An ontology of action and adventure
Striving for fitness
Biology has long ago come to the conclusion that all living beings are the product of
evolution. This means that they must be sufficiently fit not to be eliminated by natural
selection. Fitness here refers to the general ability to survive, grow and reproduce
within a given environment, by making productive use of the resources available in
that environment, while effectively evading its dangers. Since a potentially unlimited
number of organisms compete for a finite amount of resources (nutrients, energy,
water, shelter, etc.), in general only the small fraction that is best adapted (or most
lucky) will survive. Through this continuing selective pressure, evolution has
programmed living beings to continuously strive for fitness: those that would stop
trying to improve their fitness relative to the others would very quickly lose the
competition with those others, and be eliminated from the scene. Therefore, we may
assume that all living agents are driven by fitness as their ultimate, underlying value.
Note that organisms do not explicitly aim at the abstract notion of fitness: they
target a variety of more concrete goals and values that function as (not always perfect)
proxies for fitness. For example, we eat not in order to gather the resources optimal
for survival and reproduction, but in order to satisfy our hunger. The fact that the two
goals are not always consonant is illustrated by the phenomenon of obesity, a
situation in which people eat so much that it actually reduces their fitness. When we
speak about people, or other higher organisms, we may in practice replace the abstract
concept of fitness by the somewhat more intuitive notions of benefit, happiness, or
what economists call “utility”. Indeed, it can be argued that evolution has shaped our
instincts and feelings in such a way that the things that make us happy are in essence
the things that contribute to our long-term fitness [Heylighen & Bernheim, 2000;
Veenhoven, 1997]—although the example of overeating reminds us that the
correspondence is not always perfect.
Since organisms need physical resources to survive and reproduce, striving for
fitness implies striving for access to resources. Different types of organisms will
typically need different resources, depending on the local circumstances. Therefore,
while they all try to maximize the universal value of fitness, in practice they will
achieve this via different local goals and values. For example, carnivores strive for
meat, herbivores for plant material, and plants for sunlight and nutrients. These agent-
dependent values will be realized via even more local goals. For example, while a lion
in general strives for meat, in a particular condition it may aim to catch a zebra or to
eat from the carcass of a wildebeest, depending on the local context. People, as the
most complex organisms, will try to achieve the resources they need via a very
diverse array of local strategies, which may include hunting, gathering, agriculture,
trade, production of goods, offering services, gathering knowledge, striving for
political power, and even prostituting oneself.