Darwin and The Survival of the Fittest

You would think that this was the easiest one of all to knock down, that "survival of the fittest" was a corruption of the pure vessel of Darwinism as it came from the great man, himself.   However, the assertion that Darwin rejected that definition of natural selection is made in either ignorance or of misrepresentation of what Darwin said on that issue in his most famous book.

In the fifth edition of On the Origin of Species, Darwin said it explicitly,

How will the struggle for existence, briefly discussed in the last chapter, act in regard to variation? Can the principle of selection, which we have seen is so potent in the hands of man, apply in nature? I think we shall see that it can act most effectually. Let the endless number of peculiar variations in our domestic productions, and, in a lesser degree, in those under nature, be borne in mind; as well as the strength of the hereditary tendency. Under domestication, it may be truly said that the whole organisation becomes in some degree plastic. But the variability, which we almost universally meet with in our domestic productions, is not directly produced, as Hooker and Asa Gray have well remarked, by man; he can neither originate varieties, nor prevent their occurrence; he can only preserve and accumulate such as do occur; unintentionally he exposes organic beings to new and changing conditions of life, and variability ensues; but similar changes of conditions might and do occur under nature. Let it also be borne in mind how infinitely complex and close-fitting are the mutual relations of all organic beings to each other and to their physical conditions of life; and consequently what infinitely varied diversities of structure may be of use to each being under changing conditions of life. Can it, then, be thought improbable, seeing that variations useful to man have undoubtedly occurred, that other variations useful in some way to each being in the great and complex battle of life, should sometimes occur in the course of thousands of generations? If such do occur, can we doubt (remembering that many more individuals are born than can possibly survive) that individuals having any advantage, however slight, over others, would have the best chance of surviving and of procreating their kind? On the other hand, we may feel sure that any variation in the least degree injurious would be rigidly destroyed. This preservation of favourable variations, and the destruction of injurious variations, I call Natural Selection, or the Survival of the Fittest. Variations neither useful nor injurious would not be affected by natural selection, and would be left either a fluctuating element, as perhaps we see in certain polymorphic species, or would ultimately become fixed, owing to the nature of the organism and the nature of the conditions.

Several writers have misapprehended or objected to the term Natural Selection. Some have even imagined that natural selection induces variability, whereas it implies only the preservation of such variations as occur...

"This preservation of favourable variations, and the destruction of injurious variations, I call Natural Selection, or the Survival of the Fittest."

It's interesting to note that Darwin felt that it was the term Natural Selection that was objectionable whereas the phrase Survival of the Fittest - which Darwin capitalized as well as Natural Selection - passed by without note.  That is probably because it was not anywhere near as controversial as it became when survival of the fittest was given a political and legal reality in human life that natural selection in its more benign definitions wouldn't.

Alfred Russell Wallace, the "co-discoverer" of natural selection was concerned enough with how the concept was developing with use that he sent his co-discoverer a letter about it.  I will give it in full because Wallace's views, ultimately diverged from the mainstream of Darwinism in some important ways but I believe he was the one who got him to adopt "Survival of the Fittest" as Darwin used it in this edition.   It has to be wondered what would happen if Wallace had achieved priority for the idea instead of Darwin.  Note how Wallace puts a quite different interpretation to Spencer than he was generally believed to intend, quite different from how other readers took him.



Hurstpierpoint, Sussex
July 2nd. 1866.

My dear Darwin

I have been so repeatedly struck by the utter inability of numbers of intelligent persons to see clearly or at all, the self acting & necessary effects of Nat Selection, that I am led to conclude that the term itself & your mode of illustrating it, however clear & beautiful to many of us are yet not the best adapted to impress it on the general naturalist public. The two last cases of this misunderstanding are, 1st. The article on “Darwin & his teachings” in the last “Quarterly Journal of Science”, which, though very well written & on the whole appreciative, yet concludes with a charge of something like blindness, in your not seeing that “Natural Selection” requires the constant watching of an intelligent “chooser” like man’s selection to which you so often compare it;—and 2nd., in Janet’s recent work on the “Materialism of the present day”, reviewed in last Saturday’s “Reader”, by an extract from which I see that he considers your weak point to be, that you do not see that “thought & direction are essential to the action of `Nat. Selection’.” The same objection has been made a score of times by your chief opponents, & I have heard it as often stated myself in conversation.

