Offspring of the Jungle

Source: Skeptical Science

Charles Darwin didn’t coin the phrase ‘Survival of the fittest’. It was coined by the British philosopher Herbert Spencer who was a contemporary of Darwin. But Spencer owed to Darwin for the phrase. “This survival of the fittest, which I have here sought to express in mechanical terms, is that which Darwin has called natural selection or the preservation of favoured races in the struggle for life.” That’s what Spencer wrote in his book, Principles of Biology.

Spencer rephrased Darwin. The meaning is the same: survival of the fittest = natural selection. Nature selects the best and abandons the rest. Life is a struggle in which the fittest win and the others lose. That’s quite the law of the jungle.

In the jungle every creature is born to run, as Christopher McDougall put it in his book, Born to Run. “Every morning in Africa,” he wrote, “a gazelle wakes up. It knows it must outrun the fastest lion or it will be killed. Every morning in Africa, a lion wakes up. It knows it must run faster than the slowest gazelle, or it will starve. It doesn’t matter whether you’re the lion or a gazelle – when the sun comes up, you’d better be running.”

Run or perish. Be fit or be killed. That’s the law of the jungle. If the lions have a religion, its first commandment would be: Thou shalt run faster than the slowest gazelle. Who would be its god? A monster with sharp fangs and claws with blood dripping from its snarling mouth? Would the gazelles have worshipped an image of the lion in their temples?

Gods belong to civilisation, not nature. Civilisation is a creation of the animal that was endowed with a more elaborate and complex imagination. This complex animal imagined itself as superior to the other animals and created gods and commandments in order to tame its inner savagery which far surpassed the blood lust of the other animals. The other animals hunted for food usually. Some minor rivalries occurred here and there, no doubt. But by and large, the animals were driven by hunger. They killed for food. Preying is not killing, their first commandment would have read.

The human beings created a lot of commandments, but went on to break every one of them as and when he liked. He remained a beast far worse than his counterparts in the jungle in spite of his numerous gods. He killed for his gods. He killed for his sexual appetites. He killed for paper pieces that he called currency. He killed for truisms that he called ideologies. He killed for anything from greed to jealousy to lust to nationalism. And then he blamed the animals in the jungle for savagery.

PS. Written for Indispire Edition 312: "survival of the fittest," the Law of the Jungle what do these phrases tell you? I often wonder if we got Charles Darwin's theory wrong. #Survivalofthefittest