(Charles) Darwin’s Law
This preservation of favourable individual differences and variations, and the destruction of those that are injurious, I have called Natural Selection or the Survival of the Fittest.
Source: The Origin of the Species 1859.
Charles Darwin used the term ‘natural selection’ in contradistinction to the power of selection exercised by humans when breeding plants and animals. He took the phrase ‘Survival of the Fittest’ from Herbert Spencer, acknowledging in Origin of the Species that it “is more accurate than Natural Selection” and “is sometimes equally convenient.” See also Spencer’s Law.
In Darwin’s theory of evolution, natural selection is the mechanism that produces varieties of species (or “incipient species” as Darwin called them), new species, and new groups of species or genera. He argued that these results stemmed from what he termed “the struggle for life”:
Owing to this struggle, variations, however slight and from whatever cause proceeding, if they be in any degree profitable to the individuals of a species in their infinitely complex relations to other organic beings and to their physical conditions of life, will tend to the preservation of such individuals and will generally be inherited by their offspring. The offspring also will have a better chance of surviving, for of the many individuals of any species which are periodically born but a small number can survive.
The struggle for life in turn was, as implied here, a consequence of the astonishingly high rates at which plants and animals tend to reproduce.
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