"History works like this, he said: One army defeats another, and in march its genes and memes. He said there’s also a tautology latent in “the survival of the fittest” that has nothing to do with bad armies and good citizens. It’s that we don’t really have a good definition of “fittest.” We really just know, and it lines up irrefutably in our meager human language here: whatever survives, survives." \\ In short, Darwin's theory is descriptive, not predictive. - Adriano

I don't know if it's really that tautalogical, though. Reproductive fitness, while a contingent concept, does have a description that isn't defined purely teleologically. Nothing really survives. We're talking about persistence of species, of populations, of patterns, rather than persistence of individual organisms. Since genetic information is a subtype of information, you can extend the metaphor to other subtypes of information, but it's important to recognize equating genes with memes is just a metaphor. - Victor Ganata

actually I just wanted an excuse to preserve that over-the-top animated GIF qua meme as hereditary unit of cultural evolution :-) yes, clearly the more refined version is: "the survival of the replicators." - Adriano

if not a trusim, then the theory should be falsifiable. Seven observations, if repeated and confirmed, which would disprove the theory of evolution: http://whyevolutionistrue.wordpress.com/2012... - Adriano

That one about being inimical to individuals but beneficial to populations is a little perplexing. Autosomal recessive diseases like sickle cell anemia, cystic fibrosis, Tay-Sachs disease, etc. would seem to fit that paradigm quite well (although the heterozygous carrier is actually the adaptation.) - Victor Ganata

thinking about the consequences of placing artificial life [e.g. http://ff.im/11eLAC w/ http://ff.im/113ViJ] in a natural habitat without notice to the field biologists -- could be a mind fork if it started reproducing :-) - Adriano