# Is thinking of an individual reproducing as "winning" at evolution simplistic?

**URL:** <https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-thinking-of-an-individual-reproducing-as-winning-at-evolution-simplistic/643014>\
**Category:** Factual Questions\
**Created:** [December 5, 2012, 12:37am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-thinking-of-an-individual-reproducing-as-winning-at-evolution-simplistic/643014 "2012-12-05T00:37:30Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 2\
**Page:** 2

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**Author:** ![Voyager](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/voyager/32/133_2.png) [@Voyager](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Voyager)\
**Post date:** [December 6, 2012, 9:02pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-thinking-of-an-individual-reproducing-as-winning-at-evolution-simplistic/643014/21 "2012-12-06T21:02:37Z")

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> [@Jragon](#):
>
> I
> 
> This means that, in general, it may be best for individuals not to have offspring because it would strain resources and cause extinction or endangerment. Or it may be advantageous to produce some members that are uninterested in a mate (or even sterile) that contribute to making sure OTHERS mate (by gathering food, hunting, acting as protection, etc) depending on the circumstances. Consider a doctor that personally produces no offspring but cures infertility – they individually didn’t produce any offspring but they directly increased the ability for the species at large to produce offspring in general. This seems to describe bees and ants rather well too, supporting my suspicion.
> 
> So am I overthinking things, misinterpreting the rhetoric, or am I right to think that the notion of “spreading your genetics is all that matters in nature” is overly simplistic. Even if my view is true on a general level – does the idea hold for humans, or is the more simplistic statement closer to correct for our species?

I think the problem is with “what matters.” That is assigning a drive and reason which don’t really exist. There are plenty of instances of predator and prey populations growing and crashing to indicate that there is no short term mechanism preventing overpopulation in all cases. Certain species might randomly develop such and it might be successful in the long term, but evolution mostly cooks up new ways of dealing with life and seeing which ones work in both the short and long terms.

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**Author:** ![njtt](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/n/ecd19e/32.png) [@njtt](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/njtt)\
**Post date:** [December 6, 2012, 9:12pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-thinking-of-an-individual-reproducing-as-winning-at-evolution-simplistic/643014/22 "2012-12-06T21:12:55Z")

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There are no prizes in evolution, not beyond your own survival itself, and whatever pleasure (including, but not limited to, sexual pleasure) you might get while you are alive. You are not going to be rewarded if your genes survive, or, come to that, be punished if they don’t. Your mistake, **Jragon** , is to try to apply what are the essentially social/ethical concepts of winning and losing onto a process, evolution, that is not a product of society, and does not have an ethical dimension.

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