Re: CHAT: Religion, Philosophy & Politics

On Thu, May 04, 2000 at 04:30:18PM -0400, John Cowan wrote:
> bjm10@CORNELL.EDU wrote:
>
> > That means "survival of those who survive"--that is all that "fit" means.
>
> Actually, no.  "Fitness" in this sense means "well-designed, by engineering
> criteria".  Darwin did not discover a tautology!
>
> See http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/evolphil/tautology.html for a detailed
> explanation.
I'm not impressed by that site's explanations.  I think that "survival
of the fittest" is a tautology, but that there's more to the theory
than that one phrase.  And that's more or less what the site tries to
say, except that it phrases it as an explication of the word
"fittest."

Ed