“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

The concept of the survival of the fittest has had a considerably detrimental effect in many areas of human activity — particularly in the realm of medical ideology and practice.

It is quite true, however, that in the wild many animals protect and provide for wounded or disabled members, and that the wisdom that comes with age is indeed appreciated even in the animal kingdom. The survival of the fittest concept, however, has been exaggerated far above those of cooperation.

[...] We are not speaking of survival of the fittest, but the survival of life with meaning (intently). [...]

(Pause.) You say little, for example, if you note that spiders make webs instinctively because spiders must eat insects, and that the best web-maker will be the fittest kind of spider to survive. [...]

[...] While you believe in theories like the survival of the fittest, however, and the grand fantasies of evolution, then you put together your perceptions of the world so that they seem to bear out those theories. [...]

[...] But that also [became] bound up with Darwinian ideas of the survival of the fittest, and with the belief, then, that each individual must seek his or her own good at the expense of others, and by the quite erroneous conception that all of the members of a given species are in competition with each other, and that each species is in further competition with each other species.

[...] In the past you treated the land in your country as if your species, being the “fittest,” had the right to survive at the expense of all other species, and at the expense of the land itself. [...]

(Pause at 4:25.) The sooner you can rid yourself of rigid beliefs about the survival of the fittest, the better you will be. [...]

That analogy will help you at least intuitively understand the existence of situations such as suffering, and poverty, that otherwise seem to have no adequate explanations (as Jane and I were discussing today). I hope also to account for behavior on the part of nature that certainly seems to imply the survival of the fittest in a tooth-and-claw fashion, or the punishing acts of a vengeful God on the one hand and the triumph of an evil force on the other.

[...] I also wanted to know about the deep biological communication that must go on among all of the sperm in a man’s body at any given time, and why one of the “fittest” sperm in a particular ejaculate evidently doesn’t always fertilize the egg. [...]

[...] Old ideas of the survival of the fittest, conventional evolutionary processes, gods and goddesses, cannot hope to explain the “mystery of the universe”—but when we use our own abilities gladly and freely, we come so close to being what we are that sometimes we come close to being what the universe is. [...]

[...] You cannot divorce philosophy from action, and the cruelty in slaughterhouses would not be perpetrated if it were not for distorted philosophies dealing with the survival of the fittest on the one hand, and the egotistical assumption that God gave man animals to do with as man wished.

[...] In a universe formed by chance, with the survival of the fittest as the main rule of good behavior, illness became a kind of crime against a species itself. [...]

[...] In a species geared above all to the survival of the fittest, and the competition among species, then any touch of suffering or pain, or thoughts of death, become dishonorable, biologically shameful, cowardly, nearly insane. [...]

[...] There was no compassion, no intuition; little understanding revealed by the characters in the movie other than the emotions of bloodlust, survival of the fittest, and selfishness. [...]

[...] For how can you look at yourselves with self-respect, with dignity or with joy, if you believe that you are the end product of forces in which the fittest survive? Being the fittest implies those given most to what would appear to be murderous intent — for you must survive at the expense of your fellows, be you leaf, frog, plant, or animal.

(Ironically, Charles Darwin’s natural selection, “the survival of the fittest,” [a phrase that Darwin himself did not originate, by the way], allows for all sorts of pain and suffering in the process — the same unhappy facts of life, in Darwin’s view, that finally turned him into an agnostic, away from a God who could allow such things to exist! [...]

[...] Instead, I think that what has been learned so far offers only possible variations within the idea of evolution, for the talk is still about the origin of life out of nonlife, followed by the climb up the scale of living complexity; most evolutionists think that natural selection, or the survival of the fittest, still applies.

[...] Basically, then, an overall genetics of cooperation becomes a truer long-run concept than the postulated deadly struggle for survival of the fittest, whether between man and molecules, say, or among members of the same species. [...]

In other terms, the world comes to know itself, to discover itself, for the Planner left room for divine surprise, and the plan was nowhere foreordained; nor is there anywhere within it anything that corresponds to your survival-of-the-fittest theories.

[...] The ideas of shame are simply new versions of old religious concepts, or of scientific ones: if there is something physically wrong with you, it is either a sign of inner sin or of incompetency in terms of survival of the fittest. [...]

Your overreliance upon physical norms, and your distorted concepts concerning survival of the fittest, help exaggerate the existence of any genetic defects, of course. [...]

(Pause.) There has been great discussion in past years about the survival of the fittest, in Darwinian terms,⁴ but little emphasis is placed upon the quality of life, or of survival itself; or in human terms, [there has been] little probing into the question of what makes life worthwhile. [...]

[...] (We also have deep reservations about the theory of evolution and its “survival of the fittest” dogmas, but this isn’t the place to go into those subjects.) Far more basic and satisfactory to us are the intuitive comprehensions that this “nature” we’ve helped create is a living manifestation of All That Is, and that someplace, somewhere within its grand panorama, each action has meaning and is truly redeemed. [...]