Posted: Sep 04, 2018 8:08 am
zulumoose wrote:The Wiki entry on "survival of the fittest" puts it quite well:-
Herbert Spencer coined the phrase "survival of the fittest".
"Survival of the fittest" is a phrase that originated from Darwinian evolutionary theory as a way of describing the mechanism of natural selection. The biological concept of fitness is defined as reproductive success. In Darwinian terms the phrase is best understood as "Survival of the form that will leave the most copies of itself in successive generations."
And that's all well and good. What happens is that the environment changes. A lot of wibbling is done about humans having some special capacity ("Special Sauce™) which knows in a special way how to roll with the punches that the environment has to deliver. For a useful example that abstracts this away from the strictly human, look up "red tide".