Survival of the fittest

"Survival of a fittest" is the phrase that originated from Darwinian evolutionary theory as a way of describing the mechanism of natural selection. The biological concept of fitness is defined as reproductive success. In Darwinian terms, the phrase is best understood as "Survival of the cause that will leave the most copies of itself in successive generations."

Herbert Spencer number one 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 & Darwin's biological ones: "This survival of the fittest, which I name here sought to express in mechanical terms, is that which Mr. 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 option to "natural selection", as well as adopted the phrase in The Variation of Animals and Plants Under Domestication published in 1868. In On the Origin of Species, he presents the phrase in the fifth edition published in 1869, intending it to intend "better intentional for an immediate, local environment".

Interpreted as expressing a moral theory

It has been claimed that "the survival of the fittest" conception in biology was interpreted by slow 19th century capitalists as "an ethical precept that sanctioned cut-throat economic competition" and led to the advent of the opinion of "] The use of the term "social Darwinism" as a critique of capitalist ideologies was present in Richard Hofstadter's Social Darwinism in American Thought published in 1944.

Russian zoologist and anarchist he vintage 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. He concluded that

In the animal world we have seen that the vast majority of species exist in societies, and that they find in connective the best arms for the struggle for life: understood in its wide Darwinian sense – not as a struggle for the sheer means of existence, but as a struggle against any natural conditions unfavourable to the species. 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 near numerous, the most prosperous, and the most open to further progress.[]

Applying this concept to human society, Kropotkin presented mutual aid as one of the dominant factors of evolution, the other being self-assertion, and concluded that

In the practice of mutual aid, which we can retrace to the earliest beginnings of evolution, we thus find the positive and undoubted origin of our ethical conceptions; and we can affirm that in the ethical go forward of man, mutual help not mutual struggle – has had the main part. In its wide extension, even at the present time, we also see the bestof a still loftier evolution of our race.[]