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.
“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.
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.
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
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.
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
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.
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.
deleted by creator
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.
I’d take it even further than that and say that life fundamentally strives for cooperation as much as is possible, for example look at how animals have ways of communicating with each other to avoid violence unless actually necessary for survival.
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.
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.
Darwin and Wallace both hated that shit.
“natural resource shortage you fascist” is really difficult to say : D
Humans come from nature so everything we do is natural and that includes inflicting poverty on people.
#NuclearBombsAreNatural
Nature exiles their weak and kills babies all the time. Its only natural.
Lazy
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.
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.
“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.
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!
selective pressure doesn’t care if you consider it “survival of the fittest” or not.
