The phrase almost everyone credits to Charles Darwin did not appear in On the Origin of Species until its fifth edition, published in London in 1869, a full decade after the first. In that same edition Darwin also said whose phrase it was: “But the expression often used by Mr. Herbert Spencer of the Survival of the Fittest is more accurate, and is sometimes equally convenient.”
So the short answer to one of the most repeated questions about evolution is no. Darwin did not coin “survival of the fittest.” He adopted it, with one grammatical objection, after a fellow naturalist argued him into it, and he gave the credit in print.
Spencer’s phrase, Darwin’s idea
Herbert Spencer introduced the wording in Principles of Biology, which appeared in installments. The editors of the Darwin Correspondence Project at Cambridge date the first use to the October 1864 installment, volume one, pages 444 to 445. Spencer presented it as his own restatement of Darwin’s mechanism: “This survival of the fittest, which I have here sought to express in mechanical terms, is that which Mr. Darwin has called” natural selection, he wrote, before quoting Darwin’s subtitle about favored races in the struggle for life.
Darwin had been writing “natural selection” since 1859, and he liked the term because it tied what happens in the wild to what breeders do on farms. Critics read it differently. They took “selection” to imply that someone, or something, was doing the choosing.
The letter that changed his mind
On July 2, 1866, the naturalist Alfred Russel Wallace wrote to Darwin from Hurstpierpoint in Sussex. He had grown tired, he said, of watching intelligent readers conclude that natural selection needed a conscious chooser, and he blamed the label. His fix was to borrow from Spencer. “This term is the plain expression of the facts,” Wallace wrote of survival of the fittest, while natural selection was “a metaphorical expression of it.”
Darwin answered three days later from his home at Down in Kent. He agreed “with all that you say on the advantages of H. Spencer’s excellent expression,” admitted the idea “had not occurred to me till reading your letter,” and then raised a grammarian’s complaint: “it cannot be used as a substantive governing a verb.” He also joked that the fate of his own term “must now depend ‘on the survival of the fittest’.”
The timing was bad. The fourth edition of the Origin had nearly finished printing, and Darwin wrote that he wished the letter had come two months sooner. It went out in November 1866 without the new phrase.
How the wording entered the book
Put in order, the paper trail is short and clear:
- 1859: First edition of the Origin; the phrase is absent, as it is in the next three editions.
- October 1864: Spencer uses “survival of the fittest” in Principles of Biology.
- July 2 and 5, 1866: Wallace proposes the switch; Darwin agrees in principle.
- 1868: Darwin uses the phrase six times in The Variation of Animals and Plants under Domestication, the “next book” he promised Wallace.
- 1869: The fifth edition, 2,000 copies, retitles chapter four “Natural Selection; or the Survival of the Fittest.”
The Cambridge editors count seven insertions of the phrase inside that fourth chapter and six more elsewhere in the 1869 text. The defining sentence sits on page 92: “This preservation of favourable variations, and the destruction of injurious variations, I call Natural Selection, or the Survival of the Fittest.” In other words, Darwin bolted Spencer’s wording onto his own term rather than replacing it, which is exactly the compromise Wallace had suggested for some passages.
What “fittest” meant
The word that causes most of the trouble is “fittest.” For Darwin it meant better suited to a particular, local set of conditions, closer to a puzzle piece that fits than to an athlete in peak condition. Modern biologists mostly avoid the slogan for that reason and stick with natural selection, where fitness means reproductive success. The Darwin scholar Gordon Chancellor, introducing the fifth edition, calls the switch a step backward, because the fittest are by definition the ones that survive.
Darwin’s July 5 reply, the letter in which he first warmed to Spencer’s phrase, is held by the British Library under the reference Add 46434, folio 70, and its full transcript is online at the Darwin Correspondence Project.
Further reading
- Wikipedia: Survival of the fittest
- Darwin Correspondence Project: Wallace to Darwin, 2 July 1866
- Darwin Correspondence Project: Darwin to Wallace, 5 July 1866
Image: Michael Garlick, CC BY-SA 2.0 via Wikimedia Commons
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