This is what is known as tautology.
Survival of the fittest? Who are the fittest? By definition, whatever survives.
Simple fallacy. There's no meaning there. Just self-referencing, circular definitions.
“Simple fallacy. There’s no meaning there. Just self-referencing, circular definitions.”
It can’t be both a fallacy and a tautology at the same time. What it proves may be trivial, but it’s true. And at one point, it was revelatory. As for “meaning,” it may not say much, but that’s not the point. The point is to shoot down fools who write articles about how humans aren’t as strong as they used to be, and imply that somehow evolution isn’t working anymore.
But that’s never what Natural Selection has been about. Organisms aren’t always getting stronger, faster, smarter, more complex, or whatever it is we obsess about. Things do evolve from “lower” to “higher” forms, but lower forms persist, and often are more reproductively successful than their more complex alternatives.
The thing is, evolution is about what makes it through to the next generation. It’s about the genes, not the organism. Whatever genes survive were the best at surviving, for whatever reason. There’s no more “meaning” in this than there needs to be. What sort of meaning are you looking for, anyway, in a world where humans and slugs live side by side, each perpetuating their type about as effectively as the other?
Oh, and by the way, I sorta went along with your characterization of an integral part of the theory of Natural Selection (though not all of it) as a tautology, which it by no means is. In this case defining a “tautology” as a statement which, though true, is obvious and meaningless.
Simple? Yes. But so is the Special Theory of Relativity. So is all of science. People tend to think that the best theories are ones that explain the most with the fewest words. Not true. The best scientific theories are ones that make sense of the world and stand up to repeated testing. They usually have extremely limited scope, since the more you say, the less likely you are to be right.
Anyway, “survival of the fittest” is not a mere self-referential loop. If it seems so today, that is because it has been so successful. As coined by Herbert Spencer, the phrase was a popularization and encapsulation of Darwin’s theory of natural selection, which, to put it as simply as possible, argued that races favored in the struggle for life are preserved. That is, the organisms that survive get to pass on their characteristics.
So it’s not just all about “Whoever’s the fittest survives, so whoever survives was fit” “Why were they fit?” “Oh, because they survived.” It’s more a matter of “Why does this creature have so-and-so characteristic?” “Because it allowed its ancestor to survive long enough to pass it on.”
“Survival of the fittest” helps us understand the mechanism of evolution (i.e. the preservation of favored genes through the struggle for existence and reproduction), which was not always so obvious. I’d like to see the look on the face of a Lamarckian if you went back in time and told him the underlying mechanism of natural selection was tautological.