Evolution is not survival of the fittest. The Coronavirus impact on our economy offers an analogy.

Some people assume that evolution and "survival of the fittest" mean the same thing.  And sadly, some people use the phrase "survival of the fittest" to rationalize and justify the dominance of the one group of individuals over another.

One impact of society's reaction to coronavirus is that we reduced our contact with other people and visited stores like Walmart less often.  Many people turned to Amazon to buy products instead.  This could lead us to logically claim that Amazon performed better than Walmart because, according to "Survival of the fittest", Amazon was "more fit".  But there is a flaw in this claim that many people overlook.  The flaw in assuming that Amazon is "more fit" than Walmart is the implication that Amazon is more fit "in every way" than Walmart.  The flaw is to believe there is something about "fitness" inherent in the organization (or organism) that lends justification to saying one is "more fit" than another and thus their survival is more valuable or more important to the species than another.  "Fitness" is not a property inherent in specific individuals or organisms.  Instead, it is a relationship between that individual and the events of the environment they live in.

To clarify the distinction, let us imagine that coronavirus had not impacted our society, but instead, society experienced a different calamity.  What if the majority of our country lost electricity for several months?  If such a thing occurred, you could assume that Walmart would probably do better during that time than Amazon.  Following the same reasoning we used to decide that Amazon is "more fit" than Walmart during coronavirus, we would now reason that Walmart is "more fit" than Amazon during the electrical outage.  Therefore we can deduce that the quality of being "more fit" is not something intrinsic to the organization or organism.  It is a measure of the interaction of the qualities of the organization or organism and how it interacts with changes in its ecosystem.

So what is the point of this article?  The point is that we can't claim, after the fact, that one group survives and thrives because they deserve to survive and thrive because they were "more fit"; with "more fit" implying superiority over the other group.  We can only say that one group survives and thrives because they had qualities that allowed them to better respond and adapt to a specific change in the ecosystem.  Had a different change occurred in the ecosystem the other group may have survived and thrived.

Groups that seek to justify their ideas of genocide toward other groups often invoke "survival of the fittest", but I hope you can see that such reasoning is flawed.  In fact, I think you should conclude that if the survival of humanity is important, then diversity of humanity is important to increase the chances that some of humanity may survive.

And why, you may ask, is evolution not "survival of the fittest"?  The reason is that we can't apply the unqualified idea of "most fit" to an organism in order to declare that organism is most likely to be around 100 or 1000 years from now.  We can't identify "most fit" until after the events have occurred that lead us to the current organisms we have today.  We can only say that one organism or another is more likely to survive specify changes such as droughts, or diseases, or new predators or a combination of several factors.

Evolution is the result of the interaction of organisms responding to changes.  It has no forethought, no planning, no goals, and is not even predisposed to prefer life.  It does not look ahead.  Evolution is just a label we uses to describe what has come before and how it came to be.