The phrase is today commonly used in contexts that are incompatible with the original meaning as intended by its first two proponents: British polymath philosopher Herbert Spencer and Charles Darwin. "Survival of the fittest" is a phrase originating in evolutionary theory, as an alternative description of natural selection. In On the Origin of Species, he introduced the phrase in the fifth edition published in 1869, intending it to mean "better designed for an immediate, local environment".įreebase Rate this definition: 4.0 / 1 vote Darwin has called 'natural selection', or the preservation of favoured races in the struggle for life."Darwin responded positively to Alfred Russel Wallace's suggestion of using Spencer's new phrase "survival of the fittest" as an alternative to "natural selection", and adopted the phrase in The Variation of Animals and Plants Under Domestication published in 1868. Herbert Spencer first used the phrase, after reading Charles Darwin's On the Origin of Species, in his Principles of Biology (1864), in which he drew parallels between his own economic theories and Darwin's biological ones: "This survival of the fittest, which I have here sought to express in mechanical terms, is that which Mr. In Darwinian terms, the phrase is best understood as "Survival of the form that will leave the most copies of itself in successive generations." The biological concept of fitness is defined as reproductive success. "Survival of the fittest" is a phrase that originated from Darwinian evolutionary theory as a way of describing the mechanism of natural selection. Wikipedia Rate this definition: 0.0 / 0 votes
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