Survival of the fittest

"Survival of the fittest"[1] is a phrase that originated from Darwinian evolutionary theory as a way of describing the mechanism of natural selection.

Had he received the letter two months earlier, he would have worked the phrase into the fourth edition of the Origin which was then being printed, and he would use it in his next book on "Domestic Animals etc.".

[3] Darwin wrote on page 6 of The Variation of Animals and Plants Under Domestication published in 1868, "This preservation, during the battle for life, of varieties which possess any advantage in structure, constitution, or instinct, I have called Natural Selection; and Mr. Herbert Spencer has well expressed the same idea by the Survival of the Fittest.

He defended his analogy as similar to language used in chemistry, and to astronomers depicting the "attraction of gravity as ruling the movements of the planets", or the way in which "agriculturists speak of man making domestic races by his power of selection".

[11] In Chapter 4 of the 5th edition of The Origin published in 1869,[5] Darwin implies again the synonym: "Natural Selection, or the Survival of the Fittest".

[6] By "fittest" Darwin meant "better adapted for the immediate, local environment", not the common modern meaning of "in the best physical shape" (think of a puzzle piece, not an athlete).

"[12] In The Man Versus The State, Spencer used the phrase in a postscript to justify a plausible explanation of how his theories would not be adopted by "societies of militant type".

In 2010 Sahney et al. argued that there is little evidence that intrinsic, biological factors such as competition have been the driving force in the evolution of large groups.

Russian zoologist and anarchist Peter Kropotkin viewed the concept of "survival of the fittest" as supporting co-operation rather than competition.

In his book Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution he set out his analysis leading to the conclusion that the fittest was not necessarily the best at competing individually, but often the community made up of those best at working together.

The animal species, in which individual struggle has been reduced to its narrowest limits, and the practice of mutual aid has attained the greatest development, are invariably the most numerous, the most prosperous, and the most open to further progress.

This reasoning is sometimes used to claim that Darwin's entire theory of evolution by natural selection is fundamentally tautological, and therefore devoid of any explanatory power.

)[23] Momme von Sydow suggested further definitions of 'survival of the fittest' that may yield a testable meaning in biology and also in other areas where Darwinian processes have been influential.

[18][24] Skeptic Society founder and Skeptic magazine publisher Michael Shermer addresses the tautology problem in his 1997 book, Why People Believe Weird Things, in which he points out that although tautologies are sometimes the beginning of science, they are never the end, and that scientific principles like natural selection are testable and falsifiable by virtue of their predictive power.