rule

The ironic thing about social darwinist types that want to cut any support for the poor on the grounds of poverty being some kind of proof of not being fit to survive, is that the same types will likely also object to things like labor unions or other means of large groups of poorer people banding together to collectively force better conditions from the wealthy, despite social cooperation being a common and successful enough evolutionary strategy.
- Prick a Libertarian and a neoliberal bleeds.
- Humans: Literally only exist because they banded together in larger communities than other contemporary hominids. One of the earliest indicators of civilization is caring for the injured and sick. The key characteristic of successful societies is how well they keep each other alive.
  Some fuckhead who thinks he understands evolution: "We should let the financially weak die"

"Survival of the fittest" is itself a naive view of evolution. "Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution", by Peter Kropotkin, was a direct response to that shit over 100 years ago. It was a precursor to Kin Selection Theory developed in the 1960s. It gave the idea a firm mathematical foundation and is largely accepted by biologists today.
- The idea itself isn't wrong, the fittest individuals (those who have the most offspring) are always those whose genetic material will be best represented in the next generations. Kin Selection Theory just includes the fact that even selfish and thus fitter individuals which are helped by altruistic ones usually carry some altruistic genes which they propagate.
  
  even selfish and thus fitter individuals which are helped by altruistic ones usually carry some altruistic genes which they propagate.
  It's more useful to model the genes as selfish, not the individuals. A queen bee/ant won't survive long enough to produce fertile offspring if her infertile offspring, each a genetic dead end, doesn't provide for the hive/colony. That genetic programming isn't altruistic because it doesn't help rival colonies/hives, only their own.
  So no, the individuals aren't free riding on others' altruism. It's more that genetic coding for social groups is advantageous to the gene, even if localized applications of those rules might seem disadvantageous to the individual in certain instances.
  
  except that this fails to explain why animals like ants and bees have specifically ended up with most of the individuals being unable to procreate at all, clearly for them it's more beneficial to enable your mom to have more siblings than it is to have their own offspring.
  
  But then you introduce parasitic organisms, which prey on the more selfless and mutualist functions of complex species. And you end up with a cyclical rise and fall of survival strategies.
  Predator organisms proliferating in periods of organic wealth and collapsing when they've depleted the reserves.
  Meanwhile, prey organisms trade their mutualist reproductive impulses for traits that are defensive and alienating from their kin... until the predator collapse, at which point they can open up again.
  Optional survival varies with the historical movement, which is driven by the strategies that preceded that moment.
  Fitness isn't a solved problem, it is a constantly moving target.
  
  Fit and reproducing a lot isn’t mutually exclusive tho. Just look at Elon. Do you think he could hunt a deer with just his hands? I doubt he could even put up a shelf.
  
  Which, in the context of Social Darwinism, still puts the idea to rest.

Also, Darwin wrote a lot more about cooperation than competition. Competition is kinda the simplest aspect of evolution, but if you wanna understand (literally) the birds and the bees, you gotta talk about the development of mutually-beneficial systems.
- A lot of the big evolutionary milestones are cooperative. An impossibly long time ago, a big cell swallowed a little cell and (for whatever reason) did not digest it. Together they accomplish more than either cell could on their own. That symbiosis is the ancestor to practically every multicellular organism you can find. Being multicellular is itself another huge development in cooperative evolution. Predation and competition may make a hide tougher or a tooth longer, but cooperation is what really pushes the boundaries of what is biologically possible.
  
  We've learned pretty recently that almost all nutrition of plants and animals relies on symbiotic relationships with microbes with their own distinct genetic material and reproduction. The microbiome in animal guts or in the soil where plant roots live turned out to be really important for whether the actual cells in the larger multicellular organism are getting what they need to thrive.
  
  I'd take it even further than that and say that life fundamentally strives for cooperation as much as is possible, for example look at how animals have ways of communicating with each other to avoid violence unless actually necessary for survival.

Well, I guess it'll be funny when all the lower classes die off and the rich have to eat eachother to survive.
- I think groups of lower classes will likely murder the rich and take their shit long before the rich have to think about eating each other.
  
  Let's hope
  
  Yes, that’s the plot of HG Wells’ The Time Machine. The rich evolve into beautiful but helpless and mindless little doll-people. The poor evolve into ugly, cunning, mechanically-inclined troglodyte people who hunt and feast on the doll-people.

It is quite odd how many people say evolution is a liberal hoax yet are full throated social darwinists.
- That's because capitalism was created by God to ~~reward the faithful~~ punish the wicked. /s

To be fair, the phrase "survival of the fittest" was coined by Herbert Spencer, who definitely did use it to describe dying from poverty.
His actual opinion was a little more nuanced than that, but Social Darwinism was kind of his whole thing, and that's where the phrase "survival of the fittest" comes from. Darwin himself took it from Spencer and added it to later editions of On the Origin of Species.

Poverty is caused by a lack of money, and money isn’t real. Well, not really real.
- Money is a type of private property. Private property is an arrangement of power relationships, and those are real. It's real that you'll get evicted if you don't find a way to pay rent/mortgage.
  
  They’re only as real as anything inside a mind. Which is to say not very real.

