“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.
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.
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.
The ironic thing about social darwinist types that want to cut any support for the poor on the grounds of poverty being some kind of proof of not being fit to survive, is that the same types will likely also object to things like labor unions or other means of large groups of poorer people banding together to collectively force better conditions from the wealthy, despite social cooperation being a common and successful enough evolutionary strategy.
I mean why? Why is not survival of the fittest? It’s simply a matter of definition of “fit”. 🤷♂️ If the fittest means you have rich ancestors, then so be it, in some context. If it means being able to wrestle someone to the ground, that’s fine in another context. We live in many different contexts, as humans. It’s not black and white…
Because we have all given into the social construct of “we won’t kill you and take all your shit”. That was the deal. We stopped playing by the “if you piss me off me and my community with bash in your knee caps”. Most the fuckers who chant “survival of the fittest” don’t understand what that really means. It means that _anything _ is fair game.
Evolution doesn’t really care about social constructs though. It will select on one thing and one thing only – offspring.
Can’t have off spring if you get murdered for being a dick :). Humans are special in regards to evolution, we know about it so we can force its hand. The reason the rich are rich is because the public let them, those who argue for survival of the fittest don’t get that. The rules were put in place so we don’t behave like animals. But if they want us to…
The reason the rich are rich is because the public let them, those who argue for survival of the fittest don’t get that. The rules were put in place so we don’t behave like animals.
But in the grand scheme of things, we are animals too, and we have this behavior. We are animals and we are all aligning with the social constructs of our species. Being “fit to survive” doesn’t need to mean “being able to kill someone weaker”. You could have a mental illness that leads to suicide. That’s not being fit to survive and spread genes. Doesn’t mean you were necessarily weak either, someone like that could be strong af, or a ninja.
You could also just be lucky as fuck. Maybe you happened to be a cave dwelling animal when WWIII happened with all the nuclear winter that followed. Or maybe you just dodged some other kind of evolutionary cataclysmic bullet. Surely the dinosaurs were “the fittest” – strong af, top tier predators and herbivores of their time – until they weren’t. They weren’t fit to survive a meteor.
In the grand scheme of evolution, it doesn’t matter what causes the survival. We are in the blink of an eye in the timeline of life, as humans. Evolution has barely had time to register our social constructs as a blip on its radar.
Now, our social constructs aren’t “fair”, but admittedly neither were all those villages who were burned by invaders before money was a thing, or tribes fighting and killing innocents, or people being eaten by sabertooths or some shit. Nothing in evolution needs to be “fair”.
And it sucks.
That’s exactly what time saying, we are currently “playing fair” but we don’t need to
That’s exactly what time saying
[Speech-to-text detected]
we are currently “playing fair” but we don’t need to
But we are. I’m sure there are plenty of examples of behavior in nature where the animals are doing shit they don’t need to be doing, that also affect their natural selection. But it’s their nature.
We might make the argument that we aren’t living according to our nature, but we made our nature this. Whatever we’re doing right now is effectively our nature.
Aliens visiting earth for the first time right now will look at us and conclude that what we are doing is our nature, and that we are surprisingly ill-equipped for our own nature and society. That we are working together in some aspects, and against each other in some, and it makes no goddamn sense.
Poverty is caused by a lack of money, and money isn’t real. Well, not really real.
Money is a type of private property. Private property is an arrangement of power relationships, and those are real. It’s real that you’ll get evicted if you don’t find a way to pay rent/mortgage.
They’re only as real as anything inside a mind. Which is to say not very real.
Humans come from nature so everything we do is natural and that includes inflicting poverty on people.
#NuclearBombsAreNatural
Nature exiles their weak and kills babies all the time. Its only natural.
Lazy
