To all those who want a society based on "Survival of the Fittest"

Blue blood is the secret

Truely they are the most noble.

99.9% of fictional and even real societies that proclaimed this ideal lack a basic understanding of what fitness actually means.

Shih tzus are in general much fitter than Gray wolves.

Domestic dogs have pretty much won at evolution. They trade most of their reproductive freedom for near guaranteed survival to adulthood, protection from almost all potential predators and have created a demand for the most powerful species on the planet to actively perpetuate their existence.

BOW DOWN BEFORE THE MASTER RACE HUMAN MUCUS!

>my character is an asshole to everyone because muh survival of the fittest!
>He wants to be the strongest and the bestest and he will fuck up everyone standing on his way!
>wait guys why am i being murdered help

Daily reminder that meme social darwinism is dumb.

>tfw undead sponges in dwarf fortress
Truly a nightmare made manifest.

Horseshoe Crabs are cool, but as for survival of the fittest societies, it just doesn't work.

The Spartans had that whole thing going, but when they conquered Athens and tried to turn it into another Sparta, the native population simply wouldn't take to the idea. The problem is that you're eventually going to get to a point where you will need to negotiate instead of trying to fuck shit up. When words become the weapon of choice instead of brute force, the idea of who is the 'strongest' begins to change.

Get on my level

Horsehoe Crabs are fucking awesome. In my top 3 favorite animals.

There was a song I heard on the radio called Horsehoe crab, it was part of a live set the band was doing. I really liked the whole set, but that song especially. The band was promoting their new album which I looked up and immediately bought when I got home. It became my new favorite album over the next week, which is insane since my favorite album hadn't changed in nearly 10 years. There's not really a point to this annecdote, other than Horseshoe Crabs are really fucking cool man.

>In my top 3 favorite animals.
The best animals are the Giant Anteater, Pangolin and Cuttlefish.

In that order, no exceptions. I will fight you on this subject.

>cuttlefish

>Domestic dogs have pretty much won at evolution.
Except for all the crippling defects we've bred into them, sure.

>not having Ants as #1
When the Ants take over they'll see your internet history, they'll know who's really loyal

Which are completely irrelevant to their ability to survive to reproduce. Evolution doesn't actually give a shit about making things "better", the most fit organism is the one most likely to reproduce and for its offspring to also reproduce. This is why "Darwinist" ideologies are retarded, they fundamentally misunderstand what it actually means to be fit.

I don't know about yall, but I'd fuck up a horseshoe crab in a fight, I have empathy and I know maths.

Definitely not the best species.

If you need the support of another species to reproduce, you're not terribly fit on your own.

If I had a team of genetics and reproductive health specialists on retainer at all times, AND if I were able to shunt my offspring off to whoever would take them, I could be the most reproductively succesful human being in the history of the world.

That doesn't say anything about MY fitness.

>If you need the support of another species to reproduce, you're not terribly fit on your own.
Tell it to all the parasites in the world, they are thriving. And then you consider social parasites

Except it totally does.

Evolution is not a moral maxim, it's very much a "whatever works, no matter how ugly or humiliating" sort of affair.

Bugs are just cool in general.

This thread turned out to be a lot less shit than I thought it would be.

Horseshoe crabs only breed one place on earth.
HOW IS THAT SURVIVAL ETHICS?!

>If you need the support of another species to reproduce, you're not terribly fit on your own.

Laughing parasites.jpg

>That doesn't say anything about MY fitness.
Yes it does.

The term Fitness in regard to evolutionary biology literally (and I really mean literally) refers to individual reproductive success in a particular environment.

If your environment includes another species which will manage the reproduction of your species and your genotype/phenotype has features that makes them more likely to select you for reproduction than others you are by definition more fit than others.

Fitness has nothing at all to do with what you personally think good or bad traits are, is entirely dependent on environment and is relative to other organisms. Bigger, stronger or smarter organisms are not more fit than others, the sole factor is reproductive success.

No? They breed on beaches everywhere, all over the earth

Hey you're right.. then, what the fuck sea crustacean am I thinking of.

>how many extinction level events have you survived?
>oh I dunno, 3, maybe 4
>you are like little baby. watch this

Dunno.

They do only breed once a year though. They have this big mating season where they all come to shore to fuck and often die.

I remember one time, when I was pretty young, 10 or 11, something around there. I was out on Kitty Hawk in the outer banks, the place with the Wright Brothers and that. The weekend I was there happened to be just after horseshoe crab mating season. There were dead horsehoecrab shells everywhere on the beach, just everywhere. It was kinda cool, but also kinda grim. Very striking imagery, it's really stuck with me.

Are horseshoe crabs known for being particularly fit?

Well they lug that huge shell around everywhere they go so they must be pretty fit. Also they've got a lot of legs so they could do a lot of squats.

good luck surviving for very long with no bacteria in your body.

Also recall that multicellular organisms are colonies by definition.

Okay but how much can a horseshoe crab deadlift?

So... how exactly have domestic dogs 'won' at evolution, instead of humans?

We let pretty much every human reproduce, but we (mostly) select the dogs we allow to breed.

