Life is testing how fit your genes are for survival

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Let's face it. Life is about survival and your life is briefly told a test of whether your genes are fit enough to survive in the current social, cultural, etc. environment.

The more problematic survival is for you, the less is your worth, and society (silently) agrees with that.

I'd like to know whether you consider this fact unproblematic?



The struggles with Aspergers Syndrome is "merely" an indicator of a bad (especially social) fit.

Anyone who is still here reading this and still gamely dealing with life in spite of difficulties, has survived, therefore is fit to be part of life. Because they're part of life already. Enough said.

This topic is an interesting one.

^Agreed.

Life may be about survival, but survival is about adaptation. As rigid as those on the autistic spectrum maybe, we have and are continuing to adapt to the social and cultural scheme of humanity. We learn how to make social communication work for us, whether it be from "faking" social skills to retreating to the internet to using adaptive technology (such as text-to-talk software). We find a niche in society, such as technology and the arts, and, when no niche exists, we create one; many successful Aspies are self-made legends.

Just as bats have adapted to survive by using echolocation to compensate for their blindness, we Aspies use our unique talents to be useful to society.

It's no problem to you that you are fundamentally of less worth because of AS/autism? No objections?

If bullies tell you you are of less worth than them, you might in some cases possibly agree?

It's as if many people neglect the consequences of this way of determining the worth of people. I guess one should not give a f**k about this fact like most people tend to do.

Worth is subjective; I do not particularly care how other people determine my "worth," as I find worth in entirely different ways than most people. I believe that everyone is worth the universe just because they are themselves and they contribute to the body of knowledge and experience in their own ways. The "majority" has been wrong on many basic things before, such as the shape of the Earth and the components of matter; it is of no surprise to me, then, that most of society is also wrong on the way that they evaluate worth.

Basically, I reject the notion that one is "worth" less than another person, especially when it comes to matters of neurology.

I agree with you, though, on the unfairness of the way that people with ASDs are treated. I do object to persecution and bullying and hope to combat this with awareness and by being the best that I can be in spite of my challenges. It is good that you "give a f**k" about the unfairness of society; it is by caring that change occurs.

Struggling more does not mean worth less.

I am not worth fundamentally less.

I'm struggling, but I'm surviving. I'm living. I'm doing things my way. I'm doing things differently, and doing things to make things better for others.

Different is not less.

I'm living. I'm surviving. The fact that I do it my way doesn't change that.

So even under this definition, I'm worth no less.

Hi WerewolfPoet.

It's difficult for me to consider these two statements consistent. If life is about nothing but survival which is a matter of adaption, how can worth be subjective? - isn't worth then completely a matter of your survival/adaption abilities?

In that perspective I cannot see a handicapped person with difficulties to survive is worth as much as a non-handicapped person. (This is what my problem is - I don't want it to be that way, but in real life, that's how it is, there's not mistaking!! People are not remotely of equal worth)

Last edited by qawer on 23 Jun 2013, 12:25 pm, edited 1 time in total.

Survial is also a matter of having kids, and having kids with a partner with "good gene material". The survival aspect doesn't just end with just being alive.

If you don't have success you're closer to dying than someone with success.

If you don't have kids you'll die eventually. Only through having kids will you survive. And those kids should preferably be successful too.


I guess one should try to embrace this fact, somehow.

Ah yeah... no. If you have kids, you'll still die.

You're talking about the process of selection through which some genes get passed on to future generations and some do not. This doesn't reflect personal survival, but rather an ongoing process through which any given species continues to adapt as a species to its current environment.

As humans, we have the ability to reflect on things beyond "mate, spawn, and die." We may leave legacies through children, or ideas, or philosophies, or science, or stories, or other works. We are able to choose whether or not we really want to have children or whether we would do better without them. This is not death and children are not extensions of ourselves. Having children is not personal survival, except for ~half of the DNA that sits in your cell nuclei, but your DNA is not you and half your DNA is definitely not you.

I don't believe that. I passed my genes on and I'll be just as dead as anyone that didn't have any kids.

I personally don't care about success.

I do see where my phrasing could have caused confusion.

