Evolution is principally a probabilistic concept.
Can the least skilled survive? Is evolution fooled by randomness? There is a prevalent strain of Darwinism, called naive Darwinism, that believes that any species or member of a species that dominates at any point has been selected by evolution because they have an advantage over others. This result from a common misunderstanding of local and global optimal, mixed with an inability to get rid of the belief in the law of small numbers (overinference from small data sets).
Just put two people in a random environment, say a gambling casino for a week end. One of them will fare better than the other. A naive observer will conclude that one has a survival advantage to the other. If he is taller or has some trait that distinguishes him from the other, such trait will be identified by the naive observer as the explaination of hte difference in fitness.
Consider also the naive evolutionary thinking positing the 'optimality' of selection - The founder of sociobiology E. O. Wilson writes: 'The human brain evidently evolved to commit itself emotionally only to a small piece of geography, a limited band of kinsmen, and two or three generations in the future. To look neither far ahead nor far afield is elemental in a Darwinian sense. We are inclined to ignore any distant possibility not yet requiring examination. It is, people say, just common sense. Why do they think in this shortsighted way? 'The reason is simple: it is a harwired part of our Paelolithic heritage. For hundreds of millennia, those who worked for short-term gain within a small circle of relatives and friends lived longer and left more offsprings - even when their collective striving caused their chiefdoms and empires to crumble around them. The long view that might have saved their distant descendants required a vision and extended altruism instinctively difficult to marshal'.
See also Miller: 'Evolution has no foresight. It lacks the long-term vision of drug company management. A species can't raise venture capital to pay its bills while its research team... Each species has to stay biollogically profitable every generation, or else it goes extinct. Species always have cashflow problems that prohibit speculatice investments in their future. More to the point, every gene underlying every potential innovation has to yield higher evolutionary payoffs than competing genes, or it will disappear before the innovation evolves any further. This makes it hard to explain innovations'
Nicholas Nassim Taleb, Fooled By Randomness
