Over the years, evolutionary biologists and psychologists have added cooperation, kindness, friendliness, and niceness to their interpretation of Darwinism, asserting that it’s humans’ ability to live with each other, feel each other’s pain, care for their young and loved ones that make Homo sapiens the species that won out over all the others. “Communities, which included the greatest number of the most sympathetic members, would flourish the best, and rear the greatest number of offspring,” he wrote. Darwin also criticized the ‘survival of the fittest’ argument often, presenting instead a hypothesis for human evolution that centered sympathy. You’re always looking over your shoulder.”ĭarwin didn’t even coin the term ‘survival of the fittest,’ which was actually thought up by social Darwinist and philosopher Herbert Spencer. “It’s actually very costly to be the alpha male. Woods says constant competition and desire to come out on top, essentially wanting to be an alpha male, doesn’t automatically mean success. So this idea that you had to be the biggest and the strongest and the meanest in order to succeed, it’s not what Darwin meant at all,” co-author of Survival of the Friendliest, Vanessa Woods, tells the BBC. “Fitness is just your ability to reproduce. But evolutionary biologists say we’ve grossly misunderstood the concept of ‘fittest,’ and it’s hurting our lives and livelihoods. It’s a concept that thrives even today, as invoked in the Covid19 pandemic to shrug our shoulders at the plight of the elderly or to bolster anti-science politicians talking about their strength as a tool to fight off the virus. British naturalist Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution and natural selection often gets broken down into one simple phrase: ‘Survival of the fittest,’ which we’ve come to understand as the survival of the strongest, meanest, most aggressive, and selfish.
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