survival of the fittest

Examples of survival of the fittest in the following topics:

• Social Darwinism in America

  • American Social Darwinism held that the social classes had no obligation towards those unequipped or under-equipped to compete for survival.
  • Social Darwinism is a name given to various theories of society which emerged in the United Kingdom, North America, and Western Europe in the 1870s, and which claim to apply biological concepts of natural selection and survival of the fittest to sociology and politics.
  • Many such views stress competition between individuals in laissez-faire capitalism, while others frequently linked evolution, Charles Darwin and social Darwinism with racialism, nationalism, imperialism and eugenics, contending that social Darwinism became one of the pillars of fascism and Nazi ideology, and that the consequences of the application of policies of "survival of the fittest" by Nazi Germany eventually created a very strong backlash against the theory.
  • This form did not envision survival of the fittest within an individualist order of society, but rather advocated a type of racial and national struggle where the state directed human breeding through eugenics.
  • Sumner also believed that the best equipped to win the struggle for survival was the American businessman, and concluded that taxes and regulations serve as dangers to his survival.

• Reform Darwinism

  • Reform Darwinism recognized that the fittest could be those who cooperated with each other.
  • He intimated that in such cases, the fittest are not the physically strongest, nor the cunningest, but those who learn to collaborate so as to mutually support each other, strong and weak alike, for the welfare of the community.
  • Peter Kropotkin argued in his 1902 book Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution that Darwin did not define the fittest as the strongest, or the most clever, but recognized that the fittest could be those who cooperated with each other.
  • During the age of New Imperialism, the concepts of evolution justified the exploitation of "lesser breeds without the law" by "superior races. " To elitists, strong nations were composed of white people who were successful at expanding their empires, and as such, these strong nations would survive in the struggle for dominance.
  • Critics have frequently linked evolution, Charles Darwin, and social Darwinism with racialism, nationalism, imperialism, and eugenics, contending that social Darwinism became one of the pillars of fascism and Nazi ideology, and that the consequences of the application of policies of "survival of the fittest" by Nazi Germany eventually created a very strong backlash against the theory.

• Charles Darwin and Natural Selection

  • The Grants found changes from one generation to the next in the distribution of beak shapes with the medium ground finch on the Galápagos island of Daphne Major.
  • Therefore, survival and reproduction were much better in the following years for the small-billed birds.
  • Natural selection, also known as "survival of the fittest," is the more prolific reproduction of individuals with favorable traits that survive environmental change because of those traits.
  • In times of drought, when fewer leaves would be available, those that could reach more leaves had a better chance to eat and survive than those that could not reach the food source.
  • Second, more offspring are produced than are able to survive.

• The Social Problem

  • Progress and Poverty: An Inquiry into the Cause of Industrial Depressions and of Increase of Want with Increase of Wealth was written by Henry George in 1879 and is a treatise on the cyclical nature of an industrial economy and its remedies.
  • George saw how technological and social advances (including education and public services) increased the value of land (natural resources, urban locations, etc.) and, thus, the amount of wealth that can be demanded by the owners of land from those who need the use of land.
  • This new concept justified the stratification of the wealthy and poor and coined the term "survival of the fittest. " Joining Spencer was Yale University professor William Graham Sumner, whose book What Social Classes Owe to Each Other (which was first published in 1884) argued that assistance to the poor actually weakens their ability to survive in society.
  • Wisconsin-born author Thorstein Veblen argued in his book The Theory of the Leisure Class that the "conspicuous consumption and conspicuous leisure" of the wealthy had become the basis of social status in America.
  • Followers of the new Awakening promoted the idea of the Social Gospel ,which gave rise to organizations such as the YMCA, the American branch of the Salvation Army, and settlement houses such as Hull House, founded by Jane Addams in Chicago in 1889.

• The Development of Sociology in the U.S.

  • Lester Ward, the first president of the American Sociological Association, is generally thought of as the founder of American sociological study.
  • Lester Ward is generally thought of as the founder of American sociological study.
  • Spencer had argued that society would naturally evolve and progress while allowing the survival of the fittest and weeding out the socially unfit.
  • He has, in fact, been called "the father of the modern welfare state. " The liberalism of the Democrats today is not that of Smith and Mill, which stressed non-interference from the government in economic issues, but of Ward, which stressed the unique position of government to effect positive change.
  • Lester Ward, the first president of the American Sociological Association, is generally thought of as the founder of American sociological study.

• Spencer and Social Darwinism

  • Thus, their success in school is the result of their own qualities.
  • According to Spencer's synthetic philosophy, the laws of nature applied to the organic realm as much as to the inorganic, and to the human mind as much as to the rest of creation.
  • However, writing after important developments in the field of biology, Spencer rejected the ideological assumptions of Comte's three-stage model and attempted to reformulate the theory of social progress in terms of evolutionary biology.
  • Spencer is perhaps best known for coining the term "survival of the fittest," later commonly termed "social Darwinism."
  • Critics of Spencer's positivist synthetic philosophy argued that the social sciences were essentially different from the natural sciences and that the methods of the natural sciences—the search for universal laws was inappropriate for the study of human society.

• Conclusion: Trends of the Gilded Age

  • The early half of the Gilded Age roughly coincided with the middle portion of the Victorian era in Britain and Belle Époque in France.
  • Two major nationwide depressions—the Panic of 1873 and the Panic of 1893—interrupted growth and caused social and political upheavals.
  • This new concept justified the stratification of the wealthy and poor, and it was in this proposal that Spencer coined the term "survival of the fittest."
  • Joining Spencer was Yale University professor William Graham Sumner whose book What Social Classes Owe to Each Other (1884) argued that assistance to the poor actually weakens their ability to survive in society.
  • The Norwegian American economist Thorstein Veblen argued in The Theory of the Leisure Class (1899) that the "conspicuous consumption and conspicuous leisure" of the wealthy had become the basis of social status in America.

• No Perfect Organism

  • Natural selection is a driving force in evolution and can generate populations that are adapted to survive and successfully reproduce in their environments.
  • Natural selection acts on the net effect of these alleles and corresponding fitness of the phenotype.
  • The dark-colored mice may be more fit than the light-colored mice, and according to the principles of natural selection the frequency of light-colored mice is expected to decrease over time.
  • While natural selection selects the fittest individuals and often results in a more fit population overall, other forces of evolution, including genetic drift and gene flow, often do the opposite by introducing deleterious alleles to the population's gene pool.
  • It is simply the sum of various forces and their influence on the genetic and phenotypic variance of a population.

• Introduction

  • In this chapter, you will learn the three major applications of the Chi-square distribution:
  • The goodness-of-fittest,which determines if data fit a particular distribution, such as with the lottery example
  • The test of independence, which determines if events are independent, such as with the movie example
  • The test of a single variance, which tests variability, such as with the coffee example
  • NOTE: Though the Chi-square calculations depend on calculators or computers for most of the calculations, there is a table available (see the Table of Contents 15.

• Initiating a Fork

  • Some people maintain that forks are healthy for the software ecosystem as a whole, by a standard natural selection argument: the fittest will survive, which means that, in the end, everyone gets better software.
  • This may be true from the ecosystem's point of view, but it's not true from the point of view of any individual project.
  • "—because everyone is aware that a fork that fails to attract developers away from the original project is unlikely to survive long.
  • Do not neglect to take all factors into account in evaluating the potential success of your fork.
  • For example, if many of the developers on a project have the same employer, then even if they are disgruntled and privately in favor of a fork, they are unlikely to say so out loud if they know that their employer is against it.