Darwin Fittest Quotes

It is not the strongest or the most intelligent who will survive but those who can best manage change.

The law of evolution is that the strongest survives!' 'Yes, and the strongest, in the existence of any social species, are those who are most social. In human terms, most ethical...There is no strength to be gained from hurting one another. Only weakness.

The expression often used by Mr. Herbert Spencer of the Survival of the Fittest is more accurate, and is sometimes equally convenient.

The very comprehensibility of the world points to an intelligence behind the world. Indeed, science would be impossible if our intelligence were not adapted to the intelligibility of the world. The match between our intelligence and the intelligibility of the world is no accident. Nor can it properly be attributed to natural selection, which places a premium on survival and reproduction and has no stake in truth or conscious thought. Indeed, meat-puppet robots are just fine as the output of a Darwinian evolutionary process.

If theft is advantageous to everyone who succeeds at it, and adultery is a good strategy, at least for males, for increasing presence in the gene pool, why do we feel they are wrong? Shouldn't the only morality that evolution produces be the kind Bill Clinton had - being sorry you got caught?

With savages, the weak in body or mind are soon eliminated; and those that survive commonly exhibit a vigorous state of health. We civilised men, on the other hand, do our utmost to check the process of elimination; we build asylums for the imbecile, the maimed, and the sick; we institute poor-laws; and our medical men exert their utmost skill to save the life of every one to the last moment. There is reason to believe that vaccination has preserved thousands, who from a weak constitution would formerly have succumbed to small-pox. Thus the weak members of civilised societies propagate their kind. No one who has attended to the breeding of domestic animals will doubt that this must be highly injurious to the race of man. It is surprising how soon a want of care, or care wrongly directed, leads to the degeneration of a domestic race; but excepting in the case of man himself, hardly any one is so ignorant as to allow his worst animals to breed. The aid which we feel impelled to give to the helpless is mainly an incidental result of the instinct of sympathy, which was originally acquired as part of the social instincts, but subsequently rendered, in the manner previously indicated, more tender and more widely diffused. Nor could we check our sympathy, if so urged by hard reason, without deterioration in the noblest part of our nature. The surgeon may harden himself whilst performing an operation, for he knows that he is acting for the good of his patient; but if we were intentionally to neglect the weak and helpless, it could only be for a contingent benefit, with a certain and great present evil. Hence we must bear without complaining the undoubtedly bad effects of the weak surviving and propagating their kind; but there appears to be at least one check in steady action, namely the weaker and inferior members of society not marrying so freely as the sound; and this check might be indefinitely increased, though this is more to be hoped for than expected, by the weak in body or mind refraining from marriage.

Evolution is the law of policies: Darwin said it, Socrates endorsed it, Cuvier proved it and established it for all time in his paper on 'The Survival of the Fittest.' These are illustrious names, this is a mighty doctrine: nothing can ever remove it from its firm base, nothing dissolve it, but evolution.

The fittest person survives! The fighting man succeeds! He who Fights to Fit, will Survive to Succeed!

In Beauvoir's experience Darwin was way wrong. The fittest didn't survive, they were killed by the idiocy of their neighbors, who continued to bumble along oblivious.

This survival of the fittest implies multiplication of the fittest. {The phrase 'survival of the fittest' was not originated by Charles Darwin, though he discussed Spencer's 'excellent expression' in a letter to Alfred Russel Wallace (Jul 1866).}

This preservation of favourable individual differences and variations, and the destruction of those which are injurious, I have called Natural Selection, or the Survival of the Fittest.

This century will be called Darwin's century. He was one of the greatest men who ever touched this globe. He has explained more of the phenomena of life than all of the religious teachers. Write the name of Charles Darwin on the one hand and the name of every theologian who ever lived on the other, and from that name has come more light to the world than from all of those. His doctrine of evolution, his doctrine of the survival of the fittest, his doctrine of the origin of species, has removed in every thinking mind the last vestige of orthodox Christianity. He has not only stated, but he has demonstrated, that the inspired writer knew nothing of this world, nothing of the origin of man, nothing of geology, nothing of astronomy, nothing of nature; that the Bible is a book written by ignorance--at the instigation of fear. Think of the men who replied to him. Only a few years ago there was no person too ignorant to successfully answer Charles Darwin, and the more ignorant he was the more cheerfully he undertook the task. He was held up to the ridicule, the scorn and contempt of the Christian world, and yet when he died, England was proud to put his dust with that of her noblest and her grandest. Charles Darwin conquered the intellectual world, and his doctrines are now accepted facts. His light has broken in on some of the clergy, and the greatest man who to-day occupies the pulpit of one of the orthodox churches, Henry Ward Beecher, is a believer in the theories of Charles Darwin--a man of more genius than all the clergy of that entire church put together. ...The church teaches that man was created perfect, and that for six thousand years he has degenerated. Darwin demonstrated the falsity of this dogma. He shows that man has for thousands of ages steadily advanced; that the Garden of Eden is an ignorant myth; that the doctrine of original sin has no foundation in fact; that the atonement is an absurdity; that the serpent did not tempt, and that man did not 'fall.' Charles Darwin destroyed the foundation of orthodox Christianity. There is nothing left but faith in what we know could not and did not happen. Religion and science are enemies. One is a superstition; the other is a fact. One rests upon the false, the other upon the true. One is the result of fear and faith, the other of investigation and reason.

Genetics might be adequate for explaining microevolution, but microevolutionary changes in gene frequency were not seen as able to turn a reptile into a mammal or to convert a fish into an amphibian. Microevolution looks at adaptations that concern the survival of the fittest, not the arrival of the fittest... The origin of species — Darwin’s problem — remains unsolved.

