Altruism during disasters challenges evolution's idea of survival of the fittest.
September 11 at the World Trade Center: A challenge to “survival of the fittest”
If the evolutionary idea of survival of the fittest were true, our behavior in disasters should be to forget everyone else and make sure we are the one who survives.
But that is not what happened during the terrorist attack on New York's World Trade Center on September 11, 2001. And, according to Rutgers University professor of sociology Lee Clarke (American Sociological Association website 8 August 2002), it is not what has happened in the disasters and extreme situations for which there is at least 50 years of evidence.
Panic is rare in these situations, Clarke says.
Panic usually means extreme acts of self-preservation that have the opposite effect of harming self or others. But people escaping the World Trade Center didn't act like that. And they didn't ignore the needs of others around them.
The World Trade Center disaster did bring out some events that some called heartless or thoughtless. These included an alleged photo of a tourist at the World Trade Center with a plane in the background about to hit the building, and a sand sculpture in India of the plane hitting the World Trade Center.
But Professor Clarke says, “We now know that almost everyone … survived if they were below the floors where the airplanes struck the buildings. That is in large measure because people did not become hysterical but instead facilitated a successful evacuation.”
This is a subject that would made a good Ph.D. thesis for a creationist. Survival of the fittest has serious problems among animals. And it seems to have problems among humans too.
Survival of the fittest doesn't have much to do with evolution at all.
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- Who created the famous sand sculpture of a plane hitting the World Trade Center?
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