"Survival of the Fit over the Unfit" flounders among Life's true survivors

Particularly after the whirlwind defeat of the effete French by the German Blitzkrieg in May-June 1940, it seemed obvious to most middle class people in the world that the fit 1As were bound to win , every time, over the unfit 4Fs.

Survival of the fit over the unfit : bigger is better/might is right : Q.E.D.

A Fact of Nature : the classic 'Appeal to Nature'.

But Dr Martin Henry Dawson strongly and fundamentally disagreed with this particular Appeal to Nature, or at the very least, he wished to make another and stronger scientific appeal to the Facts of Nature.

For he felt he had found another (and statistically much better) method for assuring long term survival, as revealed by his study of Nature.

Young Dawson had made his scientific mark, initially, by studying the pneumococcus "R"s.

Even though these "R" type was considered by most others to be unworthy of serious scientific study.

They were the deviants, the unfits, the 4Fs, the non-virulent and non-virile members, of what even human scientists had to admit were Life's most successful survivors, the microbes.

Exit the big and mighty (and very fit) dinosaurs

For almost four billion years, the microbes had survived all that the Cosmos and Nature had thrown at them and lived to see another day while the big creatures, like the dinosaurs, went extinct at the first downturn.

Dawson's study found that almost four billion years of existence had produced no evolutionary pressures to eliminate the 'unfit' among the present day populations of microbes that he had studied.

This despite Social Darwinist claims to see evidence of the same in the mere four thousand year recorded history of human civilization.

Evolutionary pressures of survival, the Social Darwinists claimed, would ensure that humanity's portfolio of genes would be gradually drained and reduced, down to a 'small tent' of just to the most fit 1A types.

But Dawson no doubt had already noted to himself that the microbes had been around a million times longer than human civilizations - surely the slowly grinding wheels of even Darwin's ultra leisurely concept of evolutionary change must have produced something by now.

Because his microbes seemed quite tolerant of what human scientists called the 'unfit' among them.

Indeed Dawson found that the 'fit' and 'unfit' among the pneumococcus microbes were free to be both patrons and authors in the microbes' world wide lending library of potentially useful genes.

In this "Big Tent" concept for a global library, any microbe - whether judged 'fit' or 'unfit' by human scientists, could freely offer up bits of DNA with potentially useful genes for a new crisis situation and any other microbe could take it up and in turn pass it on to another microbe and so on, quickly circling the world.

The miracle of HGT

This use of the unique-to-the-microbe HGT system (horizontal gene transfer), by the way, is how resistance to a brand new antibiotic can spread to the remotest corners of the world in a few years.

It is one of the key ways that microbes have survived for four billion years.

Most microbes would be considered in 1940 to be among the "lower" forms of life because they almost never reproduced sexually - that is by taking bits from the genome of both mom and dad.

Creatures unable to do that were considered to be incredibly primitive.

But Dawson showed that if the microbes could think, they might feel that sexual beings were truly incredibly primitive - for why stop at sharing the genes of just mom and dad when you could share the genes of a trillion times a trillion times a trillion of other microbes ?

In human equivalent terms, when microbes were under attack by a powerful new antibiotic, as powerful as Hitler + Stalin + Mussolini + Tojo combined, they made the biggest possible Big Tent of all the talents, be they female or male microbes, black, red or yellow microbes, fit or unfit.

All hands on deck, without regard to limiting racism or prejudice !

Big Tent Penicillin

Dawson thought the Allied cause should not just rhetorically claim to do the same but actually and concretely do the same.

Not just for the traditional moral reasons, but because he had scientifically demonstrated that it had a proven record of success.

But in fact Dawson's earlier studies had largely been ignored.

This time though, he would combine microbe 4Fs ( in this case ,the lower fungi penicillium) with human 4Fs (the working class SBE patients), all to show just what a "Big Tent" approach could do in a time of grave human crisis...

Restoring the small , to a monoculture of the Big, 1939-1945

As a moral argument it was very old , with lots of powerful support still.

