Survival of the fittest

So similar to my last blog on Descarte and his famous and widely used phrase: "I think therefore I am," I will be looking at another famous phrase and person. Today I will look at Charles Darwin and the phrases associated with him. So what comes to mind when you read "survival of the fittest?" Do you think about competition, or the brutality of winning, or survival, or a Dog eat Dog world, the strongest survive or win. So these themes are relevant, but there is something else people think about. Did you think about a group of people killing others, or gaining some benefit at the expense of others? Did you think of selfish acts, or hurting others to get what you want? So these are all points existent within us. It turns out, Darwin wasn't one of them.


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Darwin#Evolutionary_social_movements
Darwin's fame and popularity led to his name being associated with ideas and movements which at times had only an indirect relation to his writings, and sometimes went directly against his express comments.
Thomas Malthus had argued that population growth beyond resources was ordained by God to get humans to work productively and show restraint in getting families, this was used in the 1830s to justify workhouses and laissez-faire economics.^[178] Evolution was by then seen as having social implications, and Herbert Spencer's 1851 book Social Statics based ideas of human freedom and individual liberties on his Lamarckian evolutionary theory.^[179]
Soon after the Origin was published in 1859, critics derided his description of a struggle for existence as a Malthusian justification for the English industrial capitalism of the time. The term Darwinism was used for the evolutionary ideas of others, including Spencer's "survival of the fittest" as free-market progress, and Ernst Haeckel's racist ideas of human development. Writers used natural selection to argue for various, often contradictory, ideologies such as laissez-faire dog-eat dog capitalism, racism, warfare, colonialism and imperialism. However, Darwin's holistic view of nature included "dependence of one being on another"; thus pacifists, socialists, liberal social reformers and anarchists such as Peter Kropotkin stressed the value of co-operation over struggle within a species.^[180] Darwin himself insisted that social policy should not simply be guided by concepts of struggle and selection in nature.^{[181]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Darwin#Evolutionary_social_movements}


 So I would first like to repeat a phrase from above : "Darwin's holistic view of nature included "dependence of one being on another"" So it turns out, Darwin never wrote or stood by the phrases: "survival of the fittest" or "Dog eat Dog." And it turns out that Darwin saw an interdependence among all aspects of nature. Darwin observations in his paper the Origin of the Species, only spoke of natural selection. Natural selection was simply a description of how strategies that worked well, continued. It didn't say competition or cooperation would always be best. But depending on the environment one of them is better. The evidence is found only once the strategy has been tried and whether it had succeeded.

So many people abused his name and his words.

So I have observed over the years, that in a absolute sense, if we all on the planet worked together and cooperated that would be best. So instead of having many groups competing, that everyone is together creating the best outcomes. Looking from where we are right now, competition does exist and it is a form of motivation for many people. So there is a practicality of competition in where we are right now. However, this planet won't continue to exist if we are in domination of the planet, and so destroying our home. Charles Darwin, and anyone willing to see can see that. We are all interconnected and dependent on one another. When some of us die, we all die. To live, we must live together. That's the best strategy and that would be fittest.