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You just have to be good enough to reproduce. If you follow the logic, 'the best' collapses into a tautology, where it is defined by reproducing (i.e., fitness)
by kuhewa 4y ago
You just have to be good enough to reproduce. If you follow the logic, 'the best' collapses into a tautology, where it is defined by reproducing (i.e., fitness). If there was really a singular "the best" and you had to be it to reproduce, at the individual level, populations would have a much harder time retaining heterozygosity and genetic diversity. At the species level, the only circumstance in which a species has to be 'the best' is if it has close to an identical fundamental niche (i.e., habitat and food requirements) as another species, because even given competitors for similar resources, there is often scope to occupy only a portion of the niche (i.e., abandon low elevation or certain foods), aka the realised niche, to avoid competition.
- ltbarcly3 4y agoThis is my point precisely (that it is a tautology). It's called 'survival of the fittest', not 'survival of the fit enough' for this reason. If the measure of value is 'fitness', then 'survival of the fittest' is exactly the same as saying 'survival of the best'. 'The best' does not imply singular except in cases which provide a metric which is a total ordering among contestants, which is usually far more specific than the usual usage of the word. For example, you would probably agree in general that the Olympics "is where the best go to compete", but there isn't implied a singular 'best' Olympian unless we consider only a single event and further insist that the measure is medal earned in a specific year. As you can see, to get to a singular 'the best' requires an event and a year and the rule that delivers a total ordering of goodness, but the normal English usage does not imply any of these. In fact in the normal usage, 'the best' would apply to everyone who attends the Olympics as a competitor, even alternates who do not compete in the end.
- kuhewa 4y agoIts semantics, but generally the best would be taken to refer to a superlative, gold medal at the Olympics. I'd say you just need to be good enough to attend the Olympics to attend the Olympics as a competitor. Its actually an apt analogy because there are some pretty trash athletes from some countries in some disciplines, some famously so, simply because they didn't have much local competition in their country. Survival of the fittest itself is a tautology, Darwin didn't coin it for the first edition. It doesn't really matter what the convenient slogan is, all of these concepts can be understood mathematically and it isn't the single individual or species with the highest fitness value that persists on whatever time scale is of interest.
- ltbarcly3 4y agoYou are confused about what fitness means.
- kuhewa 4y agoI am sure I am to some degree as is everyone, but whether I am insofar as it would be pertinent to the conversation I am not so sure, as I have had a decent bit of training in evolutionary biology and have written a PhD thesis and manuscripts that discuss organismal fitness at length. I can't tell if you are or aren't confused and perhaps just wanted to play with the semantics of superlatives. I reckon you seem to be dealing with the concept in a colloquial sense though.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]