Let’s be honest. The average individual human person is unlikely to survive long outside the confines of the habitat bubbles we’ve built for ourselves. Although trained survivalists may last longer than the rest of us, our weak little physical bodies pose zero competition against the real predators that thrive in the wilderness. Alone, we are outclassed by the faster, stronger carnivores sporting in-built weapons of flesh destruction, so at best we can only subsist as foragers and scavengers as long as we stay hidden and quiet. Going by the law of the wilderness, those that ‘fit’ their environment best are thus best suited to exploit the resources that ensure their survival, and human beings generally do not thrive under these circumstances. So human beings do what we do best. Cheat.
Human beings approach survival not as individuals but as a collective — the whole species working together as a unit to eliminate individual competitors one at a time. If we’re not hunting them down, we’re terraforming the environment, making it inhospitable to entire species of our competitors until the law of the wilderness no longer applies. In its place, we put up human laws to govern human habitats, heaven help the remaining non-human species left behind that exist only because we either tolerate or overlook them.
You could suggest that what we human beings are doing is proving our fitness to survive. You could say that using our brains provided us with a lethal advantage over our once-predators. Using our social connectivity allowed us to collaborate and overwhelm our competitors who couldn’t compete with our superior communication abilities. We transformed the land, changing entire landscapes to suit human survival and activity. Isn’t that a demonstration of not only how fit we are to survive, but also how fit we are to sit at the apex of the food chain on the planet’s surface?
Not really. We cheated so epically that we’ve transcended the law of the wilderness to the point that ‘survival of the fittest’ no longer applies to our species any more. When you create the environment in which you get to decide which species survives and which does not, it’s no longer survival of the fittest. The system is now skewed such that we humans determine the survival of species that we need as resources (survival of the species specifically, though not necessarily that of the individual animal — we’ll always have cows, but tomorrow Bessie’s a hamburger), species that entertain us the most, and other species that are not worth eradicating even if they may cause a nuisance or a small epidemic once in a while. In human spaces, ‘cute’ is more likely to survive than ‘fit’, at least as far as human-animal (and plant) relationships go.
But nature is fair. Having got rid of the non-human species that would compete against us, we now compete against one another though our studies and careers, putting in effort to compete over acquiring resources for ourselves. However, though it’s pitched to us as ‘survival’, most of the time we’re competing for status and validation rather than literally life or death. Yes, I’m aware of the plight of refugees and the ravages of poverty, hunger, and disease, but these are survival issues that have little to do with ‘fitness’ and more to do with the lack of will to solve these problems. We have access to enough resources to sustain the whole human population, it’s just that we don’t want to. For example, wheat, corn and milk are often intentionally wasted when the market will not pay farmers the price they are asking. People who are rich in resources believe what they have accumulated is for their survival, but really they’re spending those resources on fancy accoutrements, luxury trips and facelifts, feeding their egos instead of their stomachs. In the meantime, people beyond their range of vision are dying due to this imbalance of how resources are allocated and distributed through the flawed system that keeps human society functioning, such as it is.
Do we really want the starving to have to prove their fitness before we allocate them a share of resources from the abundance that we have? What exactly do we want them to do to prove their fitness? Because that’s the current state of things. Since they can’t do us any quid, we won’t do them any pro quo. So, in the arena of natural selection we may well have disqualified ourselves by breaking the principle of “survival of the fittest”, but within the realm of human competition, we find that like it or not, “survival of the fittest” is a principle we still can’t avoid, even though it doesn’t have to be this way.
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Inspired by Singapore-Cambridge GCE ‘A’ Level H1 General Paper (Paper 1) 2020 Question #2