Herbert Spencer's'survival Of The Fittest?

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SURVIVAL OF THE FITTEST
Herbert Spencer coined the phrase “survival of the fittest”. “Survival of the fittest was a 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 the best understood as “Survival of the form that will leave the most copies of itself in successive generations.
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 …show more content…

Darwin promptly replied that Wallace’s letter was “as clear as daylight, I fully agree with all that you say on the advantages of H. Spencer’s excellent of ‘the survival of the fittest’. This however had not occurred to me till reading your letter. It is, however, a great objection to this term that it cannot be used as a substantive governing a verb”. Had he received the letter two month earlier, he would have worked the phrase into the fourth edition of the Origin which was then being printed, and he would use it in his “next book on domestic animals …show more content…

This is precisely what is called “evolution by natural selection.” On the other hand, if the characters which lead to differential reproductive success are not heritable, then no meaningful evolution will occur, “survival of the fittest” or not: if improvement in reproductive success is caused by traits that are not heritable, then there is no reason why these traits should increase in frequency over generations. In other words, natural selection does not simply state that “survivors survive” or “reproducers reproduce”; rather, it states that “survivors survive, reproduce and therefore propagate any heritable characters which have affected their survival and reproductive success”. This statement is not tautological: it hinges on the testable hypothesis that such fitness-impacting heritable variations actually

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