3.1 The Principle of Organisms' Natural Selection, Survival Struggle and Biological Evolution

There are two kinds of natural selection: those with human participation and those without human participation. Natural selection without human participation includes natural selection of organisms by environment and natural selection of non-organisms by environment. Natural selection with human participation is also called social selection.

The process of organism (as a subject) accepts natural selection is a process of interaction between subject and object. There are two kinds of results of the interaction: the subject continues to survive, the subject is destroyed and no longer survives. The members of the subject's environment that can cause the subject to continue to survive are called the members that are beneficial to the subject, referred to as interests or resources; The members of the environment that can cause the destruction of the subject are called the members that are harmful to the subject, referred to as harm. Not all members of the object can interact with the subject. If the subject can choose the objective members, actively interact with the beneficial members and actively avoid interacting with the harmful members, this behavior of the subject is called seeking interests and avoiding harm. The process of interaction with beneficial members is the process of resource utilization.

Fang Zhouzi organizes Darwin's Principle of Natural Selection into the following four facts and two inferences:

Fact 1: Life resources are limited;

Fact 2: Biological fertility is excessive;

Corollary 1: The vast majority of an organism's offspring must perish (struggle for life);

Fact 3: Heritable variation exists among offspring of organisms;

Fact 4: Different variation may have different survival and reproductive abilities;

Corollary 2: The inferior variation will gradually be eliminated, and the superior variation will survive and be left to future generations (natural selection) (Fang Zhouzi. "Search for the Logic of Life: The Development of Biological concepts". Shanghai Transportation University Press,2005,pp.32.)

In the past, Darwin and many scholars expressed the theory of natural selection very complicated, not accurate and clear, Fang Zhouzi's expression is the most concise, including not only the description of the principle of natural selection and the principle of survival struggle, but also the reasoning and proof process of these principles. But there are still three problems with this formulation of natural selection:

    First, what is superior variation and what is inferior variation need to be strictly defined.

Second, there is a major premise implied in the derivation of corollary 2, that is, the condition that any organism can survive in nature is that the rate of reproduction of this organism is greater than or equal to the rate of death. The principle of natural selection is often expressed as survival of the fittest, so what is the fittest? Some people say that the fittest is able to adapt to the environment, what is called to adapt to the environment, is able to survive. This is tautology. The real meaning of survival of the fittest is that only when the rate of reproduction is greater than or equal to the rate of death, such creatures can survive in nature.