However, the big story in the west is that most sexual congress does not produce babies anymore.
Darwin's theory of evolution and natural selection were never really about directly competing against other members of their species. There was certainly a component of that but natural selection is predominantly about competing against nature itself.
It's all about developing traits that help a given individual or community/ecosystem survive and thrive. And unsurprisingly in most ecosystems it's not competition from peers but rather competing against weather, environmental conditions, and the food chain/predators. So what you see is that at basically every single level (from plants and microbes, up through insects, birds, mammals, and at all stages of human history) you have a constant push for mutualistic behaviors.
It's why birds warn their entire ecosystem (including other bird species and non-bird species) about predators and danger. Or as another bird example, migratory birds will cooperate and share food even when migrating with birds of different species. Anything that can bolster the ability to survive and thrive for the community as a whole (and often entire ecosystem) ends up driving evolution far more than advantages for a single individual. Doubly so with punishing adversarial advantages for individual that end up disproportionately harming the community/whole.
And the competing against nature itself you mention, is often determined by the territory a group is able to claim. Some places get drought, others freeze, and in others food is plentiful. Nature may not be a free-for-all deathmatch, but it's not a pacifist coop either. At least, most species don't behave that way.
And because of that, territoriality tends to be fairly low in most species until the food supply becomes constrained. And even then it's a gradient where hostilities generally only escalate out of desperation rather than innate competition. i.e. Competing between individuals or communities tends to occur mainly when they fail to compete against the environment and run out of other options.
But really my point was just about the general sentiment that it's "against evolution" or "against natural selection" to help the weak and that doing so is something that humans do out of a unique sense of love or kindness or whatever.
If killing the unfit is the way to go, you should kill your babies until they become immortal.
Natural selection has always been about reproduction.
marojejian•1mo ago
NYT gift link: https://www.nytimes.com/2025/12/19/science/ants-exoskeletons...
I love it when biology converges like economics. And there are so many cases in both where scale beats unit quality, in ways that might defy our intuition (or desires).
"Quantity has a Quality all its own" (Stalin?)
Consider: - Roman Legions (or Rome's scale in general) - US WWII tanks vs. Germany's - China's success with low price point products (e.g. solar panels) - (Hopefully) the future success of OS machine learning vs. giant proprietary models
I admit to find attractive the (totally speculative) idea that Neanderthals might have been as (or more) "smart" as sapiens sapiens, 1:1, but we were just much more social and would expand faster / better.
marcosdumay•1mo ago
In human economics, scale and quality usually come together, not in competition.
But of course, you follow into military examples. Those are really not as clear cut as you put.
Stalin's quantity soon stopped being plentiful because of neglect. Roman military was strong because of advanced techniques and the willingness to throw the status-quo away if it stopped working, often winning even when outnumbered. German WWII tanks were a joke, incapable of working in any real situation.
And the economical one, on Chinese solar panels, I recommend you reevaluate their quality and manufacturing conditions.
sallveburrpi•1mo ago
vlovich123•1mo ago
At some point you can refine scale where you also automate the quality issues away, but there’s always still that tension.