Comment by Retric
2 days ago
> So the fittest tree dying due to a meteor is not survival of the fittest. It's survival of the luckiest. This has nothing about being "fit"/better adapted to the environment.
Again fittest is a classification. In Darwinian terms, the phrase is best understood as "survival of the form that in successive generations will leave most copies of itself."
After several generations it could be shown that a tree did have the form of the fittest without itself surviving.
> But having millions instead of thousands that would decrease the chances of survival (for example, by the offspring exhausting food resources and starving) would be a sign of incompetence.
Offspring of many species consume their siblings, millions is generally inefficient for other reasons. Some trees could have millions of viable offspring in their lifetime but random dispersal is really inefficient.
> My issue is there is zero connection. You can't justify millions this way.
I already did.
Odds multiply here, you want competition and also have to contend with random dispersal. 1 in 10,000 * 1 in 100 is 1 in 1 million. It’s very easy to look at the combination of multiple factors and see why millions is an efficient use of resources for animals as large as humans. Trying to argue for a single justification doesn’t work because multiple factors such as our size is involved.
> That's not a cause, but a description of what happened. There's a lot of irrelevant info in that history. Also a lots of random things with no benefit
Randomness is part of evolution. There’s ultimately no particular reason we got the particular version of various mirrored molecules that we did, but once that selection happened it was unlikely to change.
The actual process isn’t just the high level overview we talk about but the actual interplay down to individual subatomic particles. Multiple paths could have resulted in an organism with your specific DNA sequence but only one path actually did result in you existing and having your specific layout of carbon 14 nuclei etc. So argue all you want that an equivalent organism could exist, just realize you’re arbitrarily lowering the threshold between the actual process and a simplified abstraction.
You're basically removing all "fit" from the term, and that's not how Darwin described it, a couple of quotes per wiki:
> "This preservation of favourable variations, and the destruction of injurious variations, I call Natural Selection, or the Survival of the Fittest." – Darwin, Charles gqiyoh
> This preservation, during the battle for life, of varieties which possess any advantage in structure, constitution, or instinct, I have called Natural Selection
Dumb meteor luck doesn't care about preserving favorable, doesn't care about any advantage in structure, so there is no fit going on even if you constrain it to a binary classification
So coming back to your first comment, your understanding of "fit" doesn't help *at all* in "drastically cut[ting] down on the issues". You don't cut anything bad if you don't filter out bad/fit for good, but instead have dumb luck making dumb choices.
Those quotes are directly talking about fittest as classification.
“preservation of favourable variations, and the destruction of injurious variations, I call Natural Selection, or the Survival of the Fittest”
“varieties which possess”
Fit in those quotes means having favorable variations and not having injurious variations, at no point does it refer to a specific organism’s survival.
> You don't cut anything bad if you don't filter out bad/fit for good, but instead have dumb luck making dumb choices.
Sperm which successfully fertilize an egg are more likely to have specific characteristics, that’s all that matters here as that alone results in survival of the fittest.
Sperm with identical characteristics die clinging to a sock on your bedroom floor, but they quite literally don’t matter because of the Trillions of sperm being produced. Humans are large animals we can take the minor metabolic hit to produce a for us a trivial number of cells each of which have extraordinarily low odds of success. Producing even more so fertilized eggs have a marginally higher probability of live birth is a winning strategy.
> Sperm which successfully fertilize an egg are more likely to have specific characteristics, that’s all that matters here as that alone results in survival of the fittest.
This is way too generic. Which specific characteristics? How are those "favorable"? How are "injurious" filtered out?
> Producing even more so fertilized eggs have a marginally higher probability of live birth is a winning strategy.
So why not billions? Now try it with the eggs. Why have a few instead of millions? Again, nothing you say here helps you get to 50mil because it's all too generic "the higher the better; not that expensive" argument quality. And you won't have a higher probability of live birth if your meteor discarding filter don't filter out the defects that decrease this probability
> but they quite literally don’t matter because of the Trillions of sperm being produced
No, they don't matter for this conversation because it's about the meaning in differences in the ability to reach the egg. If every cell has a 0% chance, there is nothing to discuss.
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