Can we get a less misreading summary of evolution than "Survival of the fittest"?

Cuz, you know, it's pretty old-fashioned as an idea.

 

Just to clarify what's wrong with it:

1. The "fittest" is ill-defined.
2. Really unfit species can survive as long as they're just fit enough to have kids and already exist in sufficient numbers.
3. Really fit species can go extinct because of really stupid accidents.

Any others?

 

The original Darwin was very defined as to prescribing the experimentation of FIT. Just to what was this troubled form of objectivity applied to? Too bad, but in the name of religious expedience and leaving that aspect of true religious Being out (to the prudent values of Protestant England) survival was just a marvelous form of meaning exactly for the proper sequence in time what happened to species origin and development.

Why did it follow that in time with an appropriate spatial conformity? Not an issue to both religious and atheist. Similarly with geography. Insular environments in an appropriately materialistic sense is all that evolution requires. In broader ranges of space and time another environmental arrangement occurs for say the natural selection of the over-all species rather than the focused thing. If it doesn't fit, at least to the ideal theory of evolution (Darwin's), there is no such existence of things.

 

I've re-read that about five times and I have no idea what you're talking about. It seems to be implying that the idea of evolution requires people to utterly dismiss anything outside the scope of the theory of evolution as it was in the 19th century. I hope that's not it though.

 

It's that otherwise the idea of Evolution identifies with the meaning of Life for the concept ordinary evolving of scientific discovery which existed before Evolution as we mean it through the recesses of Time 'from the devil to angels' as One might feel.

Must need science to discover the meaning of one's intutions about the subject of living organisms.

You're not being hard on me.

 

Science, and certainly not evolutionary science, doesn't look for meaning. It knows there isn't any.

I apologise if this doesn't relate fully to your post, but I seriously am having a lot of trouble picking out what you're trying to say.

 

"Fit" in this context is indeed often misunderstood. It means those who are most well fitted (as in equipped) to survive and procreate in their particular environment. It doesn't mean "fit" in the sense of healthy or strong. Health and strength are often favoured characteristics, but that's not the point. If the only food source is high up in the trees, then those with long necks or an ability to climb or fly are the fittest, compared to those which can't, no matter how healthy or strong. If the environment changes, different characteristics will be the best fit. Like the way the rodents flourished following the cataclysm that wiped out the dinosaurs

 

What is really the point of this thread? You want a more elaborate definition or "summary", look it up, google it, wiki it or whatever. There's nothing "wrong" with "survival of the fittest". Do we need to throw in the obvious, "Survival of the fittest" + "Shit Happens" + "Dynamic species interactions" + "Meteor Impact" + "Starvation" + "republicans" = life as we know it.

If there is a hidden agenda to discredit scientific common knowledge such as evolution because "shit happens" or RELIGION Happens then what does that make of "intelligent design"? Shitty design seems more appropriate to me.

 

There's no hidden agenda, believe me.

What I'm asking is, is there a better way of putting the same thing that doesn't imply that "fitness" is being externally determined? And don't say it's obvious, or common knowledge, because believe me, to some it isn't. There are a hell of a lot of people who don't seem to get that evolution isn't just another god, another "designer", making us all fitter through a process comparable to synchronicity.

But yeah, I wouldn't say I want anything more elaborate, just something more accurate, but ideally as concise. I suspect that it isn't possible, and that you've instead just got to accept that you'll have to explain that "fittest" means "fittest at x time, in y situation, with z provisos".

But seriously, there are so many people who don't believe in evolution purely because they've had the 19th century version of it explained to them by people who didn't really believe it themselves.

 

Ho, ho, ho... evolution is our understanding of the theory, which makes it believable in the mathematical sense of random reproduction concept, always an understanding of the fuctionality, there is the Ethics between Man and animal. What is ethical to observe for our livesin the practical experimental essence of a kind of inherent ethics in the Animal.

I thought that you were against the theory for it's ethical worth in surviving, because that would mean some kind of Dogma.

But that's What I'm trying to tell you. The ethics goes back to the observed animal; who had the prudent life-style ultimately to survive.

So we ignore the amazing ethics of self-sacrifice, co-operation, and giving up our lives for the group (possibly not; anything would have to be La-markian). Then there are elements in the human ethics of applying justice of common decent civilized behaviour. The last one returns to the point of evolution: for all the random reproduction ideas it is the Ethics of fitting the natural log curve of probability for resistence to the normalized equipment of random oriented values in chaos at the surroundings. Situations are a matter of DESTINY.

 

But this is why atheism is optomistic. Atheism thus means the open opportunity to appropriate life in man, for once we observe scientifically with the values from our ancestors the Value of life may excede itself for the interpretation of change. That is the change of the effect of one species on another is more than Fit or Misfit; it is in the most recent times an absolute Misfit. As far members of the same species are concerned They fit each other relatively to the capacity of changing life in the future generations no better than the past generations have already done so.

What survives is that evolution is What we make it for the environmental troubles in our failure of our intentions for such trait transfers, and the hiding to ourselves of How we have progressed, the reationalization of our intentions: this is La Marck.

Success of our intentions stem for confronting the concrete nature around: nature makes the accidents perceivable: that is Darwin. And we deceive what probably wil happen.

