🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <96932@netnews.upenn.edu> weemba@sagi.wistar.upenn.edu (Matthew P Wiener) writes:
>In article <1992Nov10.004237.50028@Cookie.secapl.com>, frank@Cookie (Frank Adams) writes:
>>>>                                      And I think his criticism is
>>>>valid; it isn't clear what slogans such as "survival of the fittest"
>>>>can be other than tautologies.
>
>>>If you're silly enough to define fitness as survival, sure.
>
>>I think fitness really pretty much is defined as survival, as Daryl has
>>argued in other postings.  (At least, survival of your genes.)
>
>But it's never defined as survival_of_the_species, which is what the
>"survival" in SOTF is referring to.

I will agree that given fitness as survival of your genes, and survival of
the species as the intended meaning of survival in SOTF, SOTF is not a
tautology.  On the other hand, it doesn't a whole lot of interesting
content.

>>I think the real content of "survival of the fittest" is that
>>"fittest" is a naturalistic concept.
>
>Part of it is.  I made that point several times in my postings.

You seemed to be saying that "fittest" has a naturalistic *definition* -- in
terms of things like cardiovascular efficiency, etc.  I don't think it does.
It's just that the theory of evolution claims (among other things) that, in
fact, these are only kinds of things contributing to fitness.