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References
Charles Darwin, On the Origin of Species, facsimile of first edition (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1964), pp. 80–81.
Morse Peckham, ed., The Origin of Species, by Charles Darwin: A Variorum Text (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1959), p. 22.
Charles Darwin, The Variation of Animals and Plants under Domestication (London: Murray, 1868), p. 17.
Morse Peckham, ed., The Origin of Species, by Charles Darwin: A Variorum Text (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1959), p. 164.
Morse Peckham, ed., The Origin of Species, by Charles Darwin: A Variorum Text (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1959), p. 145.
Richard Hofstadter, Social Darwinism in American Thought (Boston: Beacon Press, 1955; orig. ed. 1944), p. 39. The book's impact on subsequent accounts of Social Darwinism is discussed by Donald C. Bellomy in “‘Social Darwinism’ Revisited,” Perspect. Amer. Hist., new ser., 1 (1984), 1–129, esp. pp. 6–10.
Herbert Spencer, “The Development Hypothesis” (Leader, March 20, 1852; repr. in Essays, I [New York: Appleton, 1907], 1–7), is simply a defense of evolutionism against the criticisms of special creationists. The essay on population pressure (“A Theory of Population”) appeared in Westminster Rev., 57 (1852), 468–501. Spencer sadly reflects on his failure to extend his analysis of the effects of population pressure to all animals — thus inventing Darwinism before Darwin — in An Autobiography, I (New York: Williams and Norgate 1904), 448–452. He had earlier assessed its value rather modestly, commenting in the first edition of the Principles of Biology that it “contains merely a passing recognition of the selective process and indicates no suspicion of the enormous range of its effects, or of the conditions under which a large part of its effects are produced” (II [London: Williams and Norgate, 1867], 501).
Gertrude Himmelfarb, Darwin and the Darwinian Revolution (New York: W. W. Norton, 1962), pp. 224–225.
James A. Rogers. “Darwinism and Social Darwinism.” J. Hist. Ideas, 10 (1972), 269.
J. D. Y. Peel, Herbert Spencer: The Evolution of a Sociologist (New York: Basic Books, 1971), pp. 137–138.
D. R. Oldroyd, Darwinian Impacts: An Introduction to the Darwinian Revolution (Milton Keynes: The Open University Press, 1980), p. 207.
Alexander AllandJr., Human Nature: Darwin's View (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985), p. 19.
Jeffrey J. W. Baker and Garland E. Allen, A Study of Biology, 4th ed. (Reading, Mass.: Addison-Wesley, 1982), p. 681.
Herbert Spencer, Principles of Biology, I (New York: Appleton, 1898; orig. ed. 1864), 530–531.
Darwin to Charles Lyell, February 25, 1860, Darwin papers, American Philosophical Society, Philadelphia (I am grateful to the Syndics of the Cambridge University Library for permission to quote from this letter and other letters cited in n. 17 below). Wallace, on the other hand, was greatly impressed by the essay, which he used to defend the possibility of evolution in a socialist, egalitarian society; see his essay “Human Selection,” originally published in Fortn. Rev., September 1890, and reprinted in Studies Scientific and Social (London: Macmillan, 1980), I, 509–526, esp. pp. 521–523.
Diane B. Paul, “Marxism, Darwinism, and the Theory of Two Sciences,” Marx. Perspect., 3 (1979), 116–143. The literature on Darwin and political economy is vast. Ernst Mayr has summarized the leading arguments in The Growth of Biological Thought (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1982), pp. 477–479, 484–487, 491–493.
Darwin's complex and shifting attitudes toward Spencer are reflected in his letters. Some examples: to Hooker, June 23, 1863: “You ask what I think of Herbert Spencer's great book: I never attempted to read any except last part; and that greatly disappointed me — all words and generalities... and I could grasp nothing clearly. But I suppose this is all my stupidity; as so many think so highly of this work”; Emma Darwin to Hooker, January 16 and 19, 1864: “Charles would like very much to know what you think of Herbert Spencer as he cannot appreciate him. He has heard from Mr. Wallace with the highest praise of him especially the Social Statics”; Charles Darwin to Hooker, November 3, 1864: “I am quite delighted with what you say about H. Spencer's book: when I finish each number I say to myself what an awfully clever fellow he is, but when I ask myself what I have learnt, it is just nothing”; to Lyell, March 25, 1865: “I have read most of H. Spencer's Biology & agree with you. Some of his remarks are very clever and suggestive, but somehow I seldom feel any wiser after reading him, but often feel mistified. His style is detestable in my opinion...”; to Hooker, December 10, 1866: “I feel rather mean when I read him; I could bear and rather enjoy feeling that he was twice as ingenious & clever as myself, but when I feel that he is about a dozen times my superior, even in the master art of wriggling, I feel aggrieved. If he had trained himself to observe more, even if at the expense, by the law of balancement, of some less of thinking power, he would have been a wonderful man”; to Wallace, October 12 and 13, 1867 (on hearing that he had named his first child after Spencer): “I heartily congratulate you on the birth of ‘Herbert Spencer’, and may he deserve his name, but I hope he will copy his father's style and not his namesake's”; to E. Ray Lankester, March 15, 1870: “I suspect that hereafter he will be looked at as by far the greatest living philosopher in England; perhaps equal to any that have lived”; and to Spencer, June 10, 1872 (regarding an article that appeared in the Contemporary Review): “Every one with eyes to see and ears to hear (the number, I fear, are not many) ought to bow their knee to you, & I for one do.”
