DECONSTRUCTING IMAGES OF "SURVIVAL OF THE FITTEST"
DRAFT: NOT FOR ATTRIBUTION TO THE AUTHOR, BUT FEEL FREE TO STEAL THE IDEA AND RUN WITH IT
DECONSTRUCTING IMAGES OF "SURVIVAL OF THE FITTEST"
ABSTRACT
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DECONSTRUCTING IMAGES OF "SURVIVAL OF THE FITTEST"
In a recent show on the Discovery Channel (I think), I saw a documentary about a woman who had studied moose for many years. What I remember is that she made a crude pair of antlers; no more than that seemed to be necessary for approaching them. Anyway, she noted how infrequently bull moose fought, even during mating season. They go through a number of preliminaries instead: (what / all I remember is:) thrashing the bushes and grasses with their antlers, moving their antlers vigorously, "woofing" [could be imagining this one], mock charges. At some point, one or the other will usually drift away; only rarely does actual combat ensue, and even more rarely does death ensue.
I seem to recall this from other sources, no longer remembered. But the main point is that this is quite different from my image of "survival of the fittest", gathered from so many nature shows: "nature, red in tooth and claw" [cite?]; "the creepers, locked in a silent, deadly struggle with the trees". In other words, my image of what "survival of the fittest" means is much more aggressive, much more confrontational, much deadlier than what actually (or, more frequently) occurs in nature.
It has long been recognized that "survival of the fittest" is something of a tautology; in the absence of any criterion of how survival of "fitness" other than the fact of survival, the phrase reduces to "Those who survive, survive."
Certainly it seems that nothing in nature demands that moose kill each other. One can make up plausible arguments like, "If you don't kill your competitor now, he'll just be back next year to compete with you again", but the plausibility should not be taken as a substitute for reality. Counterarguments are possible: "If we look at the relevant gene as a group possession and not an individual possession, it makes no sense to kill someone who can help protect the herd (against wolves, for example) or who can keep on mating if you should happen to die yourself. Genetic variation at the individual level may be important to preserve, but individual variation in ability to kill one's competitors is less important for survival than individual variations in resistence to disease, efficiency of digestion, ability to locate food sources, protectiveness of the young, cooperation in other ways, etc." Which of these arguments is right? - that's for Nature to decide, and until we know the nature of Nature perfectly, we can't substitute our sense. The problem is, we believe we do know Nature.(1) And amazingly enough, Nature seems to look like what we need it to look like in order to justify / legitimate our current form of life. So, for example, we can justify cutthroat free market competition on the grounds of its "naturalness". Or, the other way around, our image of nature provides us with a ready-made interpretation of what we find in our society. In other words, our understanding of Nature is ideological, in the Marxist sense: a belief system that obscures an underlying oppressive reality and thereby serves to justify the oppression.
My sense of wildlife photographers (of a certain stripe, anyway) is that they wait and wait and wait until they can finally capture an image of (say) two bull moose fighting it out, at which point they pay scant attention to their other footage and instead show primarily the final, violent conflict.
My proposal is this: to analyze the content of nature shows (and other portrayals of Nature) to see how their themes correspond to the existing social structure, i.e., to see how they serve an ideological function.
1. It may be worthwhile to add some material here on how science becomes a hermetic project. The way we conduct science, our null hypothesis (h0) is that Nature is such-and-such a way (i.e., as our theory says it is), and we proceed to experiment until we disprove it. But our H0 (in the language of the hermetic projects paper) is that we know enough to intervene in Nature. Each time an old theory is falsified, our reaction is to say, "Aha! Now we understand Nature! Too bad about all that previous destruction, but we won't make that mistake again." And it's true; we won't make that mistake again but only new ones. Meanwhile, H0 - the assumption allowing for those new mistakes - goes unquestioned. A related discussion of this issue appears in the article, "Deep Impact" & "Armageddon" vs. "Jurassic Park" & "xx": A Critical Analysis.
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