Typical examples used for r-selection are dandelions and for K-selection – elephants. Both are viable strategies, depending on the environment. The K-selection is a carrying capacity strategy: stay alive as long as possible, learn and teach my (usually very few) offsprings the necessary tricks to thrive. The r-selection is a strategy that’s focused on reproduction: make copies of my kind as quickly as possible, and mutate generation to generation. If we observe various organisms, the theory goes that all fall somewhere in the spectrum between r-selection and K-selection.
To set the stage, I am going to do a very brief detour into biology (I am not a biologist, so will definitely make a mess of it) and use the r/K-selection lens to guide this story.
I’ve been thinking about the different conditions under which innovation emerges, and how the environment influences the kind of innovation that happens.