The embryological record is almost always abbreviated in accordance with the tendency of nature (to be explained on the principle of survival of the fittest) to attain her needs by the easiest means.

Charles Darvin is wrong : Only the closest to the government will survive!

I fully agree with all that you say on the advantages of H. Spencer's excellent expression of 'the survival of the fittest.' This, however, had not occurred to me till reading your letter. It is, however, a great objection to this term that it cannot be used as a substantive governing a verb; and that this is a real objection I infer from H. Spencer continually using the words, natural selection. (Letter to A. R. Wallace July 1866)

My firm conviction is that if wide-spread Eugenic reforms are not adopted during the next hundred years or so, our Western Civilization is inevitably destined to such a slow and gradual decay as that which has been experienced in the past by every great ancient civilization. The size and the importance of the United States throws on you a special responsibility in your endeavours to safeguard the future of our race. Those who are attending your Congress will be aiding in this endeavour, and though you will gain no thanks from your own generation, posterity will, I believe, learn to realize the great dept it owes to all the workers in this field.

Darwin’s theory described the survival of the fittest, but not the arrival of the fittest.

This survival of the fittest which I have here sought to express in mechanical terms, is that which Mr. Darwin has called 'natural selection, or the preservation of favoured races in the struggle for life.

He [William Jennings Bryan] recognized that what Darwin proposed on the biological level, when applied on the societal level, might legitimize an ideology that supports the survival of the fittest, with all of its dire complications. Byran was able to envision the kind of society that Social Darwinism would create- the kind of exploitation that comes from unbridled capitalism, for instance- and chose to war against it.

I have called this principle, by which each slight variation, if useful, is preserved, by the term natural selection, in order to mark its relation to man's power of selection. But the expression often used by Mr. Herbert Spencer, of the Survival of the Fittest, is more accurate, and is sometimes equally convenient.

Social Darwinism, or the idea that those who are the best and smartest earn the most money, has two holes: first, not all intelligent people opt to chase the money wagon and second, most morons are greedy, and many of them succeed through luck or persistence.

This is the contrary of the Darwin that we mainly receive from the Darwinists. The survival of the fittest is supposed to represent the conflict of sovereign individuals, among which the strongest wins and so gets to go on to the next round of the conflict. But in Darwin's day--at least when he was writing 'The Voyage of the Beagle'--'fittest' did not mean strongest. It meant the one that fit best into the network of mutual need

Uber, the world’s largest taxi company, owns no vehicles. Facebook, the world’s most popular media owner, creates no content. Alibaba, the most valuable retailer, has no inventory. And Airbnb, the world’s largest accommodation provider, owns no real estate. Something interesting is happening.

Darwinism met with such overwhelming success because it provided, on the basis of inheritance, the ideological weapons for race and well as class rule and could be used for, as well as against, race discrimination. Politically speaking, Darwinism as such was neutral, and it has led, indeed, to all kinds of pacifism and cosmopolitanism as well as to the sharpest forms of imperialistic ideologies. In the seventies and eighties of the last century, Darwinism was still almost exclusively in the hands of the utilitarian anti-colonial party in England. And the first philosopher of evolution, Herbert Spencer, who treated sociology as part of biology, believed natural selection to benefit the evolution of mankind and to result in everlasting peace. For political discussion, Darwinism offered two important concepts: the struggle for existence with optimistic assertion of the necessary and automatic "survival of the fittest," and the indefinite possibilities which seemed to lie in the evolution of man out of animal life and which started the new "science" of eugenics.

You are the first to arrive alive in fifty years. You are a puissant man. Arrival of the fittest is the doctrine of the Holy Darwin. Most scientific.

Prison is the only place, where Darwin's Theory of Evolution may seem to work. Survival of the fittest does only work, where the fittest is defined as the most loving.

Darwin’s ‘survival of the fittest’ is really a special case of a more general law of survival of the stable.

Charles Darwin is wrong : Only the closest to the Government will survive.

His mind It says survival of the fittest but His soul Revival of the idiots So good riddance, dancing

Darwin, with his Origin of Species, his theories about Natural Selection, the Survival of the Fittest, and the influence of environment, shed a flood of light upon the great problems of plant and animal life. These things had been guessed, prophesied, asserted, hinted by many others, but Darwin, with infinite patience, with perfect care and candor, found the facts, fulfilled the prophecies, and demonstrated the truth of the guesses, hints and assertions. He was, in my judgment, the keenest observer, the best judge of the meaning and value of a fact, the greatest Naturalist the world has produced. The theological view began to look small and mean. Spencer gave his theory of evolution and sustained it by countless facts. He stood at a great height, and with the eyes of a philosopher, a profound thinker, surveyed the world. He has influenced the thought of the wisest. Theology looked more absurd than ever. Huxley entered the lists for Darwin. No man ever had a sharper sword -- a better shield. He challenged the world. The great theologians and the small scientists -- those who had more courage than sense, accepted the challenge. Their poor bodies were carried away by their friends. Huxley had intelligence, industry, genius, and the courage to express his thought. He was absolutely loyal to what he thought was truth. Without prejudice and without fear, he followed the footsteps of life from the lowest to the highest forms. Theology looked smaller still. Haeckel began at the simplest cell, went from change to change -- from form to form -- followed the line of development, the path of life, until he reached the human race. It was all natural. There had been no interference from without. I read the works of these great men -- of many others – and became convinced that they were right, and that all the theologians -- all the believers in "special creation" were absolutely wrong. The Garden of Eden faded away, Adam and Eve fell back to dust, the snake crawled into the grass, and Jehovah became a miserable myth.

