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My favorite is "survival of the fittest" -- a catch phrase so prone to misinterpretation and so oversimplified that it's basically wrong.
by api 12y ago
My favorite is "survival of the fittest" -- a catch phrase so prone to misinterpretation and so oversimplified that it's basically wrong.
- Retric 12y agoIMO, "survival is fitness" is a much better phrase. The original form "survival of the fittest" is basically a tautology, but it's rarely taken a such. Even better people don't think of survival as a guarantee, at the individual level it’s fairly random, but people can easily see that some things help or hurt those odds.
- cbd1984 12y ago"Survival of the fittest" is only a tautology if you interpret it to be one, which is pointless, so people tend not to.
- griffinmahon 12y agoPeople tend not to interpret things in pointless ways because it's pointless. #taut
- talideon 12y agoI've always felt that 'survival of the fit enough' is closer to the intended meaning.
- api 12y ago"Survival of some set of the fit" is my favorite.
- ChrisGranger 12y agoI like "reproduction of the adequate."
- api 12y agoThat's great. Really accurate. Also explains why we're all here. :P
- Kiro 12y agoWhat's wrong with it? Or how do people misinterpret it?
- IkmoIkmo 12y agoTwo main ideas I think people may get wrong. One is that there needs to be survival of an individual (not dying), while it rather refers to survival of a species (not going extinct). This survival thus has little to do with actual life or death, rather it has to do with reproduction. For example a one-day-fly is, generally spoken, in a terrible situation when it comes to survival, it's life/death perspective is awful, just one day. But it survives as a species because its able to reproduce so rapidly that even a short life doesn't make the species go extinct. Evolution doesn't care for survival of an individual as long as that individual manages to reproduce before it does. The second is that there is somehow some 'fitness' variable, the better the more you survive. So a lion would be more fit than say a fly because it's stronger. But this too refers to a different concept, which is that 'fit' is in relation to the environment. A fly is quite fit to live in many environments over long periods of time, whereas a lion isn't fit for many environments and will have trouble surviving say changes in climate and habitat. Fitness is thus purely in relation to its environment. So really 'survival of the fittest' is more like 'species fit for the environment will survive long enough to reproduce', or something to that effect. From this then originates the argument that random mutations of a species will create different offspring that is more or less fit for the environment, and those more fit will survive, those less fit will not. That is survival of the fittest. And again, when I refer to survive, I mean the species, on the basis that when individuals of a species are fit for their environment, they have a good chance of reproducing enough offspring before death preventing the species from going extinct.
- Retra 12y ago>Evolution doesn't care for survival of an individual as long as that individual manages to reproduce before it does. Evolution doesn't care ever, regardless of whether you reproduce or not. You can evolve to the point of extinction just fine.
- ChrisGranger 12y ago
- weeksie 12y agoThe big problem lies in misunderstanding what fitness is. Fitness _only_ means surviving long enough to reproduce (and doing it). A genetically fit organism is one that reproduces. To be more fit the organism must reproduce more than others in its species. Conflating fitness with so-called desirable traits is what I most often see.