[lit-ideas] Re: MacScholarship [was 'The meaning of life']
- From: Donal McEvoy <donalmcevoyuk@xxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Fri, 12 Dec 2008 16:36:33 +0000 (GMT)
My own Macscholarship below:-
--- On Wed, 10/12/08, Robert Paul <rpaul@xxxxxxxx> wrote:
> The concept would seem to have been imported by Spencer
> from Darwin; the actual phrase was first used, as reported
> below, by Herbert Spencer, he seems to have got the idea
> from Darwin. Darwin didn't use the expression in print
> until the 5th printing of Origin [1869], where it's the
> title of Book IV. (Origin was first published in 1859.)
As Darwin did not use the expression, and as according to the Wikipedia entry
Darwin credited the phrase to Spencer, it seems clear that the idea for the
expression was not Darwin's but Spencer's. All that can be said is that Spencer
was inspired by Darwin's work, and that Darwin subsequently adopted the
expression - perhaps because, while it lacked the analogy with 'breeders' that
'natural selection' implied, it also lacked the unfortunate anthropomorphic
connotations of 'selection'.
It is significant that Darwin apparently only adopts the phrase in the 5th
edition. _The Origin Of Species_ is one of those books that gets worse once it
passes the 2nd edition - which is just the first edition with typos corrected.
In subsequent editions Darwin tried to revise and modify his theory to
accomodate his critics: as a result he made concessions to Lamarckian thinking
that, while showing his admirable lack of dogmatism, were unwarranted. Thus the
2nd edition, and not the flawed 5th, is currently the classic, standard
edition. The hard-line 'Natural Selection' defended in the first two editions
is what modern science accepts as correct, and it regards as mistaken Darwin's
various concessions and watering-down of his original thesis in subsequent
editions.
> 'This preservation of favourable individual differences
> and variations, and the destruction of those which are
> injurious, I have called Natural Selection, or the Survival
> of the Fittest.' [Darwin, Origin]
Hence this quotation cannot be taken as Darwin claiming that he was originator
of the phrase "Survival of the Fittest".
MacDonal
MacEngland
MacWorld
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