I’m sure you’ve heard the phrase ‘survival of the fittest’. It’s often misused, operating on the false interpretation that fit means physically fit, therefore expressing a dog-eat-dog ethos. The strongest wins the day. But that’s not what Darwin meant, not at all. He meant most suited to, as in, the creatures most suited to – or most fit for – a specific environment are the ones with the best chance of passing on their genes.

Darwin’s ‘survival of the fittest’ is really a special case of a more general law of survival of the stable. The universe is populated by stable things. A stable thing is a collection of atoms that is permanent enough or common enough to deserve a name.

Interestingly, Darwin didn’t use the phrase “survival of the fittest” in any of his work (though he did express his admiration for it). The expression was coined five years after the publication of On the Origin of Species by Herbert Spencer in Principles of Biology in 1864.

The survival of the fittest is the ageless law of nature, but the fittest are rarely the strong. The fittest are those endowed with the qualifications for adaptation, the ability to accept the inevitable and conform to the unavoidable, to harmonize with existing or changing conditions.

After Napoleon's 1815 defeat at Waterloo, Europeans had created nation-states in the image and likeness of Napoleon. The new states became the foci of popular affection, even worship. All organized themselves as Napoleon had France, and as Hegel had prescribed, with every house numbered so that bureaucratic government could pass its science to and collect sustenance from each. The states became the purveyors of education and sources of authority. They fostered the myth that people within their borders formed distinct races with different geniuses and destinies. All partook of Charles Darwin's ideology that life is an evolutionary struggle in which the fittest survive.

Darwin's Theory Survival of the Fittest, also applies into Business. Companies which consistently innovate, keep itself updated with customer's needs, market trends, check out their competition and accordingly make the strategy to evolve and keep them ahead of competition are the ones which are best suited for survival in Business Environment Evolution

I wonder sometimes if we need the opposite to agile. We need sudden leaps forward and then periods of stability. We need systems and processes designed in tandem with each other. We need to leap to create brand new entities based on the latest thinking and software, and periods of calm where we change little. It’s a bold new way to think about change, it’s countercultural, but it’s interesting to ponder.

of the diverse systems within our brains. Optimal sculpting of the prefrontal cortex through healthy early relationships allows us to think well of ourselves, trust others, regulate our emotions, maintain positive expectations, and utilize our intellectual and emotional intelligence in moment-to-moment problem solving. We can now add a corollary to Darwin’s survival of the fittest: Those who are nurtured best survive best.

Bankruptcy cleans out the system. What’s wrong with that? South Korea went through this in the late 1990s. They didn’t have anyone to bail them out, and they had to go through the pain. Sweden did it in the early 1990s. Mexico did it. Russia did it. The list goes on and on. Competent people take over the assets from incompetent people and rebuild from a solid base. Business has always been survival of the fittest and Darwinism at its best. After all, this is what capitalism is all about.

Darwin is associated, in the popular imagination, with bloody zero-sum competition, with Tennyson’s “nature, red in tooth and claw”—with the motto “survival of the fittest.” But this wasn’t actually his phrase. It was coined by a philosopher and sociologist named Herbert Spencer and his fellow “social Darwinists,” who were promoters of white and upper-class supremacy. For Darwin, says Keltner, “survival of the kindest” would have been a better moniker. Darwin was a gentle and melancholic soul, a doting husband and adoring father of ten, deeply in love with nature from earliest childhood. His father had wanted him to be a doctor, but when at age sixteen he witnessed his first surgery, performed in those days without anesthesia, he was so horrified that for the rest of his life he couldn’t stand the sight of blood. He retreated to the woodlands and studied beetles instead. Later, he described his encounter with a Brazilian forest as “a chaos of delight, out of which a world of future & more quiet pleasure will arise.

In the physical constitution of an organized being, that is, a being adapted suitably to the purposes of life, we assume it as a fundamental principle that no organ for any purpose will be found but what is also the fittest and best adapted for that purpose. Now in a being which has reason and a will, if the proper object of nature were its conservation, its welfare, in a word, its happiness, then nature would have hit upon a very bad arrangement in selecting the reason of the creature to carry out this purpose. For all the actions which the creature has to perform with a view to this purpose, and the whole rule of its conduct, would be far more surely prescribed to it by instinct, and that end would have been attained thereby much more certainly that it ever can be by reason. Should reason have been communicated to this favored creature over and above, it must only have served it to contemplate the happy constitution of its nature, to admire it, to congratulate itself thereon, and to feel thankful for it to the beneficent cause, but not that it should subject its desires to that weak and delusive guidance, and meddle bunglingly with the purpose of nature. In a word, nature would have taken care that reason should not break forth into practical exercise, nor have the presumption, with its weak insight, to think out for itself the plan of happiness and the means of attaining it. Nature would not only have taken on herself the choice of the ends but also of the means, and with wise foresight would have entrusted both to instinct.

Why does the theory of evolution provoke such objections, whereas nobody seems to care about the theory of relativity or quantum mechanics? How come politicians don’t ask that kids be exposed to alternative theories about matter, energy, space and time? After all, Darwin’s ideas seem at first sight far less threatening than the monstrosities of Einstein and Werner Heisenberg. The theory of evolution rests on the principle of the survival of the fittest, which is a clear and simple – not to say humdrum – idea. In contrast, the theory of relativity and quantum mechanics argue that you can twist time and space, that something can appear out of nothing, and that a cat can be both alive and dead at the same time. This makes a mockery of our common sense, yet nobody seeks to protect innocent schoolchildren from these scandalous ideas. Why? The theory of relativity makes nobody angry, because it doesn’t contradict any of our cherished beliefs. Most people don’t care an iota whether space and time are absolute or relative. If you think it is possible to bend space and time, well, be my guest. Go ahead and bend them. What do I care? In contrast, Darwin has deprived us of our souls. If you really understand the theory of evolution, you understand that there is no soul. This is a terrifying thought not only to devout Christians and Muslims, but also to many secular people who don’t hold any clear religious dogma, but nevertheless want to believe that each human possesses an eternal individual essence that remains unchanged throughout life, and can survive even death intact.

