We miss the point if we think that we have evolved by the one-way process of adapting to the environment, by ‘survival of the fittest’ in ‘the jungle out there.’ The truth is that the organisms who compose the jungle have co-evolved in a continuous dance where each helps to constitute an ecological niche for others. ‘Without the color-coding of the flowers, the color vision of the insects would not have evolved, and vice versa’ (Dennett 1991, 377). To be ‘fit’ (and thus to survive and reproduce) is to fit one’s niche. In the one nature there is room for many interpenetrating niches.
Co-evolution is Thich Nhat Hanh’s concept of ‘interbeing’ mapped onto evolutionary biology. The process of adaptation is itself mapped, or represented graphically, as a ‘fitness landscape’ depicted in terms of ‘mountains’: that is, ‘up’ is the direction of greater fitness. This of course is arbitrary, and Murray Gell-Mann (1994) reverses the directionality in his diagram so that the ‘lowest’ or ‘deepest’ level is the plane of greatest fitness for the organism. For one thing, this magically rids the adaptive process of the feeling of struggle, epitomizing the view of Lao Tzu that ‘Highest good is like water.’ D.S. Wilson (2002) offers an account of the Balinese water temples that illustrates such an approach to cultural evolution.