We literally gas dogs that become inconvenient, regardless of whether or not they've had a chance to breed. How is that fitness?

Fitness is defined at the species level. Not the individual. The subspecies of Domestic Dog is extremely fit, being extremely widespread and numerous.

Doggos co-evolved with humans. They quite literally are our best friends

>litteraly ones of the least evolved species
>fit
this
parasites are degenerate so it's still wrong.

Turns out evolution was generally a mistake after you got to the ultra-survivors.
Anyone evolved after that fails the test of time.

was that band Hop Along?

It looks like it's made of wet cardboard.

Nah. Slothrust. I'm listening to Hop Along's Horeshoe Crabs now though, it's a good song.

This is the one I heard though.
youtube.com/watch?v=yStQqyvyJNQ

And then you grew up to make a horror game to surpass Silent Hill, eh?

It should be noted that despite their reputation as living fossils, no particular genus of horseshoe crab is actually particularly old. This also goes for the average lifespan of fossil genuses. It's just that every horseshoe crab ever looks indistinguishable from one another unless you've got a major in invertebrate biology/paleontology.
Compare to triops, which have species that have been around since the Triassic!

I have a PC in my group who plays an evil wizard who believes in the very core of that dogma. The player is a nice guy but everyone else at the table agrees, behind his back, that the character is utterly insufferable.

It can also survive boiling, hard vacuum, radiation and close to absolute zero temperatures. We've shot the little fuckers into space in an unshielded capsule, and more than half of the ones survived the trip and re-entry.

It's also worth noting that Spartans were pretty shitty at reproducing. They married late, didn't spend a lot of time fucking and it wasn't too hard to get thrown out of spartan society because honour and shit.
Not to mention that at their height they spent so much time fighting that they couldn't replace the dead fast enough.

Being a proud warrior race is good for getting a couple centuries of political power but complete shit for long term survival.

Sparta's major problem is, quite frankly, they were unfit to survive as a society. They hated commerce and used heavy iron slabs as the defacto currency. Their main form of legal tender rusted and was hard to carry, two things counter to what money is actually supposed to be.

They actively killed any child that looked sickly and weak, this is counter productive as a significant portion of supposedly weak babies develop into functional adults.

They kept slaves in such a state of cruelty that their greatest fear when going to battle was that the slaves would take their weapons and rise against them, not that the enemy would ambush them.

The men spent so much time away from home that during on campaign the women of sparta assumed their husbands had been lost in battle and bred with slaves. On their return the spartan men expelled the slave bred sons. This created a truly fantastic amount of bandits and informants on spartan weaknesses over night.

Eventually technology out stripped their methods of warfare and they refused to change and became a backwater.

strength is useless unless its backed with societal and intellectual support.

Pleasantly surprised by the quality of this thread.

Perhaps tangential, but it makes me wonder about evolutionary success in relation to immortal species.

I remember first being puzzled by it reading Anne McCaffrey's Dragonriders of Pern series (which weirdly enough is more sci-fi than fantasy,) in which the firewyrms(?) from which dragons are genetically engineered are apparently immortal. Like they can still be killed, but can't die from old age. How do they not overrun the planet? Do they simply self-regulate population control by starving to death when food supply becomes scarce from over-predation? Can ancient firewyrms still reproduce with younger ones, or have their genes mutated to the point where they become different species within the same "generation?"

Also, elves. In a lot of lore they are immortal but rarely reproduce, leading to static or even dwindling population count. Is their immortality a marker of evolutionary success, or evolutionary failure, or evolutionary zero-sum-game? In LotR part of the reason Men are becoming dominant is because they die quickly and reproduce quickly, constantly making way for new generations, making the species as a whole highly flexible and adaptable. But then I don't think evolutionary progress (I know that's a loaded word, I mostly just mean mutation/adaptation) equates to evolutionary success, at least not necessarily.

tl;dr how does immortality fit in with darwinism/evolutionary-success/"survival of the fittest?"

In regards to the dragons, in nature on Earth population regulation is carried out by predation, disease, and parasites. Since I don't think anything eats dragons, that means there must be some pretty gnarly diseases and parasites out there adapted to dragons.

Make one

Re: elves--if they die out, they clearly failed.

In LOTR though, they're something like immortal spirits with a flesh body in our world. They don't die out, they all just fuck off to their ancestral paradise island which is closed to humans until the end of time. So I guess they're outside of the system of natural selection as we understand it in the real world.

Re: the dragons
All interesting questions that were not answered by the book.

Perhaps they reproduce very slowly, or only under special circumstances. Despite biological immortality, they might still evolve over vast timescales. For example, if there's a great dieback from a disease, only the creatures who are resistant will pass on their genes.

I might be wrong about this, but I think turtles and some other reptiles just grow older and larger until something kills them. I assume that means with immortality you live until the environment can't support you or something else figures out the trick to killing you, i.e. flying you really high up and dropping you onto a rock.
So the same thing with dragons, I guess? Either you get so large that feeding on the peasants' sheep isn't enough to sustain you or some uppity knight gets lucky and slays you.

