Humans vs Evolution

That's a huge, huge, bloated, jiggling, bubbling, frankly unwell smelling, and with a rancor pit under its seat IF right there. When we speak of fitness, we do mean the ability, through unspecified means, to persevere. "Survival of the fittest" really boils down to "survival of what ever happens to be good at surviving" which in turn means "survival of what ever happens to survive (in the long term)", since given any environment, survival itself is the single most objective indicator of the capacity to survive in it. Now, it may not be entirely fair to characterize all of evolution with this short simplistic summary, but for better or worse, this summary happens to be pretty much tautologous. It applies to all relevant entities (i.e. "mortal" in a most abstract sense) in all accessible (i.e. comperhensible at all within the confines of how we are able to think and reason) worlds.

I think what Leah is more or less suggesting is that "The fittest" in (uhh, my world) is - Rich people who can afford all the fancy medicals, and with no moral cause not to take them.

Your wealth becomes a bigger legacy than your genes - I can pass my wealth onto someone unrelated to me, and they will be the beneficiary of my fitness, rather than any biological spawn.

with the genetics of 6'4 basketball star, an iq of 145, high stress tolerance and perfect teeth clear skin, a musical virtuoso with a penis that could make a horse self conscious?

Is that good? I mean, obviously you think so, that's your description of an ideal human - but surely if that were the case, there would be more of them? They would have been more successful at breeding?

Why am I surrounded by hideous 5'5" mouth breathing knuckle draggers with mouths full of what appear to be chunks of shale who are flat out tapping their feet to INXS and hooting and hollaring when a bunch of men in short shorts throw inflated bladder around a paddock?

(Given that White Australia is just over 200 years old, evolution has moved quickly....)



Edit: To fill out my point - My body is terribly designed. It's loaded with minor congenital defects - none of them life threatening (at least not in my life - if I lived in some of the less "developed" countries, I imagine some of my vulnerabilities, indirectly, could have contributed to my death)
Many of these have been rectified (a few at my parents expense when I was their problem, and I've paid for a few more over the years) - I am getting closer and closer to being ideal (or robocop?)

The point is - MONEY has done this, Money has allowed me to be a desirable (I think so anyway) mate - not the luck of genetics and the hope that between my parents, and any mutations, I would be a specimen admired my all mankind, with people lining up at clinic to ask for donor #24813 (I think Ghengis Khan used a different system to ensure his genes were well spread, but personally fathering children to the women of every village and town you pillage is frowned upon these days)


Edit II: The further muddy my already rather unfindable point: I guess the best evolutionary trait for the modern man (uh, as in homosapien) is the ability to do math, and the right level of risk taking to invest astutely

Wealth is not a replicator. It does not (barring smart investment by the holder) produce copies of itself, eventhough you can indeed inherit it. One may say that wealth is attractive and that generally speaking people in a more stable financial situation are more likely to find mates for this reason, all else being equal, but the offspring they produce is not rich by default and unless they themselves secure the financial stability they inherited from their parents, the richness trait will be a short lived one in the germ line. There is of course an argument to be had that many a rich person who is not a beneficiary of recently deceased rich relatives may have in their posession an enterprise that generates wealth for them led by themselves or their representatives who are for one reason or another skilled at making choices that financially benefit the company. The rich person may also be the descendant of such people and may have learned from them some or all of the skills required to lead an enterprise to financial success. The survival and evolution of the richness trait would behave like the survival and evolution of any other replicator to the extent that it is in a broad sense subject to the same fundamental problems: (Good, but) imperfect copying and mortality.