Survival Fittest
What do you think about survival of the fittest and its absence today?
I thought about this today - its just a generalization and there are exceptions:
A lot of wealthy people in this world tend to be thinner and weaker, mainly because it is the smart people in our society that are financially succesful. I know a lot of physically strong guys that have low brainpower, but fit the image of the men that were the "fittest" in the early days of man. Today, many of them do not succeed because survival of the fittest has almost become survival of the smartest. It's unnatural to me and kind of scares me. What do you guys think about this?
Today, as always, "survival of the fitest" is expressed through reproductive success. Ones survival, and their reproductive success, used to be more a measure of being able to deal with more extreme environments, but even in the past this never ultimately meant that dealing with harsh environments was best done by the physically strongest individuals. Craftiness has been a mainstay of Homo sapiens for a long time, otherwise it becomes questionable that Homo sapien could ever have replaced neanderthalensis in Europe if robust charateristics were the only benefit in past times. So, no, physically strong individuals were rarely the best fit image in the early days of men, in fact these large bodies would have had higher energy demands and would have been selected against heavily in times of food scarcity.
But, at the same time, to imply that more intelligent people have more sucess with regard to "survival of the fittest" today is also a mistaken conclussion. These same individuals who use their intelligence to find financial success also seem to lean towards a tendancy to have smaller families (less children). In fact these people who found financial success through education and the application of intelligence show the lowest birth rates in society, quite frequently only having 1 or 2 children. Based on "survival of the fittest" they are actually proving to be quite unfit. Meanwhile everyone else in society represents a slightly higher birth rate and, in the strictess darwinian terms, they have proven to be the most fit. (NOTE - this relies that each group will have children of a similiar reproductive sucess as their parents because reproductive healthiness is actually based on grandchildren, not children. This is because children could die before reaching a reproductive age or could be sterile)
My conclussion is that in past times, because of food scarcity, food availability would have been the dividing line of who was or who wasn't reproductively successful. Crafty thin people would have found a greater success in this environment and would have converted this success into reproductive success. In modern times, however, the dividing line of reproductive success is more acutely economical in that people of lower economic strata are proving to be more reproductively fit because their health is good enough, and their stomaches are full enough such that they are proving to have the most children (overall and per capita) and most of their children survive to become reproductive as well.
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