A handicapped person still survives and still adapts; it is the very fact that they do adapt, whether it be through their wheelchairs or through pursuing a special interest and, thus, contributing something unique, that shows their survival value and, thus, their worth. The adaptations will get passed down and ensure survival for others; electronic communication, for example, helps the socially disinclined to adapt, much like heightened smell helps blind moles to adapt. Even somebody with very profound and all-encompassing impairments is able to survive and learn, whatever meager amount that learning may be; they become something in the minds of their parents and caretakers, a legend, an inspiration, and that essence is passed down throughout the community and perhaps down time.

It is in this, the fact that everybody impacts the world, that proves that we all survive and are thus worth life; even if one's genes do not become replicated, one's ideas, the impact that one had on another person's consciousness, their words, their actions, their memories, will survive in the minds and hearts of all who encountered them and/or the things that they created or contributed. Yes, life may be largely about reproduction, but reproduction is much, much more than a matter of meiosis and mitosis; ideas, dreams, artworks, words, literature, and knowledge are all reproductions of a person's essence.

Because there's also an environmental aspect? Other than that we are 'merely' our DNA, right?

There are lots of different kinds of worth out there. I choose to live my life by what makes my life worth it *to me*. This means ignoring a lot which occurs at the evolutionary level, since I don't really want a heterosexual relationship (I am bi) and don't plan on having children. In many ways my body and brain are not maximally evolutionarily fit-- I have mental illnesses, I am autistic, etc. If it weren't for medical technology I probably would have never made it past birth as I was born prematurely with a collapsed lung.

While these things are true at the evolutionary level, I don't take them to have bearing at the moral level (which people's lives we ought to value) or at the personal level (which things I ought to value as I live my life). As a human being with advanced cognitive abilities, and with the capability to do things beyond which are immediately adaptive to survival and reproduction, I have the ability to do that.

A reminder to you qawer-- in animals without these advanced capabilities, they don't reason about who is worth more or worth less. Fish, for example, don't bother about determining whether disabled fish are worth living-- disabled fish just produce fewer offspring, fail to produce offspring, or die in the wild. Even animals that kill their non-adaptive offspring don't moralize about it. There is no evolutionary reason for you to be concerned about strangers' fitness for survival/reproduction, just your own and maybe your immediate relatives' as they share your genes.

My point is that by thinking about worth in this way (philosophically, and applying it to strangers) you are ALREADY doing something beyond being adaptive and you ought to remember that.

I didn't yet read the rest of this thread, but each person is of more or less worth depending upon the context of the person evaluating and how this other person fits into what the evaluator is doing....This is how the world works....

However from the perspective of human compassion, each person is equally precious, but also this other contextual standard always exists in conjunction with it.....

People talk a lot about bullying on WP, but to to look at bullying from this angle of these two aspects might be more productive....for instance you cannot allow someone to bully you, as, from your perspective, at least, you are precious, and things would probably work better for the bully if from his perspective, also, you are precious, as you are:-). so technically this should be his perspective..I think ultimately it would be better for the survival of humanity in general, so less suffering for more people, but from the perspective of the person being bullied it might be helpful to understand that the bully is bullying or did bully oneself because he himself was and/or is bullied.

So from both angles is a much more comprehensive and ultimately more functional perspective, from either end of the stick....

The purpose of life is not to undergo natural selection, any more than the purpose of life is to go to the toilet or eat food.

The "test" you speak of is purely metaphorical. Failing or struggling with this test is not in any way an indicator of lack of worth. I think society thinks that all humans have the same worth.

Hi The_Walrus.

I respect that opinion. But you are actually talking about the same purpose. You go to the toilet and eat food in order to survive. If you didn't your probability of dying would raise. These actions are simply consequences of us trying to survive. All "rational" human action carried out by mentally healthy people can be boiled down to survival-desires. You are more than welcome to present an example that contradicts this. I have yet to find one!



If society thought that, AS people would be treated better. They are treated worse because they are considered to be of less worth, generally speaking.

So why are AS people of less worth? They are socially disabled, which decreases their survival probability a whole lot in the long run. It's all survival.