ABOUT ME:
Hi! My name is Brandy Alderman-Oler, but most people call me AO (cuz its a lot shorter) I am really interested in science, you might even think I am a science nerd because this year I am in 5 hours of science! I find it really interesting because this is a subject that NO ONE knows everything about, there is always room to learn and the information is not right there, it’s like a puzzle that we all are piecing together. With all of that said you are probably not surprised when I say I want to be a science teacher and more specifically a high school biology teacher. And that’s me :)

Survival of the fittest:
We hear this phrase often, about wild life, in sports, and even in businesses. The biggest and best will triumph. Survival of the fittest is a phrase which sums up the idea of natural competition for predominance and resources. It was originally used in studies and writings done by Herbert Spencer in his: Principles of Biology of 1864, Herbert Spencer compared his ideas of economics with Charles Darwin's theories of evolution by what Darwin called natural selection.



Animals in the wild have to fight for what they want. There is only a limited amount of resources and every one is competing for what there is. For example, if there are 2 lions fighting for the same prey, the lion that can run the fastest will get the food. This is an example of survival of the fittest on a small scale, we see this happening in nature every day, however, if we were to spend years observing animals we might find a better example. We watched a movie earlier this year about a man that went to Alaska to study the wolves and caribou, it was thought that the wolves were just eating them to extinction, but what the man found was that the wolves were just helping the process of survival of the fittest by weeding out the sick.
Animals that have not adapted to fit the changes of their habitat throughout the years will not survive. This is why animals go extinct. Animals such as the Wyoming toad are endangered because they have not adapted to the changes of Wyoming. Animals adapt as do people and everything else in the world. This is the base of evolution. Humans have made adaptations through out the thousands of year we have been around. As a result, our average age has become larger and larger throughout the centuries. this is a prime example of survival of the fittest.
The phrase is a metaphor, not a scientific description; and it is not generally used by biologists, who almost unanimously prefer to use the phrase "natural selection"