Hi, appliance repair man here who just fixes appliances in people’s home for a living. “Survival of the fittest” was a term coined by Herbert Spencer after reading Darwin’s Origin of species. And even I know that biologists and people who study evolution don’t like this term because it is vague and misleading. In this case the fittest refers to organisms that have the best reproductive success.
This term has been heavily misused to misrepresent evolution and the people who studied.
“Survival of the fittest” is itself a naive view of evolution. “Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution”, by Peter Kropotkin, was a direct response to that shit over 100 years ago. It was a precursor to Kin Selection Theory developed in the 1960s. It gave the idea a firm mathematical foundation and is largely accepted by biologists today.
The idea itself isn’t wrong, the fittest individuals (those who have the most offspring) are always those whose genetic material will be best represented in the next generations. Kin Selection Theory just includes the fact that even selfish and thus fitter individuals which are helped by altruistic ones usually carry some altruistic genes which they propagate.
even selfish and thus fitter individuals which are helped by altruistic ones usually carry some altruistic genes which they propagate.
It’s more useful to model the genes as selfish, not the individuals. A queen bee/ant won’t survive long enough to produce fertile offspring if her infertile offspring, each a genetic dead end, doesn’t provide for the hive/colony. That genetic programming isn’t altruistic because it doesn’t help rival colonies/hives, only their own.
So no, the individuals aren’t free riding on others’ altruism. It’s more that genetic coding for social groups is advantageous to the gene, even if localized applications of those rules might seem disadvantageous to the individual in certain instances.
But then you introduce parasitic organisms, which prey on the more selfless and mutualist functions of complex species. And you end up with a cyclical rise and fall of survival strategies.
Predator organisms proliferating in periods of organic wealth and collapsing when they’ve depleted the reserves.
Meanwhile, prey organisms trade their mutualist reproductive impulses for traits that are defensive and alienating from their kin… until the predator collapse, at which point they can open up again.
Optional survival varies with the historical movement, which is driven by the strategies that preceded that moment.
Fitness isn’t a solved problem, it is a constantly moving target.
Fitness can be seen as a phenotype trait, i.e. the kind of phenotype that will produce the most offspring. Of course that is dependent on the environment, but it is worth noting that the kind of adaptation you mentioned can also happen epigenetically or by other means. Basically organisms can have some adpatability built into their genotype.
People don’t understand that fitness is related purely to the number of viable offspring, which isn’t a useful indicator of a person’s virtue. Anyways Social Darwinism is idiotic and a wonderful example of the appeal to nature fallacy. We’ve surpassed evolution for fuck’s sake, if we want to progress as a society we need to educate people.
Fit and reproducing a lot isn’t mutually exclusive tho. Just look at Elon. Do you think he could hunt a deer with just his hands? I doubt he could even put up a shelf.
In evolutionary biology, fitness is defined as reproductive success, aka the number of viable, reproducing offspring
To be fair, the phrase “survival of the fittest” was coined by Herbert Spencer, who definitely did use it to describe dying from poverty.
His actual opinion was a little more nuanced than that, but Social Darwinism was kind of his whole thing, and that’s where the phrase “survival of the fittest” comes from. Darwin himself took it from Spencer and added it to later editions of On the Origin of Species.
The fittest psychological profile for the late-capitalist environment is a psychopath who is very good at imitating empathy. Change the environment XP
Also, Darwin wrote a lot more about cooperation than competition. Competition is kinda the simplest aspect of evolution, but if you wanna understand (literally) the birds and the bees, you gotta talk about the development of mutually-beneficial systems.
A lot of the big evolutionary milestones are cooperative. An impossibly long time ago, a big cell swallowed a little cell and (for whatever reason) did not digest it. Together they accomplish more than either cell could on their own. That symbiosis is the ancestor to practically every multicellular organism you can find. Being multicellular is itself another huge development in cooperative evolution. Predation and competition may make a hide tougher or a tooth longer, but cooperation is what really pushes the boundaries of what is biologically possible.
We’ve learned pretty recently that almost all nutrition of plants and animals relies on symbiotic relationships with microbes with their own distinct genetic material and reproduction. The microbiome in animal guts or in the soil where plant roots live turned out to be really important for whether the actual cells in the larger multicellular organism are getting what they need to thrive.
