Skip to content
quotesby

About this quote

What does it mean?
The speaker frames predation as a form of competition where both parties pursue conflicting goals for the same resource.
In plain terms
A lion and an antelope are competing for the antelope's body in different ways.
What can you take from it?
Conflict can exist even when parties act on different plans.

Where it applies

  • biology study
  • ecosystem analysis
  • conflict theory

Putting it to work

  • analyzing interactions
  • ecological modeling
  • negotiation theory

Questions to consider

  • When is survival a competition?
  • How do you define conflict?

Another view

Not all interactions are best understood as competition.

More from Richard Dawkins

  1. Group selection theory would therefore predict a tendency to evolve towards an all-dove conspiracy ... But the trouble with conspiracies, even those that are t…

    Permalink to quote #22
  2. What is the selfish gene? It is not just one single physical bit of DNA. Just as in the primeval soup, it is all replicas of a particular bit of DNA, distribut…

    Permalink to quote #24
  3. ... it is certainly wrong to condemn poor old Homo Sapiens as the only species to kill his own kind, the only inheritor of the mark of Cain, and similar melodr…

    Permalink to quote #21

Related quotes

  1. It was close; but that's the way it is in war. You win or lose, live or die - and the difference is just an eyelash.

    Douglas MacArthurDouglas MacArthur quote #1
  2. Troops without ammunition or food. Effective command no longer possible. 18,000 wounded without any supplies or dressings or drugs. Further defence senseless. …

    Friedrich PaulusFriedrich Paulus quote #1
  3. Let Saigons be bygones / Don't you blow this world in two.

    Kinky FriedmanKinky Friedman quote #1