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Letters
Letters
Natural Selection • The Sanctity of Tissue • Let Us Suffer If We Want • Intentions versus Promises • Course Pleasures • Scientists Need Philosophy
Natural Selection
SIR: In response to Fred Leavitt’s excellent article defending natural selection against the charge of being a mere tautology with thus zero explanatory power (Issue 28), I’d like to add two points. Firstly, criticising the catchphrase “survival of the fittest” for saying that the fittest are defined as those who survive, thus rendering “survival of the fittest” into the agreed tautology “survival of those that survive”, does not do credit to modern evolutionary biology. Sterile workers in the colonies of the social insects have evolved because the sterile worker’s fitness has been increased not through increased survival (and concomitant reproduction) of individual workers, but because the worker can help propagate the genes carried in its own body by helping copies of the same genes carried in the bodies of its kin; in such cases of kin selection, whilst direct fitness may be reduced, inclusive fitness is increased. And regardless of this point, “survival of the fittest”, a phrase not even coined by Darwin but by Herbert Spencer, does not capture in any way the totality of modern evolutionary biology and is a fairly trivial statement to criticise. Secondly, the principle of natural selection is not a tautology, given that it rests on three criteria about the actual state of the world being fulfilled, as argued in Leavitt’s article: there must be variation in the traits of organisms in a population; the traits must be to some extent heritable; and there must be a difference in survival and reproduction associated with different trait variants.
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