Metaphor: Evolution is often reduced to “survival of the fittest,” as if nature were a never-ending sports tournament where only the strongest competitors advance.
Problem / Misleading Aspect: This metaphor imports competition, ranking, and moral judgment into evolution. “Fittest” gets misread as “strongest” or “best,” reinforcing social Darwinist ideologies of progress and hierarchy. It obscures the relational truth: fitness is context-specific, emerging from how organisms align with environments and each other. Cooperation, symbiosis, and sheer chance all play crucial roles — but the sports-metaphor edits them out of the script.
Relational Ontology Correction: Evolution is not about winners and losers; it is about actualising potentials in relation to constraints and contexts. An organism’s survival depends on fit, not fitness-as-rank. There is no global scoreboard, only local alignments of possibility.
Parody (woven through): If survival really worked like a tournament, lions would hand out medals to gazelles, bacteria would publish league tables, and Darwin would have been employed as referee for the Great Evolutionary Games. The absurdity points to the misstep: treating nature like a contest erases its relational, non-hierarchical complexity.
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