<photos: final push to the summit of Mount Kinabalu, 8 October 2016>
natural selection is the "process by which forms of life having traits that better enable them to adapt to specific environmental pressures, as predators, changes in climate, or competition for food or mates, will tend to survive and reproduce in greater numbers than others of their kind, thus ensuring the perpetuation of those favorable traits in succeeding generations."
also known as "survival of the fittest" or "slowly but surely", natural selection was conceived by Charles Darwin and elaborated in Darwin's influential 1859 book "On the Origin of Species". The amazing features of today's plants and animals took millions of years to evolve, going through small and simple changes that appear complex in aggregation.
reaching the summit of a mountain is by no means accidental. it is through a similar process of "slowly but surely" beginning with training months before, being focused during the actual climb, and sheer willpower during the final push to the summit. each of these steps add up to reach the peak. #bcc #alwaysbelieve
"It may be said that natural selection is daily and hourly scrutinising, throughout the world, every variation, even the slightest; rejecting that which is bad, preserving and adding up all that is good; silently and insensibly working, whenever and wherever opportunity offers, at the improvement of each organic being in relation to its organic and in organic conditions of life. We see nothing of these slow changes in progress, until the hand of time has marked the long lapse of ages, and then so imperfect is our view into long-past geological ages, that we only see that the forms of life are now different from what they formerly were." Charles Darwin, On the Origin of Species