Charles Darwin felt strongly that observations made on large scale explorations
such as his voyage on the Beagle showed conclusively that many clearly different
organisms, animals as well as plants, were related to one another buy some
unknown law. In other words Darwin was trying to prove that evolution existed.
However Darwin does outline how a purely natural process of selection could
produce similar effects, and thus explain the development of new species without
reference to supernatural intervention. Taking that into consideration, I
believe that by "Natural Selection" Darwin is trying to portray the
struggle for existence and adaptation for survival among living things. With
Natural Selection, Darwin used this term to explain the casual mechanism, which
is responsible for the operation of his theory. He would go about and abandon
his term in favor of the term Survival of the Fittest. Although he received
criticism from so many of his peers for using Natural Selection, the term is
quite important because virtually all biologists used 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, that 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 a great
meaning on 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
because of the complexity of the conditions of the competition. It describes
only the effect or outcome of an event by its very nature and 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 the Nascar, using the term, It will be survival
of the fittest" would indicate that the victor would be unknown until the
end of the race. Similarly, if discussing the survival of a business in a
collapsing economy or perhaps 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 of which
evolution occurred. The term contains an implicit assumption that survivors are
an improved form of organism compared to those, which do not survive. Although
intelligence is a key to improvements it is not however 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 in every case be
a struggle for existence, 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 of it to
survive? A look at the fossil record shows that 99.99% of the survivors were
simpler organisms and the survivors that we know of today are not the 0.01% of
survivors 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 the term "fittest" refers to an organism which has the best
capability for acquiring and using all the available nutrients, all while
developing or having a capability of fending off physical threats to its
existence. However this concept would indeed be an explanation for a certain
type of organism. For example, there are many coral deposits throughout the
world, some which are immense in size such as the body coral, which is currently
in Florida. Unfortunately marine coral is really not an organism, but rather a
collection of organisms. Since there are really no such organisms in existence
as described above, it must be concluded that this is not what the
"fittest" is, 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, with a serious deficiency that being the inability to penetrate the
skin of even the thinnest of fruit, and thus release the sugars which begin the
process which produces their food. These mechanisms are available in thousands
of organisms, both in the animal and vegetable kingdoms. Many mechanisms such as
in the mosquito, stingers, bee/wasp, or a dissolving fluid such as produced by
other insects abound in nature. It is inexplicable in the Darwinian sense, that
some advice or method of doing this would fail to be developed over the past
eons of their existence. It must be concluded that while they are survivors,
they are not the fittest. This leads to the fact that Darwin's theory has not
explained the existing spectrum of living organisms either in the initial
development from the mineral state or in the highly developed state in which it
exists 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
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:
that heavy destruction inevitably falls either on young or old, during each
generation or at a recurrent intervals. We behold the fact of nature bright with
gladness, we often see superabundance of food, and that the birds which are idly
singing round us mostly live on insects or seeds and 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 tigers 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 and 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.