"natural resource shortage you fascist" is really difficult to say : D

The fittest psychological profile for the late-capitalist environment is a psychopath who is very good at imitating empathy. Change the environment XP

Hi, appliance repair man here who just fixes appliances in people's home for a living. "Survival of the fittest" was a term coined by Herbert Spencer after reading Darwin's Origin of species. And even I know that biologists and people who study evolution don't like this term because it is vague and misleading. In this case the fittest refers to organisms that have the best reproductive success.
This term has been heavily misused to misrepresent evolution and the people who studied.
- Right. Humanity is still evolving. But "fitness", in the long term, will likely just mean "doesn't like to wear a condom and is really convincing about it"
  
  could mean rape, top sperm doner, or polygamist. it has nothing to do with democracy or capitalism for that matter.

- [Family Guy skin color chart meme]
- Unfortunately, yes, and you can find a lot of them in this thread.

Darwin and Wallace both hated that shit.

Is this an actual thing those researchers say? I've never heard a person with higher education saying shit like this.
- In the same way that climate deniers think they know what they're talking about because they have an elementary school-level understanding of the weather, flat earthers think they know what they're talking about because they have an elementary school-level level understanding of physics, and antivaxxers think they know what they're talking about because they have an elementary school-level understanding of medicine, social darwinists think they know what they're talking about because they have an elementary school-level understanding of evolution. They heard "survival of the fittest" and were convinced that's all the nuance there was to have about the topic.
  
  Well, exactly, that sort of social Darwinism is just so antiscientific and also generally antisocial I don't think a person with any self-awareness in a remotely serious academic context could put it to paper. I've seen it online, yes, but that's not what OP tweet is addressing...

Oh man but there's so much to unpack here with how much it doesn't apply. We used to have second-order desires not just individually, but as a species...

Central bank monetary policy requires that we pay 2% more for goods every year as technology makes things cheaper and we exclude asset price inflation. They construct a wall of debt via low interest rates for inelastic goods like housing in order to provide a windfall to boomers in order to force the prices of goods upwards, every new mortgage new money supply being created.
That wall of debt that is gatekeeping inelastic shelter is what poverty looks like, prices can't rise without providing new money supply, and some poor smuck holding that IOU for the first movers to consume. Blaming the rich, whose nominal asset value is inflated by this system, is a naive view; they are simply being spoon fed wealth in a desperate attempt to get them to consume a portion of it. Every bailout for any type of correction caused by an error or oversight in the system is then funneled back to them as wages are debased.
This likely explains the fanaticism around Bitcoin and gold, I think we can all see who is served by the existing system, and its definitely not the poor.

selective pressure doesn't care if you consider it "survival of the fittest" or not.
- Daddy didn't care

I don't think I disagree with the point being made, but I can't say I like the way it's being made. I don't care about her PhD and I don't think it's particulary interesting to call a strawman a fascist.

"social construct this social construct that" oh let me just critique poverty away since its not you know... a social reality...
Maybe climate science and evolution doesn't have that much to say about vocabulary of other disciplines.

Poverty is a social construct, starvation is not. Also wealth hoarding has been a thing since... Well, since agriculture got started, so it's not unique to the post-industrial world. Kings didn't become Kings because they were nice and shared their wealth equitably.
- Good dog

I mean why? Why is not survival of the fittest? It's simply a matter of definition of "fit". 🤷‍♂️ If the fittest means you have rich ancestors, then so be it, in some context. If it means being able to wrestle someone to the ground, that's fine in another context. We live in many different contexts, as humans. It's not black and white...
- Because we have all given into the social construct of “we won’t kill you and take all your shit”. That was the deal. We stopped playing by the “if you piss me off me and my community with bash in your knee caps”. Most the fuckers who chant “survival of the fittest” don’t understand what that really means. It means that _anything _ is fair game.
  
  Evolution doesn't really care about social constructs though. It will select on one thing and one thing only -- offspring.
- It turns out working together is a highly successful strategy. You can stretch the definition of "fit" to say that working together improves fitness, but if so, it still becomes much harder to justify Social Darwinism.
  
  Whatever makes your genes more likely to spread goes into the definition of "fit" in this context.
  Evolution doesn't care how you managed to spread your genes. It only cares if you did it or not.
  If you have great social skills, which ends up in you working together, which ends up in you being better than if you didn't work together, which ends up in you spreading your genes, that counts towards your fitness.

good message, but bad post:
climate has nothing to do with the rest
poverty existed pre-indistrialisation
poverty kills people in non-fascist organisations
fascists always promised to solve poverty (german fascism = "national socialism")
- It's the guy from the meme!

Poverty is a social construct caused by wealth hoarding
What?! As if non-human species don't control access to resources... Keeping stuff for yourself (and your kin) rather than sharing with strangers is about as natural as a behavior can be. The social construct is actually the moral system that leads many humans to share.
- not by some natural resource shortage you fascist.
  Way to change the argument by leaving out half the sentence.
  
  The natural resource shortage or lack thereof is irrelevant. Look at those nature documentaries where a pack of healthy, well-fed animals drives away a starving loner.
- I think "poverty" probably has a specific sociological definition which separates it from regular resource destitution.

Humans come from nature so everything we do is natural and that includes inflicting poverty on people.
- https://dictionary.cambridge.org/us/dictionary/english/natural
  
  Nature exiles their weak and kills babies all the time. Its only natural.
- NuclearBombsAreNatural