“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.
You don’t have to be rich to have rich offspring, you just have to fuck the rich guy’s wife before he does.
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.
the kind of phenotype that will produce the most offspring
That’s only beneficial when your children are an asset to community survival. Predators tend to produce fewer offspring, because every new member of the predator cohort is an eventual rival. Prey species benefit from large populations when the populations’ role is to terraform territory or otherwise synergize with their kin. This is a big fundamental difference between animal and plant reproduction, since plants generally benefit from more members of the species in the immediate area while animals have a soft ceiling on their population tied to how much food / shelter is available.
One could argue that the human habit of terraforming and the synergy enjoyed by a large population of active brains in a small area puts us more in line with plant species than animals.
The Survival of the Fittest trope is flawed on a whole host of levels. The idea that you want a small number of apex predators as a survival mechanic neglects all the instances in which a very large number of prey species perform significantly better.
Which, in the context of Social Darwinism, still puts the idea to rest.
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.
We’ve surpassed evolution for fuck’s sake
We’ve become self-aware, but the evolutionary impulses persist. Ecological pressures don’t vanish because you begin to understand them. We can adapt rapidly - even within one or two generations - to enormous changes in the ecology. But these are still responses and they still exert evolutionary pressure on the population.
Nevermind that most people still don’t actually understand evolution in a manner that benefits them individually. The idea is only useful at the social level, via community-spanning collective actions and policies.
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
Darwin and Wallace both hated that shit.
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.
Humans come from nature so everything we do is natural and that includes inflicting poverty on people.
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.
Prick a Libertarian and a neoliberal bleeds.
It is quite odd how many people say evolution is a liberal hoax yet are full throated social darwinists.
That’s because capitalism was created by God to
reward the faithfulpunish the wicked. /s
There’s people who say this? That’s dumb, there are many ‘fit’ people who were born in a poor family, and there are ‘unfit’ people ahem Elon born wealthy. I’ve heard of the “Darwin award” for people who die by doing dumb shit but this is new to me.
[Family Guy skin color chart meme]
Unfortunately, yes, and you can find a lot of them in this thread.
Well, I guess it’ll be funny when all the lower classes die off and the rich have to eat eachother to survive.
I think groups of lower classes will likely murder the rich and take their shit long before the rich have to think about eating each other.
Yes, that’s the plot of HG Wells’ The Time Machine. The rich evolve into beautiful but helpless and mindless little doll-people. The poor evolve into ugly, cunning, mechanically-inclined troglodyte people who hunt and feast on the doll-people.
It’s been a while since I’ve read the Time Machine but I’m pretty sure the Morlocks didn’t hunt the Eloi so much as trained them to head underground for slaughter when they heard air raid sirens. Maybe I’m remembering the old timey movie more than the book.
Let’s hope
Maybe we can convince them to go hide in their bunkers sooner rather than later, then we just concrete them in and forget about them
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.
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…
It turns out working together is a highly successful strategy. You can stretch the definition of “fit” to say that working together improves fitness, but if so, it still becomes much harder to justify Social Darwinism.
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.
“natural resource shortage you fascist” is really difficult to say : D
good message, but bad post:
- climate has nothing to do with the rest
- poverty existed pre-indistrialisation
- poverty kills people in non-fascist organisations
- fascists always promised to solve poverty (german fascism = “national socialism”)
It’s the guy from the meme!
Is this an actual thing those researchers say? I’ve never heard a person with higher education saying shit like this.
In the same way that climate deniers think they know what they’re talking about because they have an elementary school-level understanding of the weather, flat earthers think they know what they’re talking about because they have an elementary school-level level understanding of physics, and antivaxxers think they know what they’re talking about because they have an elementary school-level understanding of medicine, social darwinists think they know what they’re talking about because they have an elementary school-level understanding of evolution. They heard “survival of the fittest” and were convinced that’s all the nuance there was to have about the topic.
Well, exactly, that sort of social Darwinism is just so antiscientific and also generally antisocial I don’t think a person with any self-awareness in a remotely serious academic context could put it to paper. I’ve seen it online, yes, but that’s not what OP tweet is addressing…
selective pressure doesn’t care if you consider it “survival of the fittest” or not.
Daddy didn’t care
“social construct this social construct that” oh let me just critique poverty away since its not you know… a social reality…
Maybe climate science and evolution doesn’t have that much to say about vocabulary of other disciplines.
