Charles Darwin strongly believed that observations made during large-scale explorations, such as his voyage on the Beagle, conclusively showed that many clearly different organisms, both animals and plants, were related to one another by some unknown law. In other words, Darwin was trying to prove the existence of evolution. However, Darwin outlines how a purely natural process of selection could produce similar effects and explain the development of new species without reference to supernatural intervention. Taking this into consideration, I believe that Darwin is trying to portray the struggle for existence and adaptation for survival among living things with the term Natural Selection.” Darwin used this term to explain the causal mechanism responsible for the operation of his theory. He later abandoned this term in favor of “Survival of the Fittest.”
Although he received criticism from many of his peers for using Natural Selection, the term is quite important because virtually all biologists use 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, and 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 great meaning in 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 due to the complexity of the conditions of the competition.
It describes only the effect or outcome of an event, 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 Nascar, using the term survival of the fittest” would indicate that the victor would be unknown until the end of the race. Similarly, discussing the survival of a business in a collapsing economy or 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 by which evolution occurred. The term contains an implicit assumption that survivors are an improved form of organism compared to those that do not survive.
Although intelligence is key to improvements, it is not 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 be a struggle for existence in every case, 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 it has to survive? A look at the fossil record shows that 99.
99% of the survivors were simpler organisms. The survivors we know of today are the 0.01% 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 “fittest” refers to an organism with the best capability for acquiring and using all available nutrients while developing or having the capability of fending off physical threats to its existence. However, this concept would only explain a certain type of organism. For example, there are many coral deposits throughout the world, some of which are immense in size, such as the body coral currently in Florida.
Unfortunately, marine coral is not an organism but rather a collection of organisms. Since there are no such organisms as described above, it must be concluded that this is not what fittest” means in the sense of Darwin’s meaning. The term “fittest” as contained in Survival of the Fittest can only be construed as the organism fitter than other members of organisms falling into a special group. This is consistent with the descriptions used by Darwin and also used by most evolutionists in the explanation offered for the mechanism of evolution. A quick look in the animal kingdom shows the rapidly reproducing Fruit Fly, which has a serious deficiency in the inability to penetrate the skin of even the thinnest fruit and release the sugars that begin the process of producing their food. These mechanisms are available in thousands of organisms, both in the animal and vegetable kingdoms.
Many mechanisms, such as those found in mosquitoes, bee/wasp stingers, or dissolving fluids produced by other insects, abound in nature. It is inexplicable, in the Darwinian sense, that some advice or method of defense would fail to develop over the eons of their existence. It must be concluded that while these organisms are survivors, they are not necessarily the fittest. This leads to the fact that Darwin’s theory has not fully explained the existing spectrum of living organisms, either in their initial development from the mineral state or in the highly developed state in which they exist today. In conclusion, Darwin stresses that nothing is easier than to admit, in words, the truth of the universal struggle for life.
Darwin also points out that in looking at nature, it is most necessary to never forget that every single organic being around us may be said to be striving to the utmost increase in numbers. He says that each lives by a struggle at some period of its life: heavy destruction inevitably falls either on the young or old, during each generation or at recurrent intervals. We behold the fact of nature bright with gladness. We often see a superabundance of food, and the birds which are idly singing around us mostly live on insects or seeds, thus constantly destroying life. Darwin makes it clear that the structure of every organic being is related, in the most essential yet often hidden manner, to that of all other organic beings with which it comes into competition for food or residence and from which it has to escape, or on which it preys. This is obvious in the structure of the teeth and talons of the tiger and in that of the legs and claws of the parasite, which clings to the hair on the tiger’s body.
After looking at all the examples, it turns out that this is an unabated belief system which underlies the study of all the physical sciences. The most important of these beliefs is that all phenomena in the universe are capable of being measured or acknowledged by one of the five senses of man. It ought to be noted that to evolutionists, there is no objection to philosophy being a part of science. The fact that it is absolutely unthinkable to them that religion be a part of it only shows a bias of the same sort that keeps Darwin’s theory alive. But we must not forget that neither philosophy nor religion is a proper consideration of the physical sciences and the theory of Charles Darwin. At last, I must say this was a fascinating project, and for years to come, Darwin’s theory will explore many questions of nature and survival that are not yet cleared and will solve many mysteries that we have not solved.
