Only the fit and lucky have survived

Here is an interesting and insightful juxtaposition in a science article. A Clue In The Identity Of The ClimateGate Email Hacker? by Hank Campbell.

What did the new emails show? Not much. The investigations already cleared the researchers of scientific misconduct (well, what they were cleared of were claims they "inappropriately manipulated data") and there was nothing really new in that regard, unless you are interesting in quote-mining their emails the way Greenpeace does to everyone else; instead, the new emails showed the climate researchers in question are not immune from being assholes. That's not scientific misconduct, any more than Frankenstein-ing together graphs to make a point more obvious is. The dummies in science journalism took that hockey stick graph and ran with it a decade ago (though later, plenty of scientists rationalized it) and science journalism has clearly paid that price - corporate media recognized that scientists and bloggers are better suited to providing context for complex science issues than journalists and science journalism has been gutted in that time; evolution has won there and only the fit and the lucky have survived.

Its that last bit that caught my eye, "only the fit and lucky have survived." At any given point in time, with a portfolio of individuals (or life forms, or ideas), there will be a distribution of success (in terms of survival or wealth accumulation or some other measure), but as it is just a snapshot in time, that portfolio will include those that are successful because of their actions as well as those that are successful because of circumstances beyond their control (being in the right place at the right time). The challenge is to distinguish the two. Viewing results over longer and longer periods of time clarifies the picture but in an environment of rapid and increasing levels of change, even the longer view may fail to clarify what is luck and what is cause.