
A bit of history on this term.
Lately, I’ve been binge watching YouTube videos of terrestrial animals hunting, catching, and eating other animals. “Lions and Tigers and Bears, Oh My!” h/t “The Wizard of Oz” (1939). I am starting to understand humans. Nature is metal, as has been noted oft ere.
If you enjoy horror movies (I don’t), try watching high resolution videos of insects hunting, catching, and eating their prey. We see similar “competition” throughout the biological taxonomy. Even the word competition belies the reality of the situation. Behaviours of life forms include brutal and murderous competition. Even so, survival is ephemeral for biological life.
Think about nature from different perspectives at scales changing 10x at a time. It’s fun to zoom in or out in your mind over some 60 thoretically known orders of magnitude. Imagine the grand cycles of matter-energy, including spacetime aether. Nature at scale is truly fantastical theatre.
The tree of life consists of three domains: Archaea, Bacteria, and Eukarya.
Wikipedia
We can imagine a virtual Petri dish for every observational domain in the universe at any scale bounded by a an absolute volume and interval. What do we observe? We observe what is created and how long it lives or lasts. This behaviour spans the inanimate and the animate. When concepts span domains it is often wise to clarify terminology. What does it mean to survive?

Consider the term “Survival of the fittest.” I find this term to be redundant. I also think the terms fit/fitness/fittest bias the interpretation of the science. Especially in light of defining “the biological concept of fitness […] as reproductive success.” That leads to the conclusion that fitness is ‘whatever happens’ on the passive end of the spectrum to ‘whatever it takes’ on the competitive end. If anything goes, then why do even we need the concept of fitness?

Imagine a perspective on life forms zoomed out to scale 1 = 1,000,000 years. One million years. That is almost nothing according to physicists who imagine a universe that has existed for 13,800 million years. Would you agree that all the electrons, protons, and neutrons in your physical body will have been recycled many times and scattered and scrambled in 1 million years? More than likely most of your particles will remain on planet Earth, which in scale perspective is an insignificant mote in the grand scheme of the universe.
The concepts of emergence and competition are not confined only to biological life forms. What emerges from a supernovae is certainly not biological, yet when we consider the variety and dynamics of the characteristic reactions of supernovae, what emerges is what survives the maelstrom. Note the use of the term ‘survive’ here in a non-biological non-life-directed sense. Is there an overarching term that bridges survival and continuance?
In my research of nature I have realized that the core of every particle is three separate orbitals of positive and negative point charges, at vastly different energy scales. One of many really cool aspects of these structures is that they can shield energy through normal wave cancellation via superposition. These gizmos, which I call Noether cores, are gyroscopic flywheel batteries for all particles (other than dynamical detritus). The three orbital planes change orientation with velocity.
It’s really quite amazing that emergence produces energy shielding behaviour for the core structural element of nature. It turns out that energy shielding and hence the presentation of low apparent energy is what enables Noether cores to survive high energy maelstroms and go forth and become the foundational structure for all other standard model particles. Now that is a narrative! And it makes total sense.
We can imagine the provenance of each and every Noether core in reactions between structures of various energy and resulting in other structures at various energies, all natural laws conserved. At the low apparent energy end of the spectrum like throughout our solar system, the aether structures that implement spacetime nestle together in groups of four (two pro, two anti : akin to He?) and permeate everything. They are like the “air” of spacetime.
Now here is the kicker to tie it back to nature. I said apparent energy. Even in deep space, these little gizmos permeate everything and pass right through high energy structures. Apparent energy. The outer orbital is super low energy and very cold, but it is still shielding the energy of the inner two orbitals. Rougly speaking, it seems that every particle that physicists know of has hundreds to thousands times more shielded energy than apparent energy. That’s really cool. Can we tap that energy and use it to improve well-being and reduce suffering and seed intelligent life beyond our solar system?
In other news, I updated my Wikipedia bio.
J Mark Morris is an individual. Mark’s hobby is mapping the basis of nature, a Euclidean void populated with immutable point charges (electrino and positrino), to the current state of modern physics. Mark’s view is that nature is entirely obvious when considered from this (perhaps) most basic perspective. This conception of nature leads to new narratives, models, and hypothesis in physics and cosmology based upon a fundamental assumption of two equal and opposite, immutable, charged, Planck scale point charges, the electrino and the positrino. The electrino has -1/6 charge, and the positrino has +1/6 charge. You can imagine that there is some natural law that no two point charges may approach closer than a certain natural distance. The ongoing effort is to show that this physical model, called Neoclassical Physics and Quantum Gravity, maps in some reasonable way to existing observations and mathematics. The effort also includes some thought on the history and philosophy of science. Mark is not a scholar of any of these subjects by any means. However, it seems that point charges were discarded prematurely in the latter 1800’s. The history is vague. Circa this era arose the interpretation that there was no aether. This led to Einstein’s geometry of spacetime which imagines that the underlying basis of the universe is actually a void and curvy geometry of both space and time.
Since this is new science, it is not yet widely known, and a consensus has not yet formed. Therefore, I do not modify Wikipedia pages per this new physics/cosmology, per the policy WP:OR against original research. Instead, where appropriate, I plant a flag on a Wikipedia talk page, discussing the implications for the corresponding content page, should the electrino/positrino narrative/model/theory become accepted consensus some day.
Nature is fun!
J Mark Morris : Boston : Massachusetts