[decimon]

Eat, drink and be mutant ping.

[EDINVA]

Isn’t that obvious? Did they note the ‘08 election results? Ever ride a Metro? Plenty of ‘non fitest’ out there ;)

[bgill]

both the fit and the unfit coexist indefinitely

IOW, we're doomed to coexist with RATS indefinitely.

[James C. Bennett]

Darwin's notion that only the fittest survive has been called into question by new research published today (27 March 2011) in Nature.

This probably isn't news... even to Darwin.

It is the most adept in the given the selection circumstances, that survive, and not the "fittest". If a snake-filled cavern suddenly gets sealed due to a landslide, it will be the thinnest ones that manage to escape through the cracks, that survive.

[Lorianne]

You only need to make a trip to the local Mall to disprove that theory.

[Dr. Sheldon Cooper]

"Research shows not only the fittest survive"

File under "Duh".

[Calusa]

Blame it on maternal love. Good nurture can keep the runts alive, even breed the runts, plowing undesirable traits back into the gene pool. It’s anti-darwinian I tell you. The rationalist Athenians would have none of that. They would expose sickly babies and probably a wide gamut of inconvenient whelps to the elements for the good of the state.

[RichInOC]

“The fittest shall survive...yet the unfit may live.”

—Bob Mothersbaugh and Jerry Casale

[JoeProBono]

[wendy1946]

Adolf Hitler: "...For the grossly impudent lie always leaves traces behind it, even after it has been nailed down..."

That's basically all that's really left of evolution any more, i.e. echoes in the echo chamber of dead and dying ideological doctrines masquerading as science theories.

[JDW11235]

I saw this today, and thought that it might be of interest, to you.

[ctdonath2]

Sometime “survival of the fittest” challenges our notion of “fit”.

[cookcounty]

Hmmmmm, so the creationist prediction that stasis is very much underrated is......accurate?

[allmendream]

So there is a balance between the quest for ultimate fitness and mutational variation. Wow. Who would have ever thought -seeings as how that is what we see in nature - that even given the ULTIMATE bacterial thunderdome “a thousand variations enter, one variation leaves” they don't seem to engage in a blood orgy of death and destruction that leaves only one survivor.

Variation within a populations is a measure of the fitness of a population, not just an individual. A stress that could wipe out a hypothetical “super fit ultimate competitor” bacterial population with almost no variation would only decimate a population with more variations, because some variations would be or become resistant to the stress.