The maxim “survival of the fittest” is thus a tautology.Īnd boy has that caused problems! Not, I might add, problems for biologists, but problems for some who comment on biology, from creationists to philosophers of science. Given that “fitness” is the tendency to survive and reproduce then, obviously, it is the fittest who tend to survive and reproduce. Allen Orr: “In the crudest terms, fitness involves the ability of organism … to survive and reproduce in the environment in which they find themselves”. In Darwinian terms “fitness” is the ability to survive and reproduce. That’s because the phrase is tautological. Which is rather a pity since that phrase is not how scientists state the principles of Darwinism. If one phrase could be said to have percolated into popular consciousness as summing up Darwin’s theory of natural selection, that phrase would be “survival of the fittest”.
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