Quote Originally Posted by theMagician View Post
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You just said that survival of a species has everything to do with evolution.
No I didn't. I said that a more accurate characterization of evolution is "survival of the fit enough to survive". In context of what I said previously one would expect that an intelligent person would read that as "survival of the organisms that are fit enough to survive". Oh well.


And about the individual organisms and not the entire species... Tell that to the dinosaurs.

Technically birds are dinosaurs but whatever. Let's assume that the dinosaurs are extinct. The reason that they're extinct is because there were not any individual dinosaurs that were fit enough to survive. What does that have to do with "species"? Where does "species" come into that? Please use your brain. Evolution is a local phenomenon. A "species" going extinct is a global phenomenon. Evolution does not happen "to" prevent our "species" from going extinct. There is no "to". You are thinking teleologically. It is a good way to think about people. People do stuff "to" cause things to happen. It is not a good way to think about other stuff. Stuff happens. There is no "to". Evolution happens because organisms that are fit enough to survive and reproduce survive and reproduce. This can have the consequence that a "species" doesn't go extinct.

To take this back on topic, we do not want to reproduce so that our "species" doesn't go extinct. Our "species" doesn't go extinct because we want to reproduce. There's a very powerful principle in evolution called "The Extended Phenotype". It says that "a behavior behavior benefits the genes that encode for it." In this case, a gene that causes us to want to reproduce will spread through the population and a gene that causes us to not want to reproduce will not spread through the population. Hence a "species" evolves.

Please educate yourself before you post on this topic again. I'll know if you've educated yourself because your response will be something along the lines of "OMG PhilosopherStoned. You're absolutely right. I really had no fucking clue what I was talking about. Thank you for taking the time to correct my very basic and obvious error. I was essentially postulating that evolution is magic. I was really making a creationist out of myself on that one."