Few fields of study offer so many contradictions and such fervent conviction as competition. Not many would question that the human species is intrinsically competitive, but the understanding of what this means and how it impacts everything from local schools to the global economy differs to the extreme. It is the objective of this study to synthesise a multitude of research and other literature in search of what could be considered reasonably true in scrutinising claims made that competition is always useful and beneficial. It has even been argued that competing is necessary for the continued progress of human society at all levels of endeavour. But such assertions of benefits are often curiously made together with findings that contradict them. In most cases contradiction rarely leads to discouraging the strategic use of competition. The objective of this study, therefore, is also practical in the sense that there is a need to educate [sic] the social science community about the inescapable reality of phylogenetic evolution and how it affects every aspect of human behaviour in general and competitive behaviour in particular. A critical analysis of published research is difficult to understand unless the evolutionary origins of ambition, its conditions and effects on human existence are explained first. Competition is the dispassionate engine which drives phylogenetic evolution for all known living organisms. It is difficult to say anything valid about human behaviour without considering it. The result of the analysis is disheartening. Few assertions of claimed benefits stand up to the knowledge base of biology and our evolutionary history. Most fail because they are studied, or operationalised, on the assumption that competitive processes, even if essentially detrimental, are always subject to control and can therefore be used instrumentally in all social settings for every conceivable endeavour and always in aconstructive way. No practitioner, and very few scholars in the social sciences, take the randomness by which we sometimes behave into account, or that much of human behaviour is motivated by biological algorithms generating largely automatic and unaware behaviour. We do not always know when we compete or why. Competition as an evolutionary function does not easily translate into intellectually engineered strategies, especially not if they involve intellectual and creative endeavours. The only domain in which competing remains reasonably true to its evolutionary origin and function in organised and formalised society is in the pursuit of physical prowess such as in sports. Competition has by natural selection over eons of time been designed to be primarily physical. This study concludes by comparing argued benefits as probable, occasional, doubtful or improbable to known facts of evolution in order to suggest what we may have understood correctly and what we most likely have misunderstood entirely.