Introduction
‘Survival of the Fittest’ continues to be a confusing phrase, perhaps because it is often envisioned as individuals competing against individuals, where the fittest species collectively sends the other species to extinction.
In ‘The Origin of Species’, Charles Darwin uses the term ‘Natural Selection’ to describe the key evolutionary process. The phrase ‘Survival of the Fittest’, although typically attributed to Darwin, was introduced by Herbert Spencer and then adopted by Darwin in a later book. Darwin wrote:
“This preservation, during the battle for life, of varieties which possess any advantage in structure, constitution, or instinct, I have called Natural Selection; and Mr. Herbert Spencer has well expressed the same idea …show more content…
Although no perfect examples come to mind, the example of the Dodo, a flightless bird native to the island of Mauritius, is a somewhat familiar one. Mauritius was an uninhabited island when first settled by the Dutch in the early 17th century.(BBC News, Jonathan Fryer, 14 Sep 2002.) The Dodo had no natural enemies, and had not fear of humans or the rats that stow away in the holds of ships. Between over-hunting and predation by invasive species, it was extinct by 1681. (Ditto …show more content…
Besides the important extinction events, evolution can occur gradually, as subsets of an ever-changing genome lose out due to being on the wrong end of a variation that gives some a slight reproductive advantage. It is clear by now that modern humans did not kill all the Neanderthals and take over. They interbred, and as time progressed the Neanderthals were at a disadvantage as compared to the ‘local’ modern humans who by then were really a blend of a previous ‘modern’ human and Neanderthals. Pure Neanderthals were a branch of the tree that got pruned, but the same can be said the ‘modern’ humans before this intermixing occurred. The old view of man’s evolution as so episodic, really just an artifact of the sparsity of human fossils, has contributed to the idea of ‘survival of the fittest’. It’s time to take that phrase from our scientific
‘Survival of the Fittest’ continues to be a confusing phrase, perhaps because it is often envisioned as individuals competing against individuals, where the fittest species collectively sends the other species to extinction.
In ‘The Origin of Species’, Charles Darwin uses the term ‘Natural Selection’ to describe the key evolutionary process. The phrase ‘Survival of the Fittest’, although typically attributed to Darwin, was introduced by Herbert Spencer and then adopted by Darwin in a later book. Darwin wrote:
“This preservation, during the battle for life, of varieties which possess any advantage in structure, constitution, or instinct, I have called Natural Selection; and Mr. Herbert Spencer has well expressed the same idea …show more content…
Although no perfect examples come to mind, the example of the Dodo, a flightless bird native to the island of Mauritius, is a somewhat familiar one. Mauritius was an uninhabited island when first settled by the Dutch in the early 17th century.(BBC News, Jonathan Fryer, 14 Sep 2002.) The Dodo had no natural enemies, and had not fear of humans or the rats that stow away in the holds of ships. Between over-hunting and predation by invasive species, it was extinct by 1681. (Ditto …show more content…
Besides the important extinction events, evolution can occur gradually, as subsets of an ever-changing genome lose out due to being on the wrong end of a variation that gives some a slight reproductive advantage. It is clear by now that modern humans did not kill all the Neanderthals and take over. They interbred, and as time progressed the Neanderthals were at a disadvantage as compared to the ‘local’ modern humans who by then were really a blend of a previous ‘modern’ human and Neanderthals. Pure Neanderthals were a branch of the tree that got pruned, but the same can be said the ‘modern’ humans before this intermixing occurred. The old view of man’s evolution as so episodic, really just an artifact of the sparsity of human fossils, has contributed to the idea of ‘survival of the fittest’. It’s time to take that phrase from our scientific