Ruse argues that Darwin aimed to show that natural selection was a vera causa. According to Herschel, whom Darwin greatly admired, the best evidence that something is a vera causa is that we can argue by analogy from a force already known to be one. See Michael Ruse, “Darwin's Debt to Philosophy: An Examination of the Influence of the Philosophical Ideas of John F. W. Herschel and William Whewell on the Development of Charles Darwin's Theory of Evolution,” Stud. Hist. Phil. Sci., 6 (1975), 159–181. The argument is summarized in idem, The Darwinian Revolution: Science Red in Tooth and Claw (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1979), pp. 126–180.
Darwin to Lyell, September 28, 1860, in The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin, ed. F. Darwin (New York: Appleton, 1887), II, 138–139. Darwin replied publicly to Gray in later editions of the Origin: “[Critics] have objected that the term selection implies conscious choice in the animals which become modified; and it had even been urged that, as plants have no volition, natural selection is not applicable to them! In the literal sense of the word, no doubt, natural selection is a false term; but who ever objected to chemists speaking of the elective affinities of the various elements? - and yet an acid cannot strictly be said to elect the base with which it in preference combines... Everyone knows what is meant and is implied by such metaphorical expressions; and they are almost necessary for brevity” (Peckham, Origin, p. 165). (It was to avoid this problem that the French translated “natural selection” as the equivalent of “natural election,” thus creating a wholly different set of problems. See Joy D. Harvey, “Races Specified, Evolution Transformed,” Ph.D. diss., Harvard University, 1983.)
Wallace gave his presentation copy of the Origin to Ricardo Spruce. In 1958, it came into the possession of Sir Geoffrey Keynes and thence to the Cambridge University Library. Keynes was the first to notice the alteration. I am indebted to Peter J. Gautrey of the Cambridge University Library for this information.
Wallace to Darwin, July 2, 1866, in Alfred Russel Wallace: Letters and Reminiscences, ed. J. Marchant, I (New York: Harper, 1916), 170. Robert Young discusses some consequences of Darwin's anthropomorphic language in “Darwin's Metaphor: Does Nature Select?” Monist, 55 (1971), 442–503.
Wallace to Darwin, Letters and Reminiscences, pp. 170–171.
Darwin to Wallace, July 5, 1866, in F. Darwin, Life and Letters, II, 229–230. In a footnote to the 1898 edition of his Principles of Biology, Spencer writes: “It will be seen that the argument naturally leads up to this expression — Survival of the Fittest — which was here used for the first time. Two years later (July 1866) Mr. A. R. Wallace wrote to Mr. Darwin contending that it should be substituted for the expression ‘Natural Selection.’ Mr. Darwin demurred to this proposal. Among reasons for retaining his own expression he said that I had myself, in many cases, preferred it... Mr. Darwin was quite right in his statement, but not right in the motive he ascribed to me. My reason... was that disuse of Mr. Darwin's phrase would have seemed like an endeavour to keep out of sight my own indebtedness to him, and the indebtedness of the world at large. The implied feeling has led me ever since to use the expressions Natural Selection and Survival of the Fittest with something like equal frequency” (I, 530).
The expression is A. J. Nicholson's: “The Role of Population Dynamics in Natural Selection,” in Evolution after Darwin, ed. Sol Tax, I (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1960), 515. For an example of this perspective see also Mayr, Growth of Biological Thought, pp. 488–490.
This possibility was suggested by David Kohn.
Nora Barlow, ed., The Autobiography of Charles Darwin (New York: W. W. Norton, 1958), p. 109.
A. G. Keller and M. R. Davie, Essays of William Graham Sumner, II (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1934), 56.
Huxley to W. Platt Bald, October 27, 1890, in Life and Letters of Thomas Huxley, ed. Leonard Huxley, II (New York: Appleton and Company, 1901), 284.
