Alfred Russel Wallace: Letters and Reminiscences, Vol. 1 eBook

This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 357 pages of information about Alfred Russel Wallace.

Alfred Russel Wallace: Letters and Reminiscences, Vol. 1 eBook

This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 357 pages of information about Alfred Russel Wallace.
almost entirely from your choice of the term Natural Selection, and so constantly comparing it in its effects to man’s selection, and also to your so frequently personifying nature as “selecting,” as “preferring,” as “seeking only the good of the species,” etc., etc.  To the few this is as clear as daylight, and beautifully suggestive, but to many it is evidently a stumbling-block.  I wish, therefore, to suggest to you the possibility of entirely avoiding this source of misconception in your great work (if not now too late), and also in any future editions of the “Origin,” and I think it may be done without difficulty and very effectually by adopting Spencer’s term (which he generally uses in preference to Natural Selection), viz.  “Survival of the Fittest.”  This term is the plain expression of the fact; “Natural Selection” is a metaphorical expression of it, and to a certain degree indirect and incorrect, since, even personifying Nature, she does not so much select special variations as exterminate the most unfavourable ones.

Combined with the enormous multiplying powers of all organisms, and the “struggle for existence,” leading to the constant destruction of by far the largest proportion—­facts which no one of your opponents, as far as I am aware, has denied or misunderstood—­“the survival of the fittest,” rather than of those which were less fit, could not possibly be denied or misunderstood.  Neither would it be possible to say that to ensure the “survival of the fittest” any intelligent chooser was necessary, whereas when you say “Natural Selection” acts so as to choose those that are fittest it is misunderstood, and apparently always will be.  Referring to your book, I find such expressions as “Man selects only for his own good; Nature only for that of the being which she tends.”  This, it seems, will always be misunderstood; but if you had said, “Man selects only for his own good; Nature, by the inevitable survival of the fittest, only for that of the being she tends,” it would have been less liable to be so.

I find you use the term Natural Selection in two senses—­(1) for the simple preservation of favourable and rejection of unfavourable variations, in which case it is equivalent to “survival of the fittest”; (2) for the effect or change produced by this preservation, as when you say, “To sum up the circumstances favourable or unfavourable to natural selection,” and, again, “Isolation, also, is an important element in the process of natural selection”:  here it is not merely “survival of the fittest,” but change produced by survival of the fittest, that is meant.  On looking over your fourth chapter, I find that these alterations of terms can be in most cases easily made, while in some cases the addition of “or survival of the fittest” after “natural selection” would be best; and in others, less likely to be misunderstood, the original term might stand alone.

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Alfred Russel Wallace: Letters and Reminiscences, Vol. 1 from Project Gutenberg. Public domain.