[observationist]

That's how new species happen. Over time, the penguins who get sufficiently tired of all the other penguins' shit march off to the edge of the map, and when they finally get lucky, enough of the smart, independent minded penguins survive to produce a new generation. The new adventure flock eventually garners enough members to march back to the feeding grounds and seize the territory from the loser normy penguins.

Thus the arc of the universe bends towards badass penguins.

[tptacek]

The whole point of the sequence is that there's no chance that these "badass penguins" are going to make new species. There's no food where they're monomaniacally heading. They're going to die.

[ceejayoz]

This particular one wasn't going anywhere useful.

That's presumably why the comment said "when [collective they] finally get lucky", not "when [individual they] inevitably get lucky".

A certain percentage of your species having genes encouraging risky/stupid behavior is likely somewhat useful.

[brendoelfrendo]

A lone penguin wandering off is never going to create a new, badass species. There would need to be an entire group of penguins breaking off to establish a new population and eventually a new species. And they don't necessarily become more badass, just different; whatever alleles the founders had will be more consistently expressed in the new population, and eventually they may diverge enough to be a new species. Regardless, this penguin is marching off to die alone.

[ceejayoz]

> A lone penguin wandering off is never going to create a new, badass species.

Sure. But two might.

Or the behavior may sometimes benefit the colony a few coves over with some new genes every so often.

See also: Homosexuality in various animals, including humans. Individually, not great for your genes' survival. Collectively, seems to have enough of an advantage to the species to not be selected out.

[wahern]

> Homosexuality in various animals, including humans. Individually, not great for your genes' survival.

Alot of theories, mostly the less rigorous ones, rely on group selection. But the strongest ones rely on classic genetic selection where homosexuality does directly benefit their genes, and specifically the homosexuality gene. For example, one well-known experimental study looked at siblings and, IIRC, found that the sisters of male homosexuals were more fecund. One of the theories was that a gene which in men promoted homosexuality had the effect in women of promoting reproduction by increasing sexual attraction to men. Genetic selection through survival and reproduction principally acts on genes singularly, not the whole animal, let alone species, which are derivative effects that we too often conflate with the core dynamic. Of course, an alternative explanation in this case might be that male homosexuals can help provide more resources to their siblings, which given the degree of genetic relatedness doesn't require relying on a group selection effect; but it's more tenuous and less plausible than the explanation relying on a very straight-forward selection effect directly increasing replication success of a specific gene. Reproductive success isn't about whether the specific molecular copy of a gene replicates successfully through a lineal chain, but the success of any copy of itself, anywhere, no matter how distant from a shared meiosis event (or, in principle, any shared meiosis event).

The wandering penguin notion can be analyzed in the same way. A gene that induces wandering, which in all but an utterly minuscule number of cases results in a dead-end, may superficially seem to be counter productive when judged in isolation. But is it? How are new colonies formed, and who (or what) benefits if and when a new colony grows and thrives? Not just the species, but the specific wandering gene will see massive reproductive success as the new colony grows, at least initially.

Of course, a "gene" is an amorphous thing, and intuitively wandering needs to be attenuated, so maybe the relevant "gene" here isn't just something that makes them wander, but the whole package of DNA that also encompasses regulation of propensity as manifest through the population. But we don't necessarily have to cheat that way, either. Most of the time the wandering gene would be a net negative and find itself slowly winnowed out of the population. But as long as it survives somewhere in the population long enough to induce new colony formation and benefit from a short explosion in reproductive success, it'll survive, at least globally. Heck, maybe in long-established colonies it disappears completely, only to be reintroduced by wandering penguins from younger colonies. We don't need to zoom out and model how it interacts with all the other genes until we've zoomed out so much we end up in the position of positing a group selection effect. That's the beauty of Darwinian genetic selection--all this complexity arises from a very simple dynamic that in almost all cases can be accurately and predictively modeled by just looking at specific genes in isolation, fundamentally independent of the species and, strictly speaking, even of kin groups and individual animals; and what exceptions do exist don't require zooming out nearly as much as people tend to do.

[tialaramex]

No, this trait is almost certainly not useful.

Mother Nature doesn't give a shit, that's worth remembering. For the scenarios where two species in an arms race wipe each other out aren't somehow more or less desirable than other outcomes, it's just a thing which happened. Meh.

[ceejayoz]

> Mother Nature doesn't give a shit

Sure. That's not required for natural selection to work.

But any species that reliably returns to its birthplace like penguins and salmon and elephants must have some tiny proportion of the population that wanders off and gets lost occasionally to be able to spread to new areas.

Sometimes it'll be a storm or a big ice crevasse that does it, but there's no reason it can't sometimes be this.

[beeflet]

It's convenient that colonies of penguins only live where there is food. One wonders how they got there, perhaps god set them there to live for eternity.

[tptacek]

Have you watched the film we're talking about?

[observationist]

I get what you're saying and all, but when you look back across the hundreds of millions of years of evolution, the whole reason humans exist is the extreme and sometimes arbitrary individual choices and "that never happens" situations that are exceptions to niche saturation. You could take the glass half empty, cold and pragmatic view and focus on the fact that millions, or maybe even tens of millions of antisocial/adventurous/moronic penguins have to get wanderlust and die frozen and alone before you might even get a single successful breeding pair, but who wants to look at life like that?

Most badass penguins don't make it. Being the badass penguin isn't a sensible life goal. The altar of time demands the blood sacrifice of nearly all the badass penguins before progress and change is allowed. Occasionally, though, they win, and new species are born. The exceptions end up forking the timeline, and provide a backdrop of meaning to the sacrifice of all those who came (or went?) before.

The thing I love most is the fact that you can project anything on to the penguin, from extreme heroism, to villainy, to meaninglessness, or even profound cosmic purpose. I'd love to know what the evolutionary psychology / behavior is that actually causes it, though.

[dyauspitr]

Interesting fantasy but these broken penguins are too infrequent to start something new. They usually just wander off to die alone in the cold.

New species are usually formed gradually while introducing their mutations to the population until they eventually break off as a group. But more commonly there’s usually a geographic barrier that separates an existing group and they gradually just drift apart from each other.

[ceejayoz]

> They usually just wander off to die alone in the cold.

Usually! But not always.

Every once in a while, one probably makes it to another colony many miles away, and helps prevent inbreeding as a result.

Or runs into a similar weirdo somewhere in between.

[lux-lux-lux]

Penguins live in large colonies and, as a result, generally do not have issues with inbreeding.

[ceejayoz]

https://www.penguinsinternational.org/turns-out-that-not-all...

> The researchers found that the differences between species could be determined by the habitat where a species was found. For example, Emperor penguins occupy the Antarctic continent, breeding mostly on sea ice. Even though they have colonies clustered by geographic regions, the researchers found that juveniles of Emperor Penguins can travel long distances between colonies facilitating “gene flow.”

[Towaway69]

This leaving the group to die can also be observed in other species (cats and dogs do this too).

So this penguin knew its time was up and didn’t want to mess up the colony with its dead body.

We interpret the behaviour through our lenses and experiences.

[Towaway69]

Or they find a new feeding ground? Why does the universe bend to “badass penguins”?

The universe really does not care, in a “badass” way. Major league not caring.

It’s our interpretation that something is “badass” mainly because our species has pretty much negatively affected most parts of the environment.

It’s us that are “badass” and don’t “get it” when it comes to nature and the environment.

As someone else points out, there is no such thing as a nihilist penguin, it’s purely us putting a label on behaviour that we - once again - don’t understand.