Even professors in higher education teach this wrong. It’s dangerous, backwards and just plain incorrect.
I need to get this off my chest. Often natural selection is presented on an individual level. We are presented with two offspring. One has lots of babies, the other has none." Which is the fittest? We are told “Well obviously it’s the one who passed on its genes!”
Some errors are made here. One error made is forgetting that all species share most of their genes. Meaning that it’s the nearly the entire species genealogy being passed on, not simply the individuals.
Another error is assuming those who do not have offspring are not fit for the survival of the species. In social species, these individuals without offspring may have traits that allow them to care for the offspring of other members of their species. “It takes a village to raise a child” after all. The childless members of the species may have more time to search for food and build shelter, etc. They ensure the fitness of the species by increasing the survival rate of the species as a whole.
The majority of bees and ants, for example, cannot have children, and this is integral for the species survival.
Finally, genes are not the only thing that are passed between the individuals of a species. Again, the tool using methods of a childless member of a chimp troop may be passed on to the entire troop through observation, and carried on through generations. Orcas teach each other survival techniques that pass on throughout the whole pod.
Anyway, I believe the way we teach about the natural world is poisoned by this old fashioned fascist idea of “families not society” and as our community structures are stripped away and people find themselves too poor and overworked to have kids, the social aspect of our survival becomes clearer than ever.
People conflate averages with individual determinism all the time. Thinking that “survival of the fittest” applies in each individual case, automatically and always, is as wrong as the gambler fallacy that losing a bet increases the odds of winning on the next try.
All the analysis in Das Kapital is on the basis of “blindly operating averages.” Yet insipid gotchas persist, among supply-side geniuses, about selling a single diamond in a desert — as if that contradicts the law of value
Marx: writes a complex analysis of capitalism based on real world figures and historical examples
Apologists of capitalism: “yeah but what about this contrived scenario involving like a cow or something?”
The way I’ve seen it put (by a Fire Emblem Let’s Player of all people) is “Averages mean nothing when you’re living in an instance.”