Maybe not an argument as old as Methuselah, but surely as old as Jesus.

But as a scientific argument it was quite new, without any influential scientific supporters.

It argued that there was no hierarchy of worth in biology based on bigger size or greater physical complexity : big and small were but equal variations on Life, each cast to better fit particular niches.

And it said that that, strictly speaking, the small were much more successful than the big in terms of sheer survival --- the only criteria that biology, rather than ethics or theology , could legitimately measure .

They been around  much, much longer, had vastly greater numbers of individual members, inhabited more niches and had survived all the worst disasters that Nature had thrown life on Earth, unlike the Big.

The biological sense of the survival of the fittest for each particular niche had morphed , by the 1930s, into the belief that it was the survival of the fit ( one size to fit all niches), with fit being code for big and powerful.

The small, human and non human , were becoming seen as losers and a waste of space  - life unworthy of life.

Henry Dawson joined many many others in opposing this idea on moral grounds.

But he was basically all alone in contesting it scientifically, based on what he had discovered in his small lab.

He was far too cautious a personality to be successful contesting the opposing vision by mere words.

But his is a biography of deeds --- against all odds, he succeeded in fatally shattering that vision.

He did so by simply embarking on an attempt to save the lives of just ten people, over the opposition of his own colleagues, his own wartime Allied government and his own failing body.

But thanks to the quixotic effort that Dawson began in 1940, ten billion of us, so far, have had our lives immensely improved : Bread cast Upon Waters, indeed !

"This key is fit". Bad grammar but good modernity.

This key is 'fit'.

One could, and probably should, write a long learned essay on the wrongs created over the last 150 years under the delusion this sentence makes grammatical and real world sense.

When, however, we modify the sentence so it reads: "The key will fit this lock but not that lock" , most of us agree it now does make grammatical and real world sense.

The entire phrase "will fit this lock but not that lock" can be thought of a one long adjective modifying ,and accurately limiting, the noun key.

The outstanding aspect of that long adjective phrase is its tentative nature -- which, in turn, accounts for its windy lengthiness.

 "Will" could be replaced by words like "used to" ,"once", "may", "no longer" and the words "this lock" and "that lock" replaced by other modifying and limiting nouns.

 But the phrase "the key is fit",  with the word "fit" being totally unmodified and unlimited by adjectives, together with the fact it is set in a tense of eternal and universal is-ness , strikes us as very odd indeed.

Unless we modify the sentence to say "John is fit", then most of us accept this sentence as seemingly making perfect grammatical and real world sense (and tense).

But it does not.

That broad shouldered six foot tall 175 pounds hunk of svelte eye candy might be "fit" in all of our eyes, but is he actually "fit" for being a race jockey or "fit" to crawl into a narrow tube to weld a joint ?

The Darwin of 1859 said that in a real world of 'the survival of the fittest', strong but lithe men would become horse jockeys but not Rugby forwards while huge chunky men would become Rugby forwards but not race jockeys.

In our actual world, the reality we must live with, "Fittest" is always found modified by an adjective phrase , indicating the particular time and space limitations that allows this particular being or object to be temporarily the fittest for that situation.

It accepts that the world is filled with millions of possible niches and that they change all the time.

I don't think there is any possible moral or scientific objection to this Darwin.

But the later Darwin of 1871 seemed to imply that reality is really about the survival of the "fit", an unmodified, absolute and universal/eternal noun : European males being "the fit" and no one else - and nothing else - being in that category.

It sees the world (and eventually the universe) as potentially one great vast niche, with European-origined humans as the only species needed to be able to fill it completely and permanently.

Modernity science fiction saw future human worlds as living under glass bubbles on planets of bare rock, devoid of atmosphere, generating all we need by chemical synthesis, with no need for plant or animal or microbe.

No need for Jew, Gypsy , Slav or 'defective' either.

Those authors and illustrators only said in print and pictures what our grandparents (and the Darwin of 1871) were just thinking.

Until 1939-1945, when they got a chance to play it all out in a world-war sized sandbox ---- and ended up with sand in their Pampers .....