Okay, okay I know. I'm lazy. This is a response on the spiritual humanism forums in regards to Social Darwinism. Since I'm stuck on the 4th page of the argument I'm not likely to be heard, but the essay was nice enough I think I can blog it.
Evolution is not survival of the fittest. That's right, you heard me. Not the fittest. Not by the way you are vastly likely to define 'fittest.'
A successful capitalist who causes twice as much pain and suffering and loss in his terrible trek to success, is not fit. He's destroying his environment. Evolution works against those people, in that in 10 million years the successful capitalist will have poisoned his own gene pool into oblivion.
Evolution is survival of the balanced, of those who fit best in their ecology. There are niches, and whoever fits in the niche better is more fit, can have more babies, and survive. That's why squirrels don't make wolves go extinct, and crows don't take over the Hummingbird nectar. Taken in a social context, the only society that survives is one that is sustainable. All other societies will, by the definition of unsustainable, go extinct as evolution progresses.
Really, evolution is by no means a perfect process. It's slow, and environments change. And if you have some trait, male nipples, an appendix, your coccyx, that does not increase your fitness, but also doesn't stop you from reproducing, then that trait will not go away. Evolution is the survival of the barely adequate at best, and there is lots of room for improvement.
We live in a culture, in a communal society. We're praerie dogs, dwarf mongooses, ants. Having babies is not always the best way to perpetuate the species. Midwives, aunts, even killers have an effect on who has babies and who does not. And now with genetic engineering we've got cultural control over our gene pool in an unprecedented fashion.
So it's not always "Kill or be killed." It's not always "Survival of the fittest." And the driving goal of any one human does not need to be "Have as many babies as possible." And as for Social Darwinism, they fail to account for the fact that people who care, people who build, people who come together and search for the common good are a vital part of our cultural evolution. So no, it's not betray everyone and be a jerk, and die with as much money to bequeath to your fat offspring as possible. If you really applied evolution to society, the only thing you could say was, if we can sustain our society longer, over more diverse and more adverse conditions, then we will evolve in that direction. Maybe. As I said, evolution is not perfect.
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