“Survival of the fittest” is the most commonly used phrase drafted into everyday speech from the theory of evolution. Flipping through television channels, we see a lion bearing down on a gazelle, a boxer pummeling his opponent, bighorn sheep clashing horns: we nod and smugly think, "There, see? Survival of the fittest; the order of nature." And it seems clear enough: for all we can tell, the strong do survive. It would be crazy to think otherwise, considering what we’ve learned about the natural world from mass media.
But mass media, of course, is about drama and unfolding stories, and every dramatist knows that without conflict, you have no story. And so the natural world has been dressed up as a vast and violent landscape of competition--the ultimate reality show, where real blood can be shed. Can the antelope corner tighter than the lion? Can the species survive? Will the "balance of nature" be upset? Television has taken Tennyson to heart, portraying nature as "red in tooth and claw," a world of savage predation, where survival of the fittest is the primary law (1).
This is all very exciting, but it’s a vision of the natural world focused almost entirely on dramatic competition. If we shift our focus, though, it’s clear that there’s an entire world of plant and animal relationships that aren’t dominated by violent competition. For example, aside from the obvious eating of prey by predators, most animals generally leave each other alone, particularly if they’re after different kinds of food. And of course there’s symbiosis, in which species interactions are mutually beneficial. Nevertheless, on tonight’s Animal Planet schedule, we have plenty of shows on big, scary, ferocious animals (polar bears, lions, and spitting cobras), while only one herbivore is getting airtime--the poor old wildebeest. And what about plants? Their lack of bloody teeth and claws might account for the lack of a "Plant Planet" channel (2).
Clearly, the popular focus on competition has led to a portrayal of nature as a metaphorical battlefield, where all that matters is your ability to wage war, outstrip your opponent, and beat down your immediate peers: the "Survival of the Fittest." (3) But, as usual, nature is far too complex to be reduced to this absolute, bumper-sticker slogan. Let’s see if we can clear up the confusion caused by the Survival of the Fittest myth, starting with Darwin himself.
Notes to Myth One: Survival of the Fittest
1. British poet Alfred Lord Tennyson (1809-1892), whose poetic genius leaned toward morbid and violent themes, characterized nature as "red in tooth and claw" in an elegy published nearly a decade before Darwin published On the Origin of Species. See M. Demoor, "His Way is thro' Chaos and the Bottomless and Pathless: The Gender of Madness in Alfred Tennyson’s Poetry," Neophilogus 86, no. 2 (2002): 325-35.
2. But plants deserve some television airtime: most life is supported by plants, which produce both food we can eat and oxygen we can breathe. They also "scrub" our atmosphere of carbon dioxide, which we can’t breathe. We emit carbon dioxide every time we exhale and every time we start a car.