Who is fit Those who evolve?The survival of the fitest Evolutionist ;they seem to all drop dead? It cant be?

Some body has to be fit .Unless the Theory is bogus?
Answers:
"Survival of the fittest" is indeed a misleading formulation. There is no absolute measurement for fitness - what makes you more likely to survive today might hinder you tomorrow and vice versa. So it is not like everything is striving upwards that previously determined fitness slope. Therefore many of the interpretations of Darwinism from early last century where wrong. You can't derive rules from evolution like "society should weed out weak indivudals" or stuff like that. It follows that the only thing that really matters in terms of evolution is to survive, or more precisely, to exist. Personally I go as far as to say that "reproduce as much as possible" is not the only strategy. I consider stones as a special case of evolution - they manage to survive for a very long time, too. I see evolution as just "the likely thing will happen".As for dropping dead: it is not the individual that evolution operates on. It is the population, ie the gene that evokes a specific behaviour. Death can also be predetermined by evolution, because it might be benefitial for the population.Edit: in reply to your additional comment, thanks, and I am not saying that death is necessarily always a good idea. Humans live quite long, probably also because they are costly to manufacture. Insects don't live very long, but are also very successful. We humans are free to set our own goals for life, and if it is to live long and well, so be it. The ones who figure out how to live longer will live longer ;-)

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Clearly not you. Please die now.Thank you.

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"fit" means intelligent enough to feed yourself and your mate, physically healthy enough to be able to overcome most common diseases, and kind enough to not have an entire society at your throat, threatening your existence. those who are fit are those who live long enough to reproduce, and whose offspring are also fit enough (by the above definition) to reproduce, and so on.

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"Survival of the fittest" is a particularly bad way to explain evolution. Evolution has nothing to do with being "fit", but everything to do with successfully raising offspring.In other words, if one individual has many surviving offspring who mate and bear offspring of their own, then that individual's genes will be widely spread in the descendent's population. In effect, that individuals genes have been evolutionarily selected for.On the other hand, if an individual can't manage to raise any surviving offspring, the genes of that individual will be gone from the gene pool. In evolutionary terms, that individual's genes have been selected against.Suppose a spontaneous mutation arises in a gene. If that mutation gives the individual a competitive advantage at raising offspring, then that individual will be like the first example and widely spread the gene to subsequent generations.On the other hand, suppose the spontaneous mutation made it more difficult to raise offspring. In that case, the individual would have fewer offspring than others and the gene would be underrepresented (or absent altogether) from the subsequent gene pool.The concept of speciation is simply that over many, many generations there will be a lot of spontaneous mutations. The ones that are helpful will be preserved in a population, and the ones that are harmful will (eventually) be removed. In this way, the genetic makeup of an isolated population can slowly change until it has effectively become a new species.Of course, this doesn't prove that evolution is what is happening. One good experiment to the contrary and evolution goes out the window. However, until that happens evolution is going to remain the foundation of modern biosciences.

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