We will also use Albert Einstein's notion of a gedankenexperiment. We'll do that by starting out with a bunch of organisms of more-or-less the same kind, in particular we will consider organisms that can get together to reproduce (we'll call that a "species" for convenience), who are living under more-or-less the same circumstances in more-or-less the same place (which we'll call an "ecological niche").

First, we will apply the rule of "survival of the fittest" and see what happens.

Under the doctrine of "survival of the fittest" we would expect that the best adapted male seeks out the best adapted female and their children go on to become the members of the species that propagate into the future.

Is that likely to happen? Not really.

If there is some mistake, so the best adapted male never gets to copulate with the best adapted female, they obviously don't have children. If the fittest don't have children, then "survival of the fittest" means that the species becomes extinct.

Since we can't expect that the best adapted male and best adapted female are always likely to meet one another, much less breed, this picture says that most species become extinct in a few generations.

In fact, that isn't true. Some species have been around in more-or-less the same form for millions of years. That, by itself, shows that "survival of the fittest" isn't a good way to look at things.

Some evolutionists would argue that I have missed the point. These evolutionists argue that what is meant by "survival of the fittest" is that the ancestors of the species we see today were the most "fit" because they were the ones that did have children who survived to have children, and so forth. They say that that's the way we determine "evolutionary fitness". You can't tell whether an organism has "evolutionary fitness" until you see which characteristics survive after many generations.

That is certainly true, but it is true because it is a tautology. It says that the "fit" survive because the ones that survive were the ones who were "fit". This amounts to redefining "fit" to mean "those that survive" and reduces the fundamental premise of evolution to "survival of the survivors". That is certainly true but it is circular, so it isn't very helpful. There wouldn't be any controversy about evolution if it were reduced to "the survival of the survivors".

That definition just destroys the meaning of the word "fit", which is a perfectly good word that we can take to mean "able to survive in a particular environment" without getting any benefit from the destruction. The notion of "evolutionary fitness" is a dead end.

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