Oh man but there's so much to unpack here with how much it doesn't apply. We used to have second-order desires not just individually, but as a species...
this post was submitted on 30 Apr 2025
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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.
Right. Humanity is still evolving. But "fitness", in the long term, will likely just mean "doesn't like to wear a condom and is really convincing about it"
could mean rape, top sperm doner, or polygamist. it has nothing to do with democracy or capitalism for that matter.
Poverty is a social construct, starvation is not. Also wealth hoarding has been a thing since... Well, since agriculture got started, so it's not unique to the post-industrial world. Kings didn't become Kings because they were nice and shared their wealth equitably.
Good dog
Central bank monetary policy requires that we pay 2% more for goods every year as technology makes things cheaper and we exclude asset price inflation. They construct a wall of debt via low interest rates for inelastic goods like housing in order to provide a windfall to boomers in order to force the prices of goods upwards, every new mortgage new money supply being created.
That wall of debt that is gatekeeping inelastic shelter is what poverty looks like, prices can't rise without providing new money supply, and some poor smuck holding that IOU for the first movers to consume. Blaming the rich, whose nominal asset value is inflated by this system, is a naive view; they are simply being spoon fed wealth in a desperate attempt to get them to consume a portion of it. Every bailout for any type of correction caused by an error or oversight in the system is then funneled back to them as wages are debased.
This likely explains the fanaticism around Bitcoin and gold, I think we can all see who is served by the existing system, and its definitely not the poor.
I don't think I disagree with the point being made, but I can't say I like the way it's being made. I don't care about her PhD and I don't think it's particulary interesting to call a strawman a fascist.
To be fair, the phrase "survival of the fittest" was coined by Herbert Spencer, who definitely did use it to describe dying from poverty.
His actual opinion was a little more nuanced than that, but Social Darwinism was kind of his whole thing, and that's where the phrase "survival of the fittest" comes from. Darwin himself took it from Spencer and added it to later editions of On the Origin of Species.
The fittest psychological profile for the late-capitalist environment is a psychopath who is very good at imitating empathy. Change the environment XP
Darwin and Wallace both hated that shit.
"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.
except that this fails to explain why animals like ants and bees have specifically ended up with most of the individuals being unable to procreate at all, clearly for them it's more beneficial to enable your mom to have more siblings than it is to have their own offspring.
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.
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.
You don’t have to be rich to have rich offspring, you just have to fuck the rich guy’s wife before he does.
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.
Well said
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.
I meant that our goals aren't aligned with the evolutionary "goal" of maximizing the number of offspring anymore. We are still deeply driven by evolved instincts, but we should recognize them as needs that our biology requires to be satisfied in order to achieve happiness, rather than goals in themselves. Of course we are still part of the biosphere and subject to evolution, but that evolution isn't significant on our timescale or meaningful (in the sense that by our criteria of good people, we won't evolve to be better). If we want to improve as a species, we should focus on a different, memetic, kind of evolution, passing knowledge and ideas instead of genetic material.
I meant that our goals aren’t aligned with the evolutionary “goal” of maximizing the number of offspring anymore.
More humans in one place have a real positive benefit. That's why we congregate in office buildings and university centers, rather than spreading ourselves out as evenly as possible. And communities with large populations enjoy economics of scale that smaller that smaller, more diffuse populations can't take advantage of.
evolution isn’t significant on our timescale or meaningful (in the sense that by our criteria of good people, we won’t evolve to be better).
Genetic drift isn't significant on the span of decades or centuries, but it is still happening and will have consequences to population subgroups in tens of thousands of years.
And - as we've demonstrated with more manual efforts at selection - we can force the issue with technology. Modern corn and bananas are two classic examples of a species cultivated by human intervention. Modern methods of transportation and trade has given us record levels of miscegenation, producing enormous cohorts of the human population with combinations of biological traits heretofore unseen (mostly trivial and unremarkable in the moment, but wait another 10,000 years and we'll see what we get).
The pressures we've placed upon the global ecology through industrialization are taking their toll as well. But these have feedbacks that shape our own populations. As the pressures we exert rise (via pollution, climate change, terraforming, deliberate scientific gene tampering) the consequences on our populations become more profound.
Even then, having said all of that, there is no real "better" from an evolutionary perspective. There is surviving to procreate and not surviving, but you'll be hard pressed to name an existing species that hasn't figured that out. What we have in cognition is the ability to evaluate the consequences of our actions. We don't have any kind of measure for what direction we should aim, save in what we collectively choose to value.
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
ok so you're going purist? fine: Elon's baby momma's are using IVF. so as far as reproductive success this is being tampered with. it is already being interfered with here to create a success that isn't organic.
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