Natural Selction

11 Pages 2643 Words

tner and to procreate with them to produce viable offspring. An individual’s desire to eat is compelled by their desire to stay alive so that they may transfer their genes onto the next generation. All of civilizations actions and behaviours boil down to their essential desire to live on through their children after they have passed. Since it is impossible to live forever, the best alternative would be to have their genes live on forever and that requires fitness maximization.

Effects of Natural Selection
If fitness maximization is truly the underlying desire behind all of our motives and actions, it makes a very scary statement about the true nature of human beings. This type of rationale promotes a very selfish and egocentric attitude towards the world we inhabit. If everyone is essentially only concerned with maximizing his or her own fitness, then essentially every action or behaviour we undertake would only take into consideration the well being and account of our own good. People would like to believe that the well being of our neighbours, friends and the remainder of society should play a prominent role in the process of our decision-making and actions we undertake, but according to the theory of fitness maximization it would not.
This line of reasoning actually does make some kind of sense. Most people take into account the welfare of themselves and their families into consideration before worrying about the welfare of others. When a person lists their priorities or whom they care for the most, almost everyone in the world would place their families before their friends or strangers. Some even place the welfare of their loved ones before themselves; blood is thicker then virtually anything, as it very well should be.
The problem one encounters is that there are a select group of philanthropic selfless individuals out there who do place the benefits and interests of complete strangers or non-family members before even t...