There is a great deal more to evolutionary biology than survival of the fittest—although that’s all anyone seems to remember. One of Darwin’s contemporaries was Alfred Russel Wallace, who had even more profound lessons about evolution—that humans are social creatures. That we coevolve with other species as part of a fabric of interwoven and interdependent life-forms. The world isn’t entirely about competition and dominance. And species that cooperate with others succeed better than those who do not. That’s what civilization is, cooperation.” “And

It never occurred to me that advertisers only wanted to sell products and nuns and priests and parents only gave the party line but grew up with the same prejudices and instincts that everyone else had. I had swallowed it all. I had been one of those baleen whales who cruise through the ocean depths with their mouths open, ingesting everything that came along. My stomach felt full of junk. I could no longer take it all in. You didn’t have to read Marx to find out about power or Darwin to get how the fittest survived. You could live in Lewiston and figure it all out.

Why does the theory of evolution provoke such objections, whereas nobody seems to care about the theory of relativity or quantum mechanics? How come politicians don’t ask that kids be exposed to alternative theories about matter, energy, space and time? After all, Darwin’s ideas seem at first sight far less threatening than the monstrosities of Einstein and Werner Heisenberg. The theory of evolution rests on the principle of the survival of the fittest, which is a clear and simple – not to say humdrum – idea. In contrast, the theory of relativity and quantum mechanics argue that you can twist time and space, that something can appear out of nothing, and that a cat can be both alive and dead at the same time. This makes a mockery of our common sense, yet nobody seeks to protect innocent schoolchildren from these scandalous ideas. Why? The

time? After all, Darwin’s ideas seem at first sight far less threatening than the monstrosities of Einstein and Werner Heisenberg. The theory of evolution rests on the principle of the survival of the fittest, which is a clear and simple – not to say humdrum – idea. In contrast, the theory of relativity and quantum mechanics argue that you can twist time and space, that something can appear out of nothing, and that a cat can be both alive and dead at the same time. This makes a mockery of our common sense, yet nobody seeks to protect innocent schoolchildren from these scandalous ideas. Why? The theory of relativity makes nobody angry, because it doesn’t contradict any of our cherished beliefs. Most people don’t care an iota whether space and time are absolute or relative. If you think it is possible to bend space and time, well, be my guest. Go ahead and bend them. What do I care? In contrast, Darwin has deprived us of our souls. If

After Standard Oil Company founder John D. Rockefeller became the richest man in the world, he offered gardening advice to a group of young men at a Brown University Bible study. He told his admiring audience, “The American Beauty Rose can be produced in the splendor and fragrance which bring cheer to its beholder only by sacrificing the early buds which grow up around it. This is not an evil tendency in business. It is merely the working-out of a law of nature and a law of God.” Rockefeller's audacious winner-take-all metaphor about the American Beauty rose was a description of how Standard Oil had bested its competitors. The clumsy reference to God at the end of the remarks was a meager attempt to morally sanction the ideas of philosopher Herbert Spencer, who had recently seduced the robber baron community by adapting scientific ideas like “survival of the fittest” into a loose form of Social Darwinism that defined Gilded Age business.

as the social sciences advanced in the twentieth century, their course was altered by two waves of moralism that turned nativism into a moral offense. The first was the horror among anthropologists and others at “social Darwinism”—the idea (raised but not endorsed by Darwin) that the richest and most successful nations, races, and individuals are the fittest. Therefore, giving charity to the poor interferes with the natural progress of evolution: it allows the poor to breed.12 The claim that some races were innately superior to others was later championed by Hitler, and so if Hitler was a nativist, then all nativists were Nazis. (That conclusion is illogical, but it makes sense emotionally if you dislike nativism.)13 The second wave of moralism was the radical politics that washed over universities in America, Europe, and Latin America in the 1960s and 1970s. Radical reformers usually want to believe that human nature is a blank slate on which any utopian vision can be sketched. If evolution gave men and women different sets of desires and skills, for example, that would be an obstacle to achieving gender equality in many professions. If nativism could be used to justify existing power structures, then nativism must be wrong. (Again, this is a logical error, but this is the way righteous minds work.)

Why does the theory of evolution provoke such objections, whereas nobody seems to care about the theory of relativity or quantum mechanics? How come politicians don't ask that kids be exposed to alternative theories about matter, energy, space and time? After all, Darwin's ideas seem at first sight far less threatening than the monstrosities of Einstein and Werner Heisenberg. The theory of evolution rests on the principle of the survival of the fittest, which is a clear and simple - not to say humdrum - idea. In contrast, the theory of relativity and quantum mechanics argue that you can twist time and space, that something can appear out of nothing, and that a cat can be both alive and dead at the same time. This makes a mockery of our common sense, yet nobody seeks to protect innocent schoolchildren from these scandalous ideas. Why? The theory of relativity makes nobody angry, because it doesn't contradict any of our cherished beliefs. Most people don't care an iota whether space and time are absolute or relative. If you think it is possible to bend space and time, well, be my guest. Go ahead and bend them. What do I care? In contrast, Darwin has deprived us of our souls. If you really understand the theory of evolution, you understand that there is no soul. This is a terrifying thought not only to devout Christians and Muslims, but also to many secular people who don't hold any clear religious dogma, but nevertheless want to believe that each human posseses an eternal individual essence that remains unchanged throughout life, and can survive even death intact.

