"Survival of the fittest" disputed

[kiki5711]

how about "survival of the richest"?

That implies Paris Hilton is going to reproduce.

[Coito ergo sum]

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-11063939

To summarise, a PhD student from Bristol University has published an article detailing how biodiversity varies directly with 'living space'; then, they have interpreted this as meaning that the availability of habitat and food is the primary driving force of evolution - not 'survival of the fittest'.

Would this not support what we already know, though? Why would species die out from lack of space or food? Because they can't compete with the other species occupying that space or the species that they share a food source with, I'm sure. Thoughts?

I smell a political motivation for the study.

Also, I always take a news article about a study or scientific paper with a grain of salt. Journalists are stupid and almost always get it wrong.

The article starts off with a typical mischaracterization. Survival of the fittest is term invented by Herbert Spencer, and Darwin only later used it as a metaphor for his "natural selection." Darwin's natural selection was "better adapted for immediate, local environment" means that animals with better adaptations will survive to reproduce more. It wasn't "survival of the fittest" meaning the "most physically powerful or fit" would survive.

Having more living space means more animals can survive and procreate. And, the little blurb in the article about animals avoiding competition is, of course, entirely consistent with evolution from Darwin on. Of course animals avoid competition. One way to not lose a game is to not play, so if there are spaces available for animals to live where they aren't at risk for being eaten then they will fuck and procreate making more animals, etc.

On a google search, I see stuff like "survival of the fittest disputed." Such bullshit. Nobody uses "survival of the fittest" as a descriptor for evolution, other than as a shorthand or colloquial metaphor. It's not scientific and never was. So, if this professor wrote a paper "disputing survival of the fittest" then it's a pretty short debate...

[Robert_S]

I always preferred accurate to pithy. YMMV.

But memetic selection does not seem to.

Memes aren't genes, they're analogous and, like all analogies, there are limitations to its applicability.

I was being something of a smart alack, but I think we'll be dealing with that "survival of the fittest" meme for some time yet just because it is the short little phrase that's hard to forget. It doesn't take as much effort to spread that meme as it does to spread a less deceptive description precisely because of it's structure.

[Trolldor]

Well, Survival of the fittest isn't innaccurate if you read it as 'that most well fit to its environment'

[Gawdzilla Sama]

Well, Survival of the fittest isn't innaccurate if you read it as 'that most well fit to its environment'

Take the "most" out of it? The difference between first and second in the survival game is a very close run thing,

[Trolldor]

Well, anything surviving today can't be considered a 'loser' in the race unless by natural processes it's becoming extinct.

[hackenslash]

Well, Survival of the fittest isn't innaccurate if you read it as 'that most well fit to its environment'

Well, apart from the fact that that doesn't actually parse correctly in English, it still isn't accurate, because the word 'most' implies that only the strong survive, which is anything but accurate. If you want a pithy but accurate phrase, then mine is the one I'll go with, because it gives precisely the right picture and is unambiguous.

[Warren Dew]

I don't think either the article or the paper it refers to disputes "survival of the fittest"; rather, it argues for another factor also being comparably important.

I suspect that point wasn't understood by the write of the article, and so wasn't conveyed well by the article.

I think the point is not that creatures which manage to exploit a larger environment simply gain more resources, which is arguably an aspect of "survival of the fittest"; rather, it's that a larger environment supports more biodiversity. For example, when pangaea broke apart, it was luck that determined which creatures ended up on which land masses; however, the ones who ended up on the larger land masses had more descendants with greater biodiversity, allowing them to adapt more easily to environmental change. That's why the introduction of species from large land masses to small ones tend to be more successful - like rabbits in Australia - than introductions from small land masses to large ones.

[Pappa]

First define fitness.

Already been done. Fitness is defined as an expectation with regard to number of offspring.

The term has always been misleading. It should be 'survival to reproduction of the sufficiently fit, on average'.

In The Extended Phenotype (I think), Dawkins defines 6 or 7 different types of fitness commonly used by different biologists, with quite different implications depending on which you use.

[RandomGuyOnCouch]

Surely the survival of the fittest implies that there is competition over the resources in the habitat? If no conflict arises, then obviously other factors will be the main driving force... And where conflicts arise you can be pretty sure that if only one species survives, that species was the fittest. Unless artifical selection intervened, of course.

Darwin was explicit about that when he explained his theory too.

If I'm not mistaken, Darwin didn't really think to much of the phrase.

Keep in mind, too, that even accepting natural selection as an integral part of evolutionary theory, Darwin himself spent many years lecturing that there is, in fact, a lot more to evolution.

With regards to OP, since "fittest" can mean so many things in terms of evolutionary viability, access resources are just another measure of this fitness, whether it be the ability to cope with little to no resources available (the tardigrade), the fortune to be evolving in an area with few predators (most domesticated animals), et cetera. I agree that it just sounds like some lazy academic is making abundant use of semantics to avoid doing real research or make a real point.

[Xamonas Chegwé]

Surely the survival of the fittest implies that there is competition over the resources in the habitat? If no conflict arises, then obviously other factors will be the main driving force... And where conflicts arise you can be pretty sure that if only one species survives, that species was the fittest. Unless artifical selection intervened, of course.

You appear to be assuming that inter-species competition is more important than intra-species competition in evolution - not necessarily so.

[DRSB]

Darwin envisioned these scarcity-generated selection pressures because he assumed that our ancestors lived in a world of scarcity. But did they really? How many were there of them?
A different take on the matter: Christopher Ryan in "Sex at Dawn":
"During the many millennia before agriculture, the entire number of Homo sapiens on the planet never surpassed a million people and certainly never approached the current population of Chicago. Furthermore, recently obtained DNA analysis suggests several population bottlenecks caused by environmental catastrophes reduced our species to just a few hundred individuals as recently as 70000 years ago.... Most of our ancestors lived in a largely unpopulated world chockfull of food."

[mistermack]

To summarise, a PhD student from Bristol University has published an article detailing how biodiversity varies directly with 'living space'; then, they have interpreted this as meaning that the availability of habitat and food is the primary driving force of evolution - not 'survival of the fittest'.

Would this not support what we already know, though? Why would species die out from lack of space or food? Because they can't compete with the other species occupying that space or the species that they share a food source with, I'm sure. Thoughts?

There is something in what this guy says. But what he says is not exactly new. Benign conditions like the warm rain forests do allow for greater biodiversity, because the stress levels are less, so extinctions are less. You don't get the climate butting in and wiping out the more marginal species.
But other more stressful environments have the habit of excluding all but the most specialised, so you get fewer species and less diversity.
So he's wrong to generalise, it's not just down to the availability of habitat and food, I would say it's more down to the harshness, or not, of the environment.
Of course, harsh environments offer less food anyway, so it's all connected.
.

[mistermack]

Furthermore, recently obtained DNA analysis suggests several population bottlenecks caused by environmental catastrophes reduced our species to just a few hundred individuals as recently as 70000 years ago...

That's not necessarily the case.
The apparent bottleneck can be the result of one small population undergoing some change that prevented them from interbreeding with the majority of their cousins, and eventually displacing them.
If a few hundred become isolated, by a change in the course of a river say, they can multiply and eventually be unable or unwilling to breed with the majority population when the isolation ends. Instead they eventually replace them, and genetically it looks as if the species nearly became extinct, as their genes go back to such a small original group.

This sort of thing can happen with sophisticated creatures like humans, because we have complicated cultural lives that could prohibit interbreeding, and we are prone to wiping out competitors of our own species.
.

[Pappa]

Survival of the headline-grabbing sound-bite.

Move on, nothing to see.

+1