A point. A question or two.

“Survival of the Fittest’ is a great and well known phrase. But what does it mean? What does it presage?

Fittest *for what? Fittest to survive? Whoops. That would be a tautology. And pretty meaningless.

Fittest *to what? Fittest to fit an environmental niche? So what? It seems the niches are pretty danmed small and restricted to a very few places in an enormous Universe.

Fittest for the future? Whoops. There would have to be some sort of future being moved toward for which ‘fitness’ is slowly being achieved. Or are we perhaps going backwards? How do we know? We don’t even know what ‘fittest’ means unless we presume it is us.

Maybe fitness just, simply, for evolving life. Hold on, though. What do we mean by ‘evolve’ and ‘life’. It would make no developmental sense from what we see.

Life hasn’t got a smidgen easier to be in. We haven’t ‘evolved’ a longer life, even after a couple of billion years. Or a better one in terms of disease, eating, reproducing. How come we haven’t evolved genes that would keep us alive for 500 years? That would have been useful. Why hasn’t our metabolism been refined by evolution so that we can get by for six months on a cup of water? Eating and drinking every damned day has been a friggin’ chore. Women were dying in droves in difficult childbirth right up to a century ago, and it wasn’t a new gene set that changed it. How come? One would have thought, from a ‘life’ perspective, that dying in childbirth would have been evolved out of by now. Now THAT would be evolution! That’s the sort of fitness that we could appreciate.

And the fitness mechanism. Slowly developing fitter and fitter genes (whatever that means) and the culling and withering of less fitting genes? One would think by now there would be Arnie Swartzenegger style genes all over the place and hardly any ‘unfit’ ones left. But we are so fragile. We cark it in huge numbers by the minute.

Bugger Giraffes.