Many of the popular misunderstandings about Darwinism derive from the word "fit," as in "survival of the fittest." Please understand: it is not "fit" as in "fitness centre," but "fit" as in "appropriate," as in "a fitting remark." Forget about it being a call for aggressive competition; it often selects for cooperation. Darwinism is about "the survival of the most appropriate." It is a theory that describes a process of accommodation with the complexities of an existing environment through a random exploration of possibilities. As a species evolves and "fits" into an available ecological niche it becomes a kind of mirror image of its environment.
