![]() ![]() In July 1866 Wallace wrote Darwin a long and impassioned letter in support of replacing ‘natural selection’ with ‘survival of the fittest’ in all future editions of Origin. Shorthand for the survival and perpetuation of those organisms best fitted, or suited, to take advantage of their circumstances, the term has often itself been misinterpreted simply to mean the survival of the strongest or most healthy. ![]() Wallace was so taken with it that he went through his own copy of the first edition of Origin neatly crossing through every occurrence of ‘natural selection’ and pencilling ‘survival of the fittest’ in the margin (the copy is now in Cambridge University Library, Keynes.M.2.27). Wallace seized on Herbert Spencer’s term ‘survival of the fittest’, explicitly introduced as an alternative way of expressing 'natural selection' in the October 1864 instalment of Spencer’s Principles of biology (Spencer 1864–7, 1: 444–5, 2: 48, et passim). The most forceful and persistent critic of the term ‘natural selection’ was the co-discoverer of the process itself, Alfred Russel Wallace. ( Alfred Russel Wallace to Charles Darwin, 2 July 1866)Ĭontinued from ' Natural Selection: the trouble with terminology, Part I' 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. This term is the plain expression of the facts,-Nat. ![]()
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