Natural Reward’s Struggle to Exist: How a New Theory First Entered a Hostile Scientific World

I. What does it take for a new scientific theory to come into existence?

Before a theory can spread, it must first emerge. It must be invented, named, clarified, defended, revised, and forced into a form that can survive public scrutiny.

Only later comes dissemination: the broader process of spreading the theory, persuading an audience, applying it to new problems, and building a scientific movement around it.

II. The hostile world: why natural reward had trouble being born.

Evolutionary biology was already organized around natural selection, local adaptation, and suspicion toward claims of progress. Natural reward therefore faced resistance on several fronts:

1. Conceptual hostility
   A theory of “advancement” sounded dangerously close to goal-directed evolution.
2. Linguistic hostility
   Terms such as “reward,” “entrepreneurship,” “monopoly profit,” and “struggle for supremacy” sounded foreign to standard biology.
3. Empirical hostility
   Reviewers demanded biological evidence rather than analogies from economics, business, or philosophy.
4. Professional hostility
   Experts could interpret the project not as a new theoretical synthesis, but as overreach, crackpottery, or a challenge to disciplinary authority.

This makes the “hostile scientific world” more than interpersonal conflict. It is the resistance a new conceptual organism faces when it enters an established intellectual ecosystem.

III. The first form of the theory: powerful but not yet biologically armored

The early 2019 preprint is the theory in its first exposed form.

It contains the main intuition: natural selection explains the origin of useful inventions, while natural reward explains their broader success, spread, and macroevolutionary consequences.

But the theory was still vulnerable. Its analogies were vivid but risky: Apple, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, McDonald’s, Ray Kroc. They clarified the distinction between invention and dissemination, but also invited reviewers to see the theory as economics projected onto nature.

Natural reward had been conceived, but it had not yet evolved the traits needed to survive peer review.

IV. Peer review as selection pressure

Reviewers imposed demands that reshaped the theory’s phenotype:

• remove loose economic analogies;
• provide biological mechanisms;
• define progress;
• clarify the difference between natural selection and natural reward;
• avoid language suggesting conscious foresight;
• show that the theory applies across real biological systems.

The paper itself underwent a kind of intellectual selection. Weak or vulnerable formulations were stripped away. Stronger formulations survived.

V. The conceptual birth: natural selection as blind inventor, natural reward as blind entrepreneur

The mature theory emerges when the contrast becomes precise:

• Natural selection is the blind inventor.
  It produces traits through local, immediate, incremental advantages.
• Natural reward is the blind entrepreneur.
  It explains the broader success of those traits when they unlock new resources, ecological opportunities, or zones of expansion.

The key word is blind.

The theory rejects teleology. Natural reward does not guide organisms toward future goals. It rewards inventions when circumstances make them spread.

VI. Replacing business analogies with biological case studies.

This was the main transformation of the manuscript: the theory acquired biological armor.

A. Sea squirt histocompatibility

Sea squirts show how a trait can originate as a local solution to conflict and later enable long-term resilience.

The recognition system does not evolve because somatic parasites already provide the main selective pressure. Rather, fusion creates the conditions for discriminatory conflict among cell lineages, and that conflict selects for histocompatibility. Once the system exists, it incidentally protects against the spread of obligate parasites.

This illustrates how biologists had often confused an incidental effect with the adaptive cause.

B. C4 photosynthesis.

C4 photosynthesis shows that the cause of origin and the cause of later success can differ.

Intermediate steps may have evolved as local fixes for photorespiration, not as adaptations for domination in low-CO₂ environments. Later, when atmospheric conditions changed, the completed system was rewarded with ecological expansion.

This is one of the clearest cases in which an invention can lie dormant for millions of years before finally spreading.

C. Mammalian radiation after the dinosaurs.

Mammals evolved traits such as endothermy, lactation, placenta, neurological capacity, and nocturnal adaptations under the shadow of dinosaurs.

Those traits did not originate because mammals foresaw a post-asteroid world. But when the dinosaurs disappeared, those accumulated capacities were rewarded by a vast vacant ecological field.

This example gives natural reward its macroevolutionary drama.

VII. The linguistic battle: why “struggle for supremacy” matters.

This is not a minor wording dispute. It is a battle over whether the theory is allowed to name its own phenomenon.

“Struggle for existence” belongs to Darwin’s world of local survival under resource limitation.

“Struggle for supremacy” names a different scale: the macroevolutionary race to dominate resource zones, achieve incumbent advantage, and monopolize ecological opportunity.

The phrase sounds aggressive and politically charged. But softer alternatives like “creative expansion” fail to capture the ruthless, exclusionary side of macroevolutionary success.

If natural reward loses its language, it risks being absorbed back into ordinary selectionist vocabulary.

VIII. Nietzsche, teleology, and scientific credibility.

The early version leaned on Nietzsche and the idea of life as expansion or power.

The published version removes Nietzsche.

This shows strategic discipline. The theory does not abandon its boldness, but it sheds unnecessary philosophical vulnerability. It keeps the biological claim while dropping material that would make reviewers think the argument rests on metaphysics.

Natural reward survived by learning what not to carry into the scientific world.

• It kept “struggle for supremacy.”
• It kept “blind entrepreneur.”
• It kept “monopoly profit.”

But it dropped the philosopher who made the theory easier to dismiss.

IX. The Blount confrontation: when data interpretation becomes conflict.

Zack Blount provided crucial insight into the multistep selective process leading to E. coli citrate metabolism.

At first, the exchange was scientific and technical. Blount helped refine the citrate figure, correcting details about acetate, glucose metabolism, specific mutations, and aerobic citrate transport.

But the deeper conflict was not about molecular facts. It was about what those facts mean.

Gilbert sees:

• incremental enabling steps favored by selection;
• the passing of a key threshold favored by selection;
• the massive population expansion and subsequent domination of the flask by citrate metabolizers as natural reward;
• this distinction being important in a broader macroevolutionary context.

Blount sees:

• incremental enabling steps favored by selection;
• the passing of a key threshold favored by selection;
• the massive population expansion as a reward that came only at the end;
• the reward is selection.

In Gilbert's view, natural selection is about competitive displacement under checks to increase. Even occasional expansions can have huge impacts on macroevolutionary patterns. Moreover, they can also result in a different type of competition in which the first lineages to exploit untapped resource zones expand, diversify, and gain an incumbent advantage.

Blount views all non-random differential reproductive success as due to selection, which is the standard Neo-Darwinian view. 

Gilbert explicitly contests this view by distinguishing the units of reproduction from the units upon which different forces act.

The intensity of the exchange — accusations of crackpottery, comparison to creationist tactics, concern over public communication, and Blount’s request to be unnamed in the acknowledgments — shows that the theory’s emergence was not merely technical. It had a human element.

X. The Darwinian double bind: why the theory had to be invented.

Evolutionary biology says natural selection has no goal and produces only local adaptation. Yet the history of life appears to show large-scale directional patterns: increasing ecological reach, increasing innovative capacity, and major transitions from simple to more complex forms of organization.

This is the Darwinian double bind:

• theory denies absolute progress;
• history appears to display it.

Natural reward is presented as the attempted solution. It preserves blind causation while explaining why life can nevertheless advance over deep time.

XI. Closing frame: emergence before dissemination

The podcast ends by asking how we can distinguish a genuine scientific advancement at the moment it first appears.

If natural reward is correct, then it may be impossible to foretell which apparently minor invention will one day inherit the earth. In that sense, the episode treats natural reward itself as an invention whose future reward cannot yet be known.