Heroes Not Zombies

How would you define fitness?

Take a moment to think of some answers for yourself then read this (I suspect rather different) definition….

“resilience during change”

or

“an adaptation to an environment whose complexity co-evolves with the complexity of the system”

I DO like these definitions – because it does seem to me that fitness is indeed about the ability to adapt to change. In a paper entitled “Technological integration and hyper-connectivity: tools for promoting extreme human lifespans”, Marios Kyriazis suggests that it is by becoming fit that an organism increases its chances of survival.

This question of fitness reminds me (for the second time today) of Hans Georg Gadamer’s essays on health, The Enigma of Health. In those essays he discusses the idea of fitness from the perspective of how well something fits – or, in this newer language, how well it develops, adapts and changes with environmental change. (I was thinking of Gadamer when preparing for a talk I gave this evening about how to make health…..it strikes me that he hit the nail on the head when he talked about the mysterious invisible, even disappearing, quality of health…..that it is a natural quality of all living organisms. He says that if we have a wound in our hand then we notice our hand…our attention is drawn to it by the pain, the heat, the redness…but when that wound heals and the pain, heat and redness disappear, so we become unaware again of our hand)

How do you think of fitness? Is it something to do with resilience, and of adaptability?

If Kyriazis is right then the way to increase fitness is to increase the number and quality of connections. And THAT also strikes me as spot on.