Galapagos tortoises can live a very long time (more than a century), but they do eventually die of old age. And they're an endangered species confined to a single island, so it doesn't seem to have done much for them.

But there is this
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turritopsis_dohrnii

>en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turritopsis_dohrnii
>in nature, most Turritopsis are likely to succumb to predation or disease in the medusa stage
Huh. Well that answers the question. Dragon Flu.
I wonder how deadly it'd be to humans.

Every living thing needs the support of other species to reproduce. You think you'd live to reproductive age without eating something?
Fitness is about the ability to establish and maintain a niche. I might be that bird that eats parasites and carrion in hippo mouths, but if the hippo is a huge population endemic on every landmass in the world and actively engaged in protecting and enhancing my survival, if my species cannot be killed off unless you first kill off a goddamn force of nature that reshapes the entire biosphere, yeah, I'm in pretty good shape.

Not water bear shape, but much better than almost any other species. Including the hippo, since they'll die out before I do.

this is a good ass thread

I don't think anyone could breed something to out-compete horseshoe crabs. Let them have their niche, and we'll eke out our own.

Suddenly the survival game Don't Starve seems more significant and aptly named

>not combining the DNA of all creatures to create the ultimate lifeform
And you call yourself a mad scientist.

Faker? I think you're the fake ultimate lifeform here! You're comparing yourself to ME? Ha! You're not even good enough to be my fake!

I wonder how we will take dogs with us to space.

Are you happy?

Greater immunity to pollution that naturally occurring crabs?

medicaldaily.com/horseshoe-crab-populations-steadily-decrease-their-indespensable-medical-use-threatened-280728

Like this, but with space helmets on

friendly reminder that there were dogs in space before humans in space

No need to fix what aint broke.

>Hey, I'm an endurance-based pack hunter with a great sense of smell, a high running speed, and complex social systems!
>Hey, I'm ALSO an endurance-based pack hunter! My sense of smell isn't so good, but I can throw things better than any other primate, harness the unstoppable power of fire, and say words like gneurshk! Also, I'll let you eat my garbage if you don't kill me!
>Wanna be friends?
>Sure!

>And so the unholy alliance was formed

and then somewhere along the lines, the local top apex predator decided to get in on that action too.

what a bunch of faggots, behind his back? jesus, you are the cancer you fear

Why do horseshoe crabs look so pissed off all the time?

Dogs are extremely unfit. They haven't existed for very long, are full of defects that make it impossible for them to take care of themselves, and their protector is a fairly new species that could possibly destroy itself at anytime. Short success, huge gamble.

>classic spear+shield combo
>attractive, immediately recognisable and striking shape, perfect for heraldry for instance
>literally have blue blood
Are they the most patrician animal?

Reminds me a bit of His Name Is Alive.
youtube.com/watch?v=PRjbnOXz638

Triops are fuckin cute cus they're like tiny translucent horseshoe crabs. I had some for a while when I was a kid.

BITCH, PLEASE. STROMATOLITE MASTER RACE!

>Horseshoe crabs having any chance of leaving the Solar System and surviving the Sun becoming a red giant

Checkmate, crabfags.

>any species having a chance of surviving the heat death of everything
Checkmate, Life.

I think OP seems to get the same thing wrong as this guy and this one and a whole load of others. The logic with which you consider a water bear or a horseshoe crab to be fit for survival has the same problem as taking out a loan to pay off your debt, rather than to pay it off. It's short-sighted. While simple creatures like the ones above can maintain an illusion of being fit for survival in the immediate sense, a species also needs to have the intellectual capacity to rise above animalistic drives for senseless self-preservation and discover the long-term necessity of eugenics. Only then, such a species is truly fit for survival, because it will breed itself consciously to improve on it's capacity to develop more and more advanced tech, until it is capable of either leaving the planet in a vessel equipped with all they need to live without a sun, or to leave the solar system with the planet.

TLDR: Horseshoe crabs can't build spaceships. Only humans can and that doesn't include most currently live hominids either.

>cockroaches are superior to elves because numbers
Nice logic humies.

Yeah wtf just be normal and make the bants public.

>he thinks eugenics means killing everybody that isn't fit for reproduction

I know!
Eugenics means increasing reproduction between fit people while increasing stability and use of contraceptives in those that aren't

>Horseshoe crabs can't build spaceships
I'm calling bullshit. Show proofs

gelding is the most reliable contraceptive

Horseshoe Crabs>Humans>Orks>Dwarves>Cockroaches>>>Shit>>>>>>Kenders>>>>>Elves>>>>>>Yourwaifu

At least we have learned to harness their ultimate power

>Dairy Crab's Life.jpg

>Other animals can't eat you if they think you are a weird rock

Jokes on you my waifu is a horseshoe crab

"Cull the weak" ideology is the stupid way of doing it.
It's better to "Encourage the strong" and have only those interested in dominance fight for it while leaving the "weak" be and do something useful as they are.
If you just go purging what those already in power consider weak, you lose a lot of potential. Being "the Fittest" should be encouraged but not mandatory, while the rest shouldn't be attacked or disdained unless they actively cause regression (Criminals, for example)

...

I'd tap that.