The “fittest” can be greatly loving and selfless, not the most contentious and brutal. In any case, what happens in nature does not rationalize people acting in the same way.

The phrase “survival of the fittest“, which was minted not by Darwin but by the scholar Herbert Spencer, is widely misinterpreted.

For starters, there is a ton more to evolution by natural selection than just the survival of the fittest. There must also be a population of reproducing beings and differences between them that influence fitness – variation that must be heritable. By itself, the survival of the fittest is a dead end. Business people are particularly guilty of confusing survival of the fittest with evolution.

What’s more, although the phrase conjures up an impression of a brutal battle for survival, in fact, the word “fittest” seldom means the strongest or the most contentious. On the contrary, it can mean anything from the best camouflaged or the most fecund to the cleverest or the most harmonious. Forget Rambo, think Einstein or Gandhi.

What we see in the wild is not every creature for itself. Cooperation is an extremely successful survival strategy. It has been the basis of all the most dramatic steps in the history of life. Complex cells evolved from cooperating simple cells. Multicellular organisms are made up of cooperating complex cells. Superorganisms such as bee or ant colonies contain cooperating individuals.