Darwin Quote: It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent. It is the one that is most adaptable to change.
Yes, and what that quote does not address directly is that survival is likely to be a multivariate probability distribution across populations and generations that will be very context sensitive and include factors like:
ability to cooperate;
ability to detect and remove cheats in the cooperative;
ability to learn;
ability to adapt to current environment;
ability to effectively locate and move to an optimal environment when this one degrades;
ability to maintain current environment at somewhere near optimum;
ability to survive famine;
ability to survive plague;
ability to avoid predators;
ability to compete hard enough to survive, but not so hard as to make too many enemies;
ability to do some combination of all of the above with the least amount of computation, time and energy.
All of that summed over thousands of generations and including all the many very infrequent but very important events (like ice ages, super-volcanoes, …..).
It really is very complex!