What Galileo and Newton were to the seventeenth century, Darwin was to the nineteenth. Darwin's theory had two parts. On the one hand, there was the doctrine of evolution, which maintained that the different forms of life had developed gradually from a common ancestry. This doctrine, which is now generally accepted, was not new. It had been maintained by Lamarck and by Darwin's grandfather Erasmus, not to mention Anaximander. Darwin supplied an immense mass of evidence for the doctrine, and in the second part of his theory believed himself to have discovered the cause of evolution. He thus gave to the doctrine a popularity and a scientific force which it had not previously possessed, but he by no means originated it. The second part of Darwin's theory was the struggle for existence and the survival of the fittest. All animals and plants multiply faster than nature can provide for them; therefore in each generation many perish before the age for reproducing themselves. What determines which will survive? To some extent, no doubt, sheer luck, but there is another cause of more importance. Animals and plants are, as a rule, not exactly like their parents, but differ slightly by excess or defect in every measurable characteristic. In a given environment, members of the same species compete for survival, and those best adapted to the environment have the best chance. Therefore among chance variations those that are favourable will preponderate among adults in each generation. Thus from age to age deer run more swiftly, cats stalk their prey more silently, and giraffes' necks become longer. Given enough time, this mechanism, so Darwin contended, could account for the whole long development from the protozoa to homo sapiens.

The barrier to disruptive innovation often isn’t knowing enough—it’s knowing way too much about how things have always been.

Social Darwinism, that bastard child of evolutionary thinking, and its cousin militarism, fostered the belief that competition among nations was part of nature’s rule and that in the end the fittest would survive. And that probably meant through war. The late nineteenth century’s admiration of the military as the noblest part of the nation and the spread of military values into civilian societies fed the assumptions that war was a necessary part of the great struggle for survival, that it might indeed be good for societies, tuning them up so to speak.

equally eagerly from the nineteenth-century polymath Herbert Spencer, the first truly global thinker – who, after reading Darwin, coined the term ‘survival of the fittest’. Hitler revered Atatürk (literally, ‘the father of the Turks’) as his guru; Lenin and Gramsci were keen on Taylorism, or ‘Americanism’; American New Dealers later adapted Mussolini’s ‘corporatism’.

Darwin’s notion of the survival of the fittest was a key element both in the Marxist concept of class warfare and of the racial philosophies which shaped Hitlerism.

natural selection explains “only the survival of the fittest, not the arrival of the fittest.

If reframing by dint of repertoire or repurposing fails, we need to devise a new frame altogether, an act of reinvention. This is exemplified by Charles Darwin. He is popularly associated with the idea of survival of the fittest. But the frame he invented is more fundamental: that all species of life have descended over time from common ancestors. That basic concept—literally a diagram of the tree of life—transformed how humans understood the origin of life on Earth and how species evolved. In this way, the reframing was not a matter of applying a new frame from one’s repertoire or finding and adapting a new frame from another context to a new problem. Rather, it can be seen as inventing a new frame altogether.

didn’t mind the fencing. Maybe even liked it. “It’s like Darwin’s law got repealed. Call it the rule of the weak.” “Okay.” “You think women can tell which men are the fittest anymore? They can’t. You see a guy who’s really cut and buff and wearing a muscle shirt to show it off, and you can figure he spends all his time in the gym, but you know something? Odds are he’s a faggot.” “Or a WrestleMania champ.” Another flash of annoyance; I’d gone too far. “I mean, look at these guys.” He waved at the wall, at the hostages on the other side. “This country was made by guys like

man progressed through the “ceaseless devouring of the weak by the strong.”127 It was actually Spencer, and not Darwin, as most people assume, who coined the term “survival of the fittest.

Actually I am even less inclined to go in that direction. It’s just another example of the same problem. This word ‘nature’, when used to imply outside of culture, is a mythic idyll. People who live close to the environment don’t try to live in harmony with nature, quite the opposite. A few generations ago we had far fewer means to resist nature, and the result was a very low life expectancy, much of which was spent wracked by disease. Death is natural, disease is natural; most nature programmes consist of one animal eating another one alive. We have known since Darwin that the morality underpinning evolution is survival of the fittest. The whole point of humanity as any kind of moral order is the struggle to overcome nature. So, for me, nature and morality are the very antithesis of each other.

In the last 25 years, criticism of most theories advanced by Darwin and the neo-Darwinians has increased considerably, and so did their defense. Darwinism has become an ideology, while the most significant theories of Darwin were proven unsupportable. The critics advanced other theories instead of 'natural selection' and the survival of the fittest'. 'Saltatory ontogeny' and 'epigenesis' are such new theories proposed to explain how variations in ontogeny and novelties in evolution are created. They are reviewed again in the present essay that also tries to explain how Darwinians, artificially kept dominant in academia and in granting agencies, are preventing their acceptance. Epigenesis, the mechanism of ontogenies, creates in every generation alternative variations in a saltatory way that enable the organisms to survive in the changing environments as either altricial or precocial forms. The constant production of two such forms and their survival in different environments makes it possible, over a sequence of generations, to introduce changes and establish novelties--the true phenomena of evolution. The saltatory units of evolution remain far-from-stable structures capable of self-organization and self-maintenance (autopoiesis). [Evolution by epigenesis: farewell to Darwinism, neo- and otherwise.]

In The Origin of Species, Charles Darwin introduced the concept known as “survival of the fittest.” Don’t you believe it. Yes, he did discuss the principle, but that is not what he called it. Darwin analyzed the concept in great detail, but referred to it as “natural selection.” The term “survival of the fittest” is nowhere to be found in his original 1859 publication, or in any of its subsequent three editions. The expression was provided by Herbert Spencer, a philosopher contemporary with Darwin, in his Principles of Biology in 1864. Spencer found the phrase descriptive of an economic process—parallel to that of biological evolution—by which companies adapt to the marketplace in order to increase their ability to grow and prosper.

