are parallels between humans and animals in terms of using failure as a tool.
ReplyDeleteAs Brad mentioned, one example of how animals learn from failure can be seen in operant conditioning, or trial and error learning. But can an animal that learns to avoid toxic prey due to failure in the past be compared to a human who analyzes his or her failure in order to progress further towards a goal? Speaking strictly in terms of operant conditioning, it seems that for animals, failures represent the “closing of doors” (to put it in Shenk terms) because when an animal fails it merely learns to avoid that incident in the future. In other words, using operant conditioning as an example of learning from failure represents one of the most basic forms of experience. This experience seems to stem from association between behavior and consequence. As theorized by Edward Thorndike, the law of effect states that animals will tend to repeat behaviors they know have typically produced positive or beneficial results and will tend to avoid behaviors they know have negative consequences (this is the failure) (https://new.edu/resources/changing-behavior-through-reinforcement-and-punishment-operant-conditioning). Thus, operant conditioning provides a small but feasible relation between humans and animals due to the notion of experience involved, but does not quite work completely.
On another level, as Brad pointed out, failure ultimately drives evolution because those who “fail” at survival amongst competitors will die out, thereby leaving only those who have the genetics and traits necessary for success. But using failure in this sense also does not give us the kind of comparison we are looking for in relation to what Shenk describes as using failure as opportunity. Failure in the evolutionary sense does not work organism by organism, but rather across spans of generations. An organism that fails to survive does not learn or develop, but rather dies out and eliminates its unfavorable genes from the population. Failure here can only be attributed to acts of survival, whereas Shenk refers to failure in relation to acts of “genius” (skill-related).
The most relevant connection we can make between the human ability to learn from failure and that of an animal seems to the art of problem solving, or “the cognitive activity of devising a method to proceed from one state to another in the face of real or apparent obstacles” (Campbell 1128). Problem solving almost always starts when the organism (even a human) is confronted with failure. A basketball player who fails at a particular area of the game is presented with a problem that he or she must devise a way to correct. By learning how to resolve the issue of the inept skill, the player has gained the experience of how to tackle similar problems in the future. This is akin to the study of ravens discussed in Campbell; multiple ravens were confronted with the challenge of grabbing food off of a branch hanging by a string (they tried to grab the food in flight but failed to do so because of the string) (Campbell 1128). Whereas some successfully solved the problem by pulling up on the string, others could not accomplish this task, which suggests that those ravens that succeeded had learned from previous similar experiences – from similar failures through which they had to devise methods in order to resolve. Because other animals have an intelligence highly comparable to that of ravens, the cognitive ability of problem solving must be evident in those organisms as well. Therefore, animals do indeed have the ability to use failure as opportunity in much the same way that humans do.
Mark Zhang (mzhang59@gmail.com)