Is 'survival of the fittest' a tautology?

[Gigantopithecus]

I posed this question to a class and was surprised by many of the answers they gave.

Basically, if evolution by means of natural selection posits the fittest survive, and those that survive are the fittest, isn't this a tautology?

What say you?

 

[cquark]

Originally posted by: Gigantopithecus
I posed this question to a class and was surprised by many of the answers they gave.

Basically, if evolution by means of natural selection posits the fittest survive, and those that survive are the fittest, isn't this a teleological argument?

What say you?

I'm not sure that the word "teleological" means what you think it means. Teleology is the supposition that there is design or purpose in nature, which is not a supposition made by natural selection or the popular statement "survival of the fittest."

In any case, "survival of the fittest" is a poor description of natural selection and is one you will rarely, if ever, find in the scientific literature. When the phrase is used, it's not as an argument, but rather as a definition, much like Newton's second law defining force through the equation F=ma.

The core idea of natural selection is that inherited variations of characteristics lead to different reproductive success. What matters is not that you survive--after all, you won't in the long run--but how many offspring you produce that themselves reproduce. It's also woth noting that fitness should not be treated as a characteristic of individual members of a species, but instead should be treated as a statistical characteristic of genes in a population of a species.

 

[Gigantopithecus]

LOL. Teleological? What was I thinking? I meant a tautology. Edited, and thanks for the correction and input.

 

[Mark R]

"Survival of the fittest" is a poor way to think about evolution. Darwin himself did not use the phrase in the first edition of Origin of Species. What Darwin said is that heritable variations lead to differential reproductive success. This is not circular or tautologous. It is a prediction that can be, and has been, experimentally verified (Weiner 1994).

See here

 

[unipidity]

Well, yes. Some things are more likely to survive (or rather, reproduce) due to whatever traits, attributes etc etc and we call them fit. Because they survive. And those things that survive tend to be fit. Meh. Totally tautological. But in no way does that impact on evolution- quite the opposite- there is no way to determine fitness other than by seeing how it affects long term reproductive success. No outside observer saying 'yes, a slightly more concave eye is better', but rather the fact of it BEING better.