Survival Of The Fittest Essays (1325 words) - Charles Darwin

Survival Of The Fittest Chaim H. Respes IH 52 Term Paper Natural Selection to Survival of the Fittest Charles Darwin felt strongly that observations made on large scale explorations such as his voyage on the Beagle showed conclusively that many clearly different organisms, animals as well as plants, were related to one another buy some unknown law. In other words Darwin was trying to prove that evolution existed. However Darwin does outline how a purely natural process of selection could produce similar effects, and thus explain the development of new species without reference to supernatural intervention. Taking that into consideration, I believe that by Natural Selection Darwin is trying to portray the struggle for existence and adaptation for survival among living things. With Natural Selection, Darwin used this term to explain the casual mechanism, which is responsible for the operation of his theory. He would go about and abandon his term in favor of the term Survival of the Fittest. Although he received criticism from so many of his peers for using Natural Selection, the term is quite important because virtually all biologists used it as the explanation for the mechanism. A main reason why Natural Selection was not very popular was because evolution requires enormously long periods of time, that the everyday experience of human beings provides them with no ability to interpret such histories. Looking at Darwin's position, Survival of the Fittest had a great meaning on the struggle for existence and Darwin's emphasis on abundance. First looking at Survival of the fittest, it's a phrase that describes the outcome of a competition where there is no possibility of predicting the outcome in advance because of the complexity of the conditions of the competition. It describes only the effect or outcome of an event by its very nature and regardless of the situation in which it is used. For example, if it were used to describe the outcome of an auto race such as the Nascar, using the term, It will be survival of the fittest would indicate that the victor would be unknown until the end of the race. Similarly, if discussing the survival of a business in a collapsing economy or perhaps the survival of a race of people during fierce wars would indicate that nothing would be known about the outcome until the end of the particular event. Secondly Survival of the Fittest was used extensively because it was a better, more descriptive, explanation of the mechanism of which evolution occurred. The term contains an implicit assumption that survivors are an improved form of organism compared to those, which do not survive. Although intelligence is a key to improvements it is not however true for the field of biological reproduction. There is no human intelligence available to weed out the defectives and alter the process toward a more desirable end. As more individuals are produced that can possibly survive, there must in every case be a struggle for existence, either one individual with another of the same species, or with the individuals of distinct species, or with physical conditions of life. Keeping that in mind, I came upon one of the greatest mysteries of biological history, the vanishing of the dinosaurs. Here Survival of the Fittest plays a routine role because the fittest were some form of bacteria. Does that mean that the smaller the organism the more chances of it to survive? A look at the fossil record shows that 99.99% of the survivors were simpler organisms and the survivors that we know of today are not the 0.01% of survivors that are more fit from a complexity standpoint and thus prove the methodology of the theory. So what does the term fittest mean? It is speculated that the term fittest refers to an organism which has the best capability for acquiring and using all the available nutrients, all while developing or having a capability of fending off physical threats to its existence. However this concept would indeed be an explanation for a certain type of organism. For example, there are many coral deposits throughout the world, some which are immense in size such as the body coral, which is currently in Florida. Unfortunately marine coral is really not an organism, but