Malthus, Darwin, and Survival of the Fittest

This material was inspired by the book "Not By Chance! (Shattering the modern theory of Evolution) by Dr. Lee Spetner, pp. 13-17. The references used on those pages include (non-exhaustively):

Bergerud A. T., (1983). "Prey switching in a simple ecosystem," Scientific American, vol. 249, December.

Eliot, C.W., (1909). "Introductory Note" to Darwin's Origin of Species, Harvard Classics Edition, Volume 11, New York: Collier.

Wynne-Edwards, V. C., (1965). "Self-regulating systems in populations of animals," Science, vol. 147, pp. 1543-1548.

Wynne-Edwards, V.C., (1986). Evolution Through Group Selection, London: Blackwell.

Category:

Science & Technology

Tags:

• Natural selection
• Thomas Malthus
• Charles Darwin
• evolution
• survival of the fittest

[PrinceOfSpane]

Why are other animals different from humans? What are these 'intrinsic' regulatory mechanisms? Because it seems to me that animal growth is limited by predation, disease etc, whereas human exponential growth is so precisely because we have overcome these things, through medicine and weapons etc. The point Malthus was making was that eventually these limiting factors will catch up with us, and so far it has primarily been the work of scientists that has stopped this from happening.

[Kanbei85]

The theories of Malthus are not really the topic of this video, they were merely mentioned in it.

[prsaledja]

"it's time to get to work mythbusters. it's time to STOP BLINDLY ACCEPTING the absurdities that WE HAVE BEEN THOUGHT TO BELIEVE in a biology classroom"

when this comes out of the mouth of a religious person one cannot stop to laugh :))

peace everyone ;P

[PrinceOfSpane]

@Kanbei85 If you say so, but I'd still like to know what these intrinsic mechanisms are, and from reading some other comments it's apparent that other people would like to know as well.

[Rivera3689]

Darwin is cool :D

[RoadlessPath]

Even if you comments are right this doesn't make the evolution theory wrong. Its just becoming complexer.

It's strange when i meet religious people that they have changed their belief with knowledge that the science, making selection which one they can us and which one don't. And suddenly after adapting attack science again. And they still believe in the delusion.

Religions in relation to science is as a person which wearing a shoe which grows tide, and get a new brush.

[RoadlessPath]

Well you are right about that people behave different then the animal population. To give you one example:

Animals will kill what scienctist call the "weakest"animals. Human hunters have (I don't now when they started with that) killed the strongest animals. Example: The big male deers instead of weaker ones.

This made place survival of the fittest into another prespective. The fittest and the weakest are being killed. What happens is that humans behaviour tips nature's harmony of the scale.

[TheSpankymonkey]

"Animals and humans do not behave the same way" - If you say so ;-) Would you like slapping round the head with a jesus fish now? Or later? You know, even if EVERYTHING Darwin relied on was WRONG right now. It still would not question evolution. It happens, we have over 150 years of further science since then. Even if you ripped Darwin apart from the limbs and stopped him printing the book it wouldn't change anything. So what are you doing? Absolutely nothing at all.