alt Hacker NewsNo, this trait is almost certainly not useful.
Mother Nature doesn't give a shit, that's worth remembering. For the scenarios where two species in an arms race wipe each other out aren't somehow more or less desirable than other outcomes, it's just a thing which happened. Meh.
> Mother Nature doesn't give a shit
Sure. That's not required for natural selection to work.
But any species that reliably returns to its birthplace like penguins and salmon and elephants must have some tiny proportion of the population that wanders off and gets lost occasionally to be able to spread to new areas.
Sometimes it'll be a storm or a big ice crevasse that does it, but there's no reason it can't sometimes be this.