Comment by eviks
2 days ago
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.
> Which specific characteristics? How are those "favorable"? How are "injurious" filtered out?
Mobility for one, within close distance to an egg the sperm which can orient on the chemical gradient beat out those unable to move.
> So why not billions?
Cost vs benefit
> Now try it with the eggs. Why have a few instead of millions?
Spending more resources on a few fetuses is the chosen strategy. Which would run into issues if both sides released millions of cells. The chemical signaling to abort a large number would be complex at implantation, much simpler to release a limited number of eggs.
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