According to the best estimates, 99.9 percent of all the species that ever existed on earth have gone extinct. A similar fate awaits the extant ones. A lot has to go right for a new species to establish itself, yet even then most of its members do not partake in the species’s success, for they either die early, fail to reproduce, or get eliminated by enemies, competitors, or nature’s adversities. Given the great quotient of failure in the struggle for life, one could say that every living organism descends from ancestors that beat the odds—that were “winners.” However, in this sense “winning” means little more than the perpetuation of loss. If the measure of success is survival, even the fittest members of a flourishing species are losers in the long run.
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