This Strict Father interpretation of evolution can then be turned metaphorically into Social Darwinism, the survival of the fittest in society; and then, via the metaphor of the Moral Order Is the Natural Order, the social survival of the fittest can be seen as moral.

Langton's impression was that evolutionary theories of culture still carried a stigma from the time of social Darwinism in the nineteenth century when people were defending both war and gross social inequity on the grounds of "the survival of the fittest." But while he could certainly see the problem-after all, he'd been protesting war and social inequity most of his life-he just couldn't accept the gaping hole. If you could create a real theory of cultural evolution, as opposed to some pseudoscientific justification for the status quo, he reasoned, then you might be able to understand how cultures really worked-and among other things, actually do something about war and social inequity.

Darwin’s great advantage over Paley and other thinkers of his generation was his grasp of the immensity of time. His

Listen carefully to today’s Republican right and you hear the same social Darwinism that was used more than a century ago to justify the brazen inequality of the Gilded Age: survival of the fittest. Don’t help the poor or the unemployed or anyone who’s fallen on bad times, they say, because this only encourages laziness. America will be strong only if we reward the rich and punish the needy.

Darwin had said the fittest survived, and the Social Darwinists completed the circle. The best way to demonstrate fitness to survive was to dominate one’s fellows;

makes the biosphere robust is not evolution’s propensity to maximize fitness but rather its propensity to generate less than maximally fit yet survivable variants (survival of the fit) and a realm of possibilities (sloppy fitness space) to explore. These insights have been around for more than 160 years since Darwin published the Origin of Species. And yet our modern world has been saturated with a survival-of-the-fittest mentality, which despite what many may think, is the antithesis of how nature works.

If twentieth-century history - with its widespread belief in social Darwinism and the many terrible effects of trying to apply eugenics that resulted from it - has anything to teach us, it is that we humans have a dangerous tendency to turn the visions we construct of ourselves into self-fulfilling prophecies. The idea of the "survival of the fittest" has been misused to condone, and in some cases to justify, excesses of human greed and individualism and ignore ethical models for relating to our fellow human beings in a more compassionate spirit. Thus, irrespective of our conceptions of science, given that science today occupies such an important seat of authority in human society, it is extremely important for those in the profession to be aware of their power and to appreciate their responsibility. Science must act as its own corrective to popular misconceptions and misappropriations of ideas that could have disastrous implications for the world and humanity at large.

Rather than “Survival of the Fittest”—which wasn’t from Charles Darwin; it was a philosopher interpreting Darwin in 1864— we might have had the opposite, “Survival of the Most Cooperative.

EVOLUTION, ALTRUISM AND GENETIC SIMILARITY THEORY by J. PHILIPPE RUSHTON The reason people give preferential treatment to genetically similar others is both simple and profound: they thereby replicate their genes more effectively. Altruism is a very interesting phenomenon, even recognized by Darwin as an anomaly for his theory. How could it evolve through his hypothesized "survival of the fittest" individual when such behavior would appear to diminish personal fitness? If the most altruistic members of a group sacrificed themselves for others, they ran the risk of leaving fewer offspring to carry forward their genes for altruistic behavior? Hence altruism would be selected out, and indeed, selfishness would be selected in. Altruistic behaviors, however, occur in many animal species, some to the point of self-sacrifice (Wilson, 1975). For example, honey bees die when they sting in the process of protecting their nests. Darwin proposed the competition of "tribe with tribe" to explain altruism (1871, p. 179). Thus, a tribe of people willing to cooperate and, if necessary, sacrifice themselves for the common good would be victorious over tribes made up of those less willing or able. Subsequently Herbert Spencer (1892/93) extended this, suggesting that the operation of a 'code of amity' towards the members of their own group, and a 'code of enmity' toward those of out-groups prevailed in successful groups. In non-elaborated forms, some version of "group-selection" was held by most evolutionists for several decades. A degree of polarization followed [Wynne-Edwards' advocacy of group selection] As D. S. Wilson put it, "For the next decade, group selection rivaled Lamarkianism as the most thoroughly repudiated idea in evolutionary theory" Essentially, there did not seem to exist a mechanism by which altruistic individuals would leave more genes than individuals who cheated. The solution to this paradox is one of the triumphs that led to the new synthesis of sociobiology. Following Hamilton (1964) the answer proposed was that individuals behave so as to maximize their "inclusive fitness" rather than only their individual fitness by increasing the production of successful offspring by both themselves and their relatives, a process that has become known as kin selection. This formulation provided a conceptual breakthrough, redirecting the unit of analysis from the individual organism to his or her genes, for it is these which survive and are passed on. Some of the same genes will be found in siblings, nephews and nieces, grandchildren, cousins, etc., as well as offspring. If an animal sacrifices its life for its siblings' offspring, it ensures the survival of shared genes for, by common descent, it shares 50% of its genes with each sibling and 25% with each siblings' offspring. …the makeup of a gene pool causally affects the probability of any particular ideology being adopted, which subsequently affects relative gene frequencies. Religious, political, and other ideological battles may become as heated as they do because they have implications for genetic fitness; genotypes will thrive more in some cultures than others. … Obviously causation is complex, and it is not intended to reduce relationships between ethnic groups to a single cause. Fellow ethnics will not always stick together, nor is conflict inevitable between groups any more than it is between genetically distinct individuals. Behavioral outcomes are always mediated by multiple causes.

