CHAPTER III 



FITNESS AND ADAPTATION 



The Criterion of Fitness The Different Kinds of Fitness Fit- 

 ness by Design and Fitness by Mutual Influences Temporary and 

 Permanent Fitness The Measure of Organic Fitness The Meas- 

 ure of Social Fitness The Adaptation of Vital Actions to Good 

 and Evil The Evolution of Fitness and Adaptation Adaptability 

 in Nature-Action, as a Universal Creative Tropism. 



I. The Criterion of Fitness 



THE familiar phrase "Survival of the fit and elimi- 

 nation of the unfit," has played and still plays an im- 

 portant role in evolutionary theory. But it is an elu- 

 sive verbal formula whose imposing garment of unes- 

 sentials and its silence as to what we really want to 

 know make it so comprehensive and self-evident, its 

 emptiness so dangerous. It is virtually but another 

 way of saying that whatever is exists because it was so 

 created, and the thing which survives is that which is 

 fit to survive. What the creative and preserving factors 

 are, the questions of real significance, are left unasked 

 and unanswered. Hence all the theories of evolution 

 upbuilt on selection, such as germinal, physiological, 

 or natural selection, are fundamentally evasive and of 

 little scientific, or moral, value, in so far as they con- 

 tain no general implication as to what constitutes "fit- 

 ness," how things are created, how they are saved, why 

 destroyed, and to what end, or purpose, they do, or do 

 not, exist. 



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