True optomism is in ignorance.

 

Can you go one post without lapsing into gibberish?

Optimism is a state of mind. As an ideology it has been redundant since pretty much every theory says that the universe will either end or become uninhabitable, but since most of us won't live that long, optimism as a mindset is far from foolish.

 

Well, Darwin never used the phrase "survival of the fittest" in the Origin or anywhere else, as far as I know. I think it was coined by Spencer. A good candidate for an alternative term that Darwin did use a lot is "natural selection," but I really don't see how "survival of the fittest" is inadequate, for reasons already pointed out by Lithium, although I can see how someone might be a little misled by it. On the other hand, "natural selection" just doesn't seem to have the same zing as "survival of the fittest," does it?

 

Well, also, natural selection implies that someone (capital-N "Nature", perhaps?) is doing the selecting.

Part of the problem with "survival of the fittest" is that it excludes, for example, situations where an animal is too fit, and thus either dies as a result of over-population - lack of food, etc. - or ceases to evolve. There's also the fact that even the fittest animal might not pass on its genes, or might not pass them on in sufficient numbers to outweigh a host of mediocrity.

 

(2) seems fairly innocuous, since it seems very unlikely that a population's environment will remain so constant that some trait will not be selected at some point in time. (3) seems impossible, since, if an organism can't reproduce, then it obviously itsn't fit. In the case of (3a), the offspring of the original population would only be considered "fit" once some environmental change occurred that made the trait in question useful for survival. So, even if the parent organism did not reproduce very many offspring, these few offspring would thrive in the new environment and their rivals would die off. (1), however, seems plausible, and might be thought a good reason for taking the catchphrase, "survival of the fittest," with a grain of salt. After all, it is just a catchphrase.

By the way, it was Spencer who coined the phrase, and he did so in 1864. Darwin published many more books after this date, and, as far as I know, never adopted the term. It also seems reasonable to assume that he read Spencer, since he was a very popular author in England at that time. So, this leads me to believe that Darwin did not altogether approve of the term, perhaps thinking it a rather gross generalization.

Still, the term "natural selection" seems adequate to me. It does, indeed, imply that nature (capitalized or not) is doing the selecting. If it were God doing the selecting then we should call it "supernatural selection." If it were man, as with the selective breeding of farm animals, doing the selecting, we might call it "artifactual selection" or "architectonical selection." In fact, I think that Darwin called it "domestic selection" in the Origin.

 

Well quite, they all imply selection, a conscious choice being made, and by extension a goal, an end, or some rationale that informs that choice. That's what I dislike about that phrase, because there is no conscious selection, no goal, and no overarching plan.

 

Not really. Human evolution will at the very least have to be engineered by some conscious intention. We're simply too able to ensure our own survival for evolution to occur naturally. Almost all babies are "fit" enough to grow up and reproduce, irrespective of their genes, so there's no reason for one trait to thrive while another is "bred out".

Unless the population is indeed too high, in which case, non-reproducing adults can greatly benefit populations of social animals (e.g. hunting for the pack while not adding extra hungry mouths to it).

But is that how most people understand "fittest"? You understand that over-reproduction can make a species "unfit" because you're a thinker. But I'm guessing most people would need this explaining to them.

A single, awesome mutation quite possibly wouldn't be passed on. It could make one organism incredibly "fit", but unless it was passed on in sufficiently numbers, it would likely be watered more or less out of existence within a few generations.

Other examples: you'd think, from the term "fittest", that antelope would evolve to be faster and faster. But any antelope that's faster than the slowest one survives, whereas the trait of speed quite possibly means you burn off more energy...

All I'm really saying here is that "fitness" is a somewhat deceptive word.

 

Actually, now that I think about it, a better phrase might be "struggle for existence." Darwin used this one, too. And, it seems to beat the over-population example. Darwin talks about over-population in the Origin, and says that the fitter organisms will compete for food and mates better than other organisms in the population, and so will survive and pass on their genes better. I still don't think that the "nature" in "natural selection" implies that something conscious and acting intentionally is doing the selecting, because we usually don't ascribe consciousness to nature. But some (e.g. pantheists) do. So they might find it misleading. But, "struggle for existence" does not use the word "fit," which we already said might be misleading, or "nature," which I still think is better but still might confuse some.

 

You misunderstand: I was saying that "selection" implies that. But no, people really do attribute consciousness to nature. Not just Gaia theorists, but the general, uneducated public often imagine the weather, disasters, etc. as having some kind of purpose and intent. Not necessarily in the God-fearing way of attributing natural disasters to divine retribution, but people do talk about weather cycles as if they are meting out some kind of justice/punishment, carrot/stick system.

"Struggle for existence" works in some ways, but then, we're more talking about a struggle for continuation; as I said, one member of a species can be exceptionally gifted for survival in terms of beneficial mutations, but if it merely survives, and doesn't pass on its genes, it might as well never have existed.

 

Or is it a struggle for determining continuation in the abstract sense, like model of a region of mountainously inhabited animals, which suddenly Man has to take seriously for the uniwitting way He effected the region when he didn't apply his serious Mind to concurant development?

God may have not of supplied us with continuity of Life one bit. Man is after all the devil better than God.

Just for the thread.