Darwin himself, a member of the RSPCA, was more modest in his views and actually quite empathetic toward animals, often describing in his letters and journals their capacity for misery and happiness alike. But today's evolutionary scientists seem to remember only the survival-of-the-fittest part, just as many Christians and Jews remember only the go-forth-and-subdue part of their Bible.

But then a counter-sect arose, embracing persons who thought they believed in Darwin’s novel theory. What they actually believed in was Reformed Darwinism, a religious and social theory combining ‘survival of the fittest’ with ‘Devil take the hindmost’. The important thing was to be a survivor. Take care of your tribe and your territory. Be selfish. God helps those who help themselves.

requires the creation of entirely new information. As an increasing number of evolutionary biologists have noted, natural selection explains “only the survival of the fittest, not the arrival of the fittest.

I understand why some religious people don’t like Darwin’s work on evolution. Early evolutionary theory seemed to suggest that the existence of God and, consequently, the God-mandated practice of ethical conduct are not fundamental to humankind. Evolution teaches that being human is being an animal, different from and yet fundamentally the same as other animals—not a uniquely privileged creature made by God in God’s own image. The will to survive is basic to all animals. The fittest survive.

One question I have about this theory (*Darwin) is: What basis was used to determine which species are higher or lower, and which are strong or weak? To decide that the phenomenon of the survival of the fittest is the providence of nature and that people are the highest, most evolved species seems to reflect more the strongman logic of human beings than the true state of nature. No one can say which species is the strongest because all living things depend on one another to survive (...)

In Beauvoir’s experience Darwin was way wrong. The fittest didn’t survive. They were killed by the idiocy of their neighbors, who continued to bumble along oblivious.

Handcrafted Humanity Sonnet 95 Nature always tries to trick us most strongly, Into being a filthy bunch of egotistical morons. If we stand true to our conviction of community, No cockeyed canine is gonna dictate our terms. Survival of the fittest is the motto of animal, Sacrifice for the helpless is the motto of human. The decision is to be made by none but you, What'll you spend your life as - animal or human! Let's not spend another day with cold shoulder, Let us rather put all of our shoulders together. Only then we will be a tad stronger than history, And rise as the mightiest descendant of Nature. To conquer ourselves is to conquer space and time. We live the fullest when we live as people's lifeline.

Müller’s talk echoed his earlier technical publications making the same points. In a provocative technical book, “Origination of Organismal Form,” Müller and biologist Stuart Newman argued that neo-Darwinism has “no theory of the generative.”12 In other words, neo-Darwinism cannot explain what caused new forms of life to arise. In this book, published nearly 150 years after the Origin of Species, Müller and Newman characterized the “origination of organismal form” as an unsolved problem for evolutionary theory. Yet, again, the origin of biological form is precisely what Darwinism, and later neo-Darwinism, claimed to explain. Other evolutionary biologists have echoed this concern. Many now repeat an old aphorism affirming that mutation and natural selection can account for “the survival of the fittest, but not the arrival of the fittest”13—that is, small-scale variations, but not large-scale innovations in biological form.

Arrival of the fittest is the doctrine of Holy Darwin. Most scientific." "Quant suff.!" the crowd bellowed.

Why do the racists insist on their false views? The answer is a simple one. The theory of ‘higher’ and ‘lower’ races, of the right of one race to dominate over another, justifies war between nations – it is the ideological mask concealing imperialist politics. The racists equate the class struggle in human society with the struggle going on in the animal kingdom; they make use of the reactionary theory of social-Darwinism that developed in the latter half of the nineteenth century. This theory states that modern human society is governed by biological laws that are the same as those that operate in the animal kingdom – the brute struggle for existence, the survival of the fittest, the extinction of the unfit. The racists, like the social-Darwinists, maintain that the division of human society into classes is the result of biological inequality and is due to natural selection. In this way racism attempts to use the laws of nature to explain social inequality in capitalist society. The racists developed the theory of social-Darwinism and maintained that people belonging to a certain class possess certain racial features.

Such was the case with the revolution in thought initiated by Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace. The phrase that won the day, which has been repeated endlessly over the centuries, and which neither of them composed, was simply “survival of the fittest.

I believe we have been brought to the brink by our misunderstanding of evolution as simply a continuous struggle and quest for individual fitness (as measured by the number of one’s “toys”). Human civilization has bought into the warning couched in the subtitle of Darwin’s Origin of Species book: The Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life—in other words, that life is an all-out struggle wherein the riches go to the fittest, regardless of the means by which they are attained.

I cannot help but notice that there is no problem between us that cannot be solved by your departure. —Mark Twain

irreducible complexity,” that is, structures in nature and in the human being that are so complex that it is statistically impossible that they could have come to be by chance. To appeal to a chance mutation, or to the mere selection of the fittest, or to any of the other appeals on offer in the various heritages that spring from Darwinism, simply makes no sense. Living systems have an irreducible complexity to them that makes it statistically impossible that all of the necessary but highly improbable steps were taken at the same time—and without such statistically impossible simultaneity, life could not be. What this suggests, it is argued, is the need for a designer.

I concur with Charles Darwin, that we are social animals and we will grow as human beings through empathy, kindness, and compassion for others. We will develop and display these qualities through the development of higher CHAKRAS. If we are stuck in our survival of the fittest attitudes Charles Darwin sees only a bleak future for mankind.

A reflective mind will keep in mind the scientific and historical evidence that death is as much a fact as is life. The belief in life hereafter completes the cause and effect puzzle even in moral sphere of life. In life hereafter, everyone will get deterministic reward for intentional acts in this life based on the ability and freedom in the circumstances which one faced in this life, no matter whether rich or poor, white or black, male or female, strong or weak and elite or commoner. That makes life of everyone meaningful rather than a constant struggle of survival in one form of matter to the other form of matter where survival instinct is the only moral code.