Now I think this arises almost entirely from your choice of the term “Nat. Selection” & so constantly comparing it in its effects, to Man’s selection, and also to your so frequently personifying Nature as “selecting” as “preferring” as “seeking only the good of the species” &c. &c. To the few, this is as clear as daylight, & beautifully suggestive, but to many it is evidently a stumbling block. I wish therefore to suggest to you the possibility of entirely avoiding this source of misconception in your great work, (if not now too late) & also in any future editions of the “Origin”, and I think it may be done without difficulty & very effectually by adopting Spencer’s term (which he generally uses in preference to Nat. Selection) viz. “Survival of the fittest.”

This term is the plain expression of the facts,—Nat. selection is a metaphorical expression of it—and to a certain degree indirect & incorrect, since, even personifying Nature, she does not so much select special variations, as exterminate the most unfavourable ones.

Combined with the enormous multiplying powers of all organisms, & the “struggle for existence” leading to the constant destruction of by far the largest proportion,—facts which no one of your opponents, as far as I am aware, has denied or misunderstood,—“the survival of the fittest” rather than of those who were less fit, could not possibly be denied or misunderstood. Neither would it be possible to say, that to ensure the “survival of the fittest” any intelligent chooser was necessary,—whereas when you say natural selection acts so as to choose those that are fittest it is misunderstood & apparently always will be. Referring to your book I find such expressions as “Man selects only for his own good; Nature only for that of the being which she tends”. This it seems will always be misunderstood; but if you had said “Man selects only for his own good; Nature, by the inevitable “survival of the fittest”, only for that of the being she tends”,—it would have been less liable to be so.

I find you use the term “Natural Selection” in two senses, 1st for the simple preservation of favourable & rejection of unfavourable variations, in which case it is equivalent to “survival of the fittest”,—or 2nd. for the effect or change, produced by this preservation, as when you say, “To sum up the circumstances favourable or unfavourable to natural selection”, and again “Isolation, also, is an important element in the process of natural selection”, —here it is not merely “survival of the fittest” but, change produced by survival of the fittest, that is meant— On looking over your fourth Chap. I find that these alterations of terms can be in most cases easily made, while in some cases the addition of “or survival of the fittest”, after “natural selection” would be best; and in others, less likely to be misunderstood, the original term may stand alone.

I could not venture to propose to any other person so great an alteration of terms, but you I am sure will give it an impartial consideration, and if you really think the change will produce a better understanding of your work, will not hesitate to adopt it.

It is evidently also necessary not to personify “nature” too much,—though I am very apt to do it myself,—since people will not understand that all such phrases are metaphors.

Natural selection, is, when understood, so necessary & self evident a principle, that it is a pity it should be in any way obscured; & it therefore occurs to me, that the free use of “survival of the fittest”,—which is a compact & accurate definition of it,—would tend much to its being more widely accepted and prevent its being so much misrepresented & misunderstood.

There is another objection made by Janet which is also a very common one. It is that the chances are almost infinite again the particular kind of variation required being coincident with each change of external conditions, to enable an animal to become modified by Nat. Selection in harmony with such changed conditions; especially when we consider, that, to have produced the almost infinite modifications of organic beings this coincidence must have taken place an almost infinite number of times.

Now it seems to me that you have yourself led to this objection being made, by so often stating the case too strongly against yourself. For Example, at the Commencement of Chap. IV. you ask, if it is “improbable that useful variations should sometimes occur in the course of thousands of generations”; —and a little further on you say, “unless profitable variati do occur natural selection can do nothing.”  Now such expressions h given your opponents the advantage of assuming that favourable variations are rare accidents, or may even for long periods never occur at all, & thus Janet’s argument would appear to many to have great force. I think it would be better to do away with all such qualifying expressions, and constantly maintain (what I certainly believe to be the fact) that variations of every kind are always occurring in every part of every species,—& therefore that favourable variations are always ready when wanted. You have I am sure abundant materials to prove this, and it is, I believe, the grand fact that renders modification & adaptation to conditions almost always possible. I would put the burthen of proof on my opponents, to show, that any one organ structure or faculty does not vary, even during one generation among all the individuals of a species,—and also to show any mode or way in which any such organ &c. does not vary. I would ask them to give any reason for supposing that any organ &c. is ever absolutely identical at any one time in all the individuals of a species,—& if not then it is always varying, and there are always materials which, from the simple fact, that “the fittest survive”, will tend to the modification of the race into harmony with changed conditions.

