Will Darwinism Survive?

Poor Charles Darwin. He is so misunderstood. Everyone says “Darwin? Oh yeah. Survival of the fittest.” It is true that being fit may help you to survive and reproduce but that is only a small part of what Darwin was trying to say.

Fitness depends on your environment. What Darwin observed was that birds of a species, when exposed to different environmental conditions, over time developed small differences in characteristics such as the size and shape of their beaks. These changes were related to factors such as the kinds of food available to them. Long thin beaks were good for gathering some foods, short stout beaks were better for other kinds. Whatever shape worked better tended to be preserved because its possessors survived and multiplied more successfully.

But fitness could also be related to how a bird looked to its potential mates. A male who looked more attractive or behaved more aggressively might spread those characteristics by fertilizing more eggs. A female might build a better nest to take care of the eggs.

Changes in the environment could change the characteristics of the species that survived. For instance a drying climate that caused loss of forests could, by favoring agility on the ground rather than in trees, develop a new species of apes who walked upright. And if staying together in families or flocks or tribes made survival more likely the survivors would spread the traits, such as empathy and ability to communicate, that facilitate staying together.

Notice that there is competition between various traits for survival. Is looking good and being aggressive more or less important for species survival than being able to communicate well? The only way we can know for certain is to wait and see what traits survive. And even then we will only have the answer for a given environment. It is not survival of the individual we are talking about.

Can a species survive so well that it multiplies beyond the capacity of its environment to support it? The human species may currently be working on a test of that hypothesis. Dinosaurs may have tested it too.