Both Hegel and Darwin can be mis-used to support a belief in the “survival of the fittest".

The scientific association with a big idea, the “brand name,” goes to the one who connects the dots, not the one who makes a casual observation—even Charles Darwin, who uncultured scientists claim “invented” the survival of the fittest, was not the first to mention it.

After the lockdown, when markets become less active, the subject of mainstream economics faces another tough ground. There are millions of poor people who do not have work. When lockdown happens, a great many people find resource markets stalled where they used to get income. More than ever, such crises necessitate the flow of resources from the haves to the have-nots. But, frozen goods and resource markets cannot help much, especially the poor and vulnerable people. That is where, pro-social behaviour and beyond-market distribution of resources is necessary. However, mainstream economics treats altruism as ‘impure’. It looks at altruism in the paradigm of pursuing self-interest.

Corona Virus has once again reminded us that the world at the level of viruses and bacteria may operate on survival instincts alone where survival of the fittest is the only moral code. Human body structure might have evolved to be in the present form, but the Ultimate Creator has given us the human soul and spirit which has consciousness like animals, but also has conscience. To focus attention on consciousness alone is to live with survival instincts and ignore higher morals. To act on goodness suggested by conscience requires looking beyond animal instincts and embrace goodness as a habit and wilful choice. Accountability in life hereafter urges that and promises cause and effect in moral matters.

In the Godless worldview, the battle of survival ends with destruction eventually for Corona Virus, bacteria, other unicellular organisms and multi-cellular organisms like animals and humans the same way. Humans having consciousness and conscience may define their personal meaning of life by themselves as to how best to spend few million breaths under the sun in maximizing self-pleasure. But, the life ends without due justice for many people who are killed, robbed and discriminated against and it ends without due punishment for many people who cause these crimes. Some are lucky and some are unlucky in the mortal combat of survival of the fittest.

The sixth secret is that, as Charles Darwin tried to explain, survival of the fittest is not determined by competitive strength, but rather by social desirability. There’s more money than certified talent in the world of investing, so outstanding investment managers have many choices because so many investors want to be their clients.

Survival of the fittest," which Sax had always considered a useless tautology. But if social Darwinists were taking over, then maybe the concept gained importance, as a religious dogma of the ruling order....

We took all the old-world systems and digitized them. Skeuomorphism, the design concept of making digital items resemble their real-world counterparts, was a way to aid the transition into the new era. Mail became e-mail, with ‘addresses’ and inboxes. We made ‘folders’ and ‘trash’ and ‘desktops’ as digital equivalents. PowerPoint had ‘slides’ like early slide projectors and floppy disks represented ‘saving’, which is wonderfully anachronistic, as is ‘return’ which stands for ‘carriage return’ from typewriters – and don’t even start me on ‘cc’ for carbon copy.

We need to stop thinking of technology as a tattoo, a surface-level commitment best kept on a conspicuous but infrequently used part of the body. Instead, let’s think of it as oxygen: essential to the beating heart of your business.

An intolerance of bureaucracy Small companies feel different to big ones. I have worked at both. In large companies, if I am travelling for work I will be forced to use some admin staff to book a hotel with a corporate travel provider. Perhaps eight e-mails will be sent to me with various approval chains and updates, my boss will be asked to agree, a business reason is noted. Some systems will talk to others, and my assistant will orchestrate the whole thing. It will take perhaps 10 minutes of my time, 30 minutes of my assistant’s, and likely an hour of other people’s in back offices. All this to book a hotel stay for $200 that on the Hotel Tonight app I could book in around three seconds and for $100 cheaper. Why is it I can call an hour-long meeting with 20 people, costing perhaps $2,500 of time and nobody cares, but I need to ensure I use approved agents to get a hotel room? Every company, large and small, needs to reject bureaucracy and busy work. We worry a lot about seniority and protocol, but often it is an excuse. I love a memo sent out by Elon Musk, in which he says: ‘Anyone at Tesla can and should e-mail/talk to anyone else according to what they think is the fastest way to solve a problem for the benefit of the whole company. You can talk to your manager’s manager without his permission, you can talk directly to a VP in another department, you can talk to me.’ He goes on to say, while realizing the challenge and opportunity ahead and what they have against them, ‘We obviously cannot compete with the big car companies in size, so we must do so with intelligence and agility’ (Bariso, 2017). Get better at knowing when to call and when to e-mail, when to pop over for a chat, which partner meetings to never accept. A lack of bureaucracy doesn’t mean chaos, it’s about focusing on the best way to make a difference and sometimes that means anarchically barging into a meeting to get someone to make a decision. I often think teams are too big. We’ve long heard about two pizza teams, but let’s be more flexible. Tom Peters talks about the need to recruit the very best talent and pay the world’s best compensation. Steve Jobs was widely reported to have stated that a small number of A+ people can outperform any large teams of B players (Keller and Meaney, 2017). I see a lot of time and energy spent bringing people into the loop, people being part of things to look important and not adding clear value.

Change requires companies to step change rather than incrementally improve. The world’s best candle-makers continually made better candles, but they never invented the lightbulb. Today companies need to leap to new business models and rethink fundamentals and what they stand for, not slowly tweak what has worked before.

Our role is to forget everything that went before us – not to apply technology to existing solutions, but to rethink how we’d create businesses today in this context of the post-digital age.

The best swordsman in the world doesn’t need to fear the second-best swordsman in the world; no, the person for him to be afraid of is some ignorant antagonist who has never had a sword in his hand before; he doesn’t do the thing he ought to do, and so the expert isn’t prepared for him. MARK TWAIN, 1889