I hope these remarks may be intelligible to you, & that you will be as kind as to let me know what you think of them.

I have not heard for some time how you are getting on.

I hope you are still improving in health, & that you will be able now to get on with your great work for which so many thousands are looking with interest.

With best wishes | Believe me My dear Darwin | Yours very faithfully | Alfred R. Wallace— 

I would guess that Darwin was having a lot of trouble articulating just what natural selection meant. Which isn't surprising as the idea, as Wallace points out, is so liable to interpretation.  The idea in its history has undergone fundamental change in "the synthesis" when Fisher and others firmly glued it to genetics and on till today when you can find quite divergent views of just what "natural selection" is.  One working marine biologist I asked to define it  included genetic drift within his definition, which leads me to believe the idea is, indeed, a metaphor instead of a theory and it is dissolving or, maybe more appropriately, drifting into a quite different form from one Darwin would have recognized.

In regard to this series showing Darwin's intimate connection with eugenics and Ernst Haeckel,  this passage in Wallace's letter jumps out:

This term is the plain expression of the facts,—Nat. selection is a metaphorical expression of it—and to a certain degree indirect & incorrect, since, even personifying Nature, she does not so much select special variations, as exterminate the most unfavourable ones.

Darwin constantly presented the survivors of natural selection as being more vigorous and healthy than those who die.   He said so all through The Descent of Man.  If he had seen natural selection in the way Wallace presents it in this passage, he couldn't have articulated the basic premise of eugenics all through the book.   All Wallace saw in natural selection was that organisms that couldn't live, died and that those that could lived and reproduced, carrying what helped them survive into another generation.  It was more fit to the specifics of the conditions that organism faced but it wasn't qualitatively better.

Darwin's presentation lent itself to a political interpretation almost immediately, due to that difference.  It was grasped onto by those who wanted to establish a human hierarchy based on some notion of human s having value tied to their utility.  Their preference was to see those who were wealthy as better, crowned as superior by nature, and that that was a scientific fact.  And that, along with those who found in Darwinism a weapon to attack religion, did begin almost as soon as people began reading the book. But that's for further posts that I haven't begun to write.

That difference between Darwin and Wallace is both a revelation of where the malignant legacy Darwin left starts, in the assumption that survivors were, somehow, made better by the mere fact of survival.   Darwin, a rich man, the son of a prosperous family was a benficiary of the horrible British class system, the laws that just about insured a large impoverished class dependent on the wealthy and created a class of the destitute who were, effectively, outlaws.  It's not a surprise that he would see things in those terms.  I suspect that when Wallace said,  "Nature, she does not so much select special variations, as exterminate the most unfavourable ones." he was talking about a far narrower range of truly problematic "variations" than Darwin would have.  Which is apparent when Darwin, at some times talks about "savages" having more vigor due to the deaths of the "weaker members" of their societies than happens among the "civilised" but, when it suits him, he anticipates the extinction of these same people, despite their enhanced "vigor".   And I think in that we can see Darwin mixing his own upper class and English habits of thought into science, where those, of course, don't belong.

Natural selection, the insertion of Malthus into evolutionary biology, is inescapably political and economic.  That insertion was intentional and it was admitted at the start.   It was almost impossible to keep evolutionary science from being cast politically and as an affirmation of the worst of economic class division once that introduction was made.  Darwin might have been looking for an explaination of the origin of species but he also gave class ranking an allegedly scientific validation.   Metaphors presented as science will, eventually, take on the authority science is given from habit.

I am not trying to raise up A. R. Wallace as a rival to the mythical Darwin,  Wallace had his own baggage to deal with.  The Great Man of Science means of promoting science is stupid and insulting.  Science should be strongly enough founded in evidence that it doesn't need hagiographic mythology about the likes of Charles Darwin.  It is condescending to try to sell science with historical fiction.  Heroic fiction teaches us nothing about reality, it is public relations and public relations is generally based on deception.  Science presents itself as an enhanced view of reality, its representatives should act as if they believe that.  Even when it's hard, giving people accurate information about science, the promotion of science should rest on that.   The effort to promote the public understanding of science should inform us of something real instead of something refuted by the evidence.