“EACH new variety or species, during the progress of its formation, will generally press hardest on its nearest kindred, and tend to exterminate them.”
So said Charles Darwin in On the Origin of Species, when he was describing how competition for resources between species drives some to extinction. It now turns out that Darwin could have been wrong. Researchers in the US have shown that in some situations, the more strongly animals compete with each other, the more species can coexist.
The first hint that Darwin’s maxim might be flawed came from biologists studying saltwater plankton. They noticed that many…