Thomas Huxley, “Apologetic Irenicon,” quoted in L. Huxley, Life and Letters, II, 322. See also “Evolution and Ethics” in T. H. Huxley, Collected Essays, IX (New York: Greenwood Press, 1968; orig. pub. 1902), 80–81.
Wallace reported: “In one of my latest conversations with Darwin he expressed himself very gloomily on the future of humanity, on the ground that in our modern civilization natural selection had no play, and the fittest did not survive. Those who succeed in the race for wealth are by no means the best or the most intelligent, and it is notorious that population is more largely renewed in each generation from the lower than from the middle and upper classes” (“Human Selection,” p. 509). See also the section, “Natural Selection as affecting Civilised Nations,” in A. R. Wallace, The Descent of Man (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1981; orig. ed. 1871), pp. 167–180. John C. Greene discusses Darwin's social views in “Darwin as a Social Evolutionist,” J. Hist. Ideas, 10 (1977), 1–27.
Wallace, “Human Selection,” p. 509.
David Starr Jordan, The Heredity of Richard Rowe (Boston: American Universalist Association, 1911), “Prefatory Note.”
The first use of the phrase that I know of was by J. B. S. Haldane in The Causes of Evolution (London: Longmans, Green and Co., 1932), p. 131.
J. B. S. Haldane, “Human Biology and Politics,” in Adventures of a Biologist (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1937), p. 151.
R. A. Fisher, The Genetical Theory of Natural Selection (New York: Dover, 1959; orig. pub. 1930), p. 240.
Theodosius Dobzhansky, Mankind Evolving (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1962), p. 129.
For example, see T. Dobzhansky, Genetics and the Origin of Species, 3rd ed. (New York: Columbia University Press, 1951), pp. 77–79.
C. H. Waddington, The Strategy of the Genes (London: Allen and Unwin, 1957), pp. 64–65; quoted in Michael Bradie and Mark Gromko, “The Status of the Principle of Natural Selection,” Nat. Syst., 3 (1981), 5.
Edmund Sinnott, L. C. Dunn, and T. Dobzhansky, Principles of Genetics, 5th ed. (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1958), pp. 100–101.
Efforts to solve (or dissolve) the tautology problem have intensified over the last decade, perhaps in response to creationists' claims that Darwinism is empirically untestable, and hence unscientific. Some important examples are: Susan Mills and John Beatty, “The Propensity Interpretation of Fitness,” Phil. Sci., 46 (1979), 263–288; Stephen Jay Gould, “Darwin's Untimely Burial,” in Ever Since Darwin (New York: W. W. Norton, 1977), pp. 39–48; Robert Brandon, “Adaptation and Evolutionary Theory,” Stud. Hist. Phil. Sci., 9 (1978), 181–206; Mary Williams, “The Logical Status of Natural Selection and Other Evolutionary Controversies,” in M. Bunge, The Methodological Unity of Science (Dordrecht: Reidel, 1973), pp. 84–102 (all reprinted in Elliott Sober, Conceptual Issues in Evolutionary Biology: An Anthology Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1984); also Costas B. Krimbas, “On Adaptation, Neo-Darwinian Tautology, and Population Fitness,” in Evolutionary Biology, ed. M. Hecht, B. Wallace, and G. Prancc, XVII (New York: Plenum, 1984), 1–57; Elliott Sober, The Nature of Selection: Evolutionary Theory in Philosophical Focus (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1984), pp. 38–85; and M. J. S. Hodge, “Natural Selection as a Causal, Empirical, and Probabilistic Theory” (unpublished MS).
It was largely defined as an issue by Karl Popper; for a summary of his views, see Michael Ruse, “Karl Popper's Philosophy of Biology,” Phil. Sci., 44 (1977), 638–661. Popper has often been criticized for his naiveté about evolutionary theory, but, as Ruse notes and this paper confirms, he had distinguished company.
Darwin used “fit” and “fitted” interchangeably with “adapted” and “adaptive,” but more frequently employed the latter; see Paul H. Barrett, Donald J. Weinshank, and Timothy T. Gottleber, eds., A Concordance to Darwin's Origin of Species, First Edition (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1981). “Fitness” appears once in the Origin: “Nor ought we marvel if all the contrivances in nature be not, as far as we can judge, absolutely perfect; and if some of them be abhorrent to our idea of fitness” (Darwin, Origin, p. 472).
Sober, Nature of Selection, p. 71.
I am grateful to John Beatty for suggesting this point.
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Paul, D.B. The selection of the “Survival of the Fittest”. J Hist Biol 21, 411–424 (1988). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF00144089
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BF00144089