Evolutionary biologist here! What they say is 100% true. ‘Survival of the fittest’ only refers to how successful an organism is at enduring their environment long enough to reproduce, and is not at all tied to the idea that those who are the ‘best’ are the only ones that survive. Evolution does not care if you keel over dead the second you give birth to a baby, it only cares if that baby survives long enough to breed again. What is the ‘fittest’ is almost entirely environmentally subjective; that’s how you have creatures like horses that are basically living trainwreaks still roaming about vs something that people think would be better suited to filling their ecological niche. No genology or phenology has inherent worth over the other, all that matters is if they were capable of passing their genes on to the next generation
You know what gives us a huge evolutionary advantage, past our high cognitive ability? Our intense social bonding. Humans are outstandingly social creatures, and that has magnified all of our successes as well as our downfalls. The trait that made us the fittest for our environment wasn’t just sheer dumb luck (though it was certainly partially attributed to that in some cases), it was love. We wouldn’t be where we are if we didn’t care enough about each other to value each life as highly as our own, and anyone who tells you otherwise is a fucking idiot.
[video description: a Tiktok stitch between @lochnessmonsterofficial’s friend Steph and Tiktok user @augustusmorning. Begin video.
Steph is looking away from the camera, not moving or speaking. A caption is superimposed:
Just thinking about the 18-20 year old woman who 4000 years ago got polio and survived but was parapegic and was still cared for in a town she was not born in.
Cut to augustusmorning, who is looking straight at the camera. They begin speaking in ASL, and translated captions appear below:
This is why the phrase “survival of the fittest” is actually ideology and not fact. When someone online states that it’s evolution that men are like “this.” that it’s evolution that women are like “that.” That it’s evolution that some people are oppressed or die. What they are expressing is not fact but ideology. They don’t want you to look at the bones. They don’t want you to see that people took care of and healed each other. That society worked in a much more mutualistic kind of way. Why? Because it goes against what they believe. How they view the world. It’s not the truth. It’s an expression of their own cruelty.
End video description]
[image description: tags, reading “natural selection selected for a species that cares about its community.” End description]
