CHAT: Survival of the fittest (was: Religion etc.)

bjm10@CORNELL.EDU wrote:

> 3:  [...] unable to interbreed" presumes that the organism can
> have sex in the first place, therefore, it cannot be a universal principle).
And it too is a dispositional property, as in the question:  How many species
of (morphologically indistinguishable) fish in Wisconsin?  To test all
ten thousand lakes would require at least 2 x 10^8 breeding experiments....

> "Survival of the fittest" is a out-dated term that should be relegated to
> the same category as "phlogiston" and "aether".
The phrase is about the (local) direction of evolution, not the fact or the
mechanism of evolution.  Its implication is that organisms evolve toward better
engineering design (balancing the constraints of the environment, available
energy, etc.).  This is pretty impressive, and distinguishes Darwinism
proper from various non-D. evolutionary theories, which see natural
selection merely as the executioner of the unfit.  Not for nothing did the
authors of the modern synthesis compare evolution to Shakespeare:
it creates exquisitely precise adaptations.

(This is not the same as saying that evolution has an overall global direction,
which is not the case.)

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