Survival of the fit enough

Why optimisation is a lie that has nothing to do with evolution

Dear friends,

Thank you for being here and for reading my queer ecology writing! If you’re new to my work, you can read more about me on my website or my newsletter. If you’re enjoying these essays, please consider supporting me on Patreon or with coffee ☕️. This year I’m leaning even more into workshops, keynotes and tours on all these subjects, so drop me a line if you’d like to host something. And a reminder that much of this blog comes from my upcoming book on queer ecology and I’m looking for a publisher! Feel free to drop your connections and ideas in the comments,
love, Kes 🩷

---

Concentration of power is built on hierarchies and control but also story-telling - and few stories have been as useful to those in power as misrepresentations of life, nature and evolution.

If enough people use, or misuse, a term, at some point it just seems to be a description of reality. As a meme, ‘Survival of the fittest’ is resilient and massively misunderstood - I’ve heard it several times this week, and not once in a way that reflects current understandings of biology.

‘Survival of the fittest’ is a measurement - specifically of ‘survival of the form that will leave the most copies of itself in successive generations’. Which sounds technical but it has its usefulness for evolutionary biologists, ecologists and others.

That’s not how regular people use it. It has been widely, and strategically, misinterpreted to describe nature as a battleground, of (only) competition for limited resources, of hierarchies and optimisation. It has been widely, and strategically, used to justify all kinds of oppressions including eugenics.

As Ambika Kamath and Melina Packer wrote in Feminism in the Wild (2025) - even the word, fittest, shows a bias that isn’t reflective of how evolution by natural selection actually works. As they put it, “It isn’t only the fastest gazelle who manages not to be eaten by a cheetah and who gets to reproduce. Rather, all the gazelles who run fast enough to not be eaten by cheetahs may survive and produce offspring.”

In other words, out there in the real world, it isn’t only the ‘fittest’ who survive, but the ‘fit enough’.

Seeing survival as only for superlatives – the fittest, the smartest, the richest – has dovetailed neatly with hierarchies and class. If some individuals are seen as fitter and more useful to society (or just intrinsically superior), it stands to reason that others are less than.

Valuing production, reproduction and little baby animals

In systems like capitalism, producing work and goods is valued so those who are seen to produce less are also valued less. Sick and disabled people for example are seen by many rich people - and those who follow their stories - as less productive and less useful to society. That also makes us considerably more disposable.

On the other hand, the work of planet-killing CEOs fits conveniently into what is considered productive so, not only can they continue to do what they do, but they are lavished with resources beyond what anyone could ever need. A hierarchy is formed.

Another unspoken assumption in stories of evolution is that reproduction is a central part of existence and making babies is the most important thing in life. Without much understanding of evolution by natural selection, it’s easy to tell a story in which individuals who reproduce more are ‘fitter’ (maybe better at ‘leaving copies of themselves in successive generations’). Those who reproduce are seen to be more valuable for the population or the species, than those who don’t and of course it’s been easy enough to extend this to human individuals and weaponise it to justify, for example, homophobia.

But on the contrary, as the authors point out: “…it’s not just the work of producing offspring that matters to an animal population’s persistence. An individual’s impact on their population also depends on their social and ecological relationships with other individuals in the same or different species.” As always, it’s all about relationships. [1]

Combine this with the lack of systemic evidence that “engaging in same-sex sexual behavior necessarily reduces an individual’s fitness.” - and we see how the story has very little to do with biology and everything to do with prejudice and hierarchies.

Ageism also has its roots in this reproductivity-as-value story. For centuries, older, non-reproductive animals (and by extension humans) have been considered practically worthless by western biologists. Their experiences and knowledge were devalued. They could no longer reproduce (if they ever did) so they had nothing useful left to offer.

This is one story. Another is that the accumulation of experiences and knowledge are an essential part of survival for many species, from orcas to terns. (I have some thoughts here about intergenerationality and queer struggles which I’ll save for another day.)

So survival, we’ve been told, is only for the most productive and the most reproductive - and we’ve seen how that framing has been used to justify hierarchies including of class, ability, sexuality and age.

But as Kamath and Packer remind us: for eugenicists, who often utilise(d) natural selection theory to justify their murderous ideas, “Poor, Black and Brown people were seen as too successful at survival and reproduction.” [emphasis mine] so, for a while, the focus was shifted from survival and reproduction to heroism and self-sacrifice as the desirable traits for selection.

Such convenient stories can cut both ways and are used to justify whatever needs justifying.

Optimise everything

At the heart of all this is optimisation thinking.

It’s such a dominant paradigm in biology that few even question it. Why do elephants have trunks or hummingbirds have long beaks? It’s always about optimising their fitness. They are perfectly adapted to their environment and that’s why they survive. But again, not only the fastest gazelles survive, reproduce or contribute. [2]

And if something shows up that isn’t obviously about adaptation – if we haven’t (yet) found a way in which a variation is optimal to fitness - then we’ll keep searching until we find it. That’s how paradigms maintain themselves and when they are this circular, they can be very stable.

Optimisation thinking doesn’t only show up in natural selection theory or eugenics - it saturates our culture. I see it in every single trans person who ever thought they weren’t trans enough and I observe it in a hundred ways in myself - the constant striving to be the optimal writer, the optimal activist, the optimal human being if I want to justify my existence.

I see it in the perfectionism of middle-class comrades who believe in highly romanticised stories of ‘mutual aid’ and ‘community’ when in reality, with our backs against the wall, we settle for ‘good enough’ every time.

Maybe you too have swallowed some optimality thinking along the way.
Maybe it has damaged you and those you love, not only with its impossible pressures but the hierarchies created in its name.
Maybe optimisation was all myths and manipulations that have little to do with evolution and everything to do with maintaining power.

Maybe it’s time to let it all go.

---

[1] one of the many reasons I love ecology

[2] in fact it has more to do with contingency and co-constitution, two concepts I’m still getting my head and heart around and which seem to be destabilising everything I thought I knew about life. More soon!

---