charles_darwin

The Origin of Species
may have felt more certain about his theory in 1872 than in 1859,
but the new title was also less awkward.
Some of Darwin’s editing was both substantive and significant.
Perhaps the best-known change was Darwin’s use of the phrase ‘‘the
survival of the fittest.’’ Although the idea is associated with Darwin
and the theory of evolution, he did not use this phrase in the first
edition. Commenting on the survival of some species in the ‘‘struggle
for existence,’’ Darwin writes, ‘‘This preservation of favourable variations
and the rejection of injurious variations, I call Natural Selection.’’
17 After not being able to explain to some of his critics how
and why natural selection worked, Darwin wrote in the fifth edition,
‘‘This preservation of favourable variations, and the destruction of injurious
variations, I call Natural Selection, or the Survival of the Fittest.’’
18 And Darwin expanded the explanation still further in the
sixth edition: ‘‘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.’’ 19
The survival of the fittest was an idea Darwin borrowed from
Herbert Spencer (1820–1903), a British sociologist, philosopher, and
acquaintance of Darwin’s. Although the idea seemed to explain why
natural selection occurred, the survival of the fittest did not quell
the objections to Darwin’s theory about natural selection. The objections
could be put in the form of a question: ‘‘Does natural selection
really explain all of the complicated phenomena of nature?’’ To
address these criticisms, Darwin added a new chapter entitled ‘‘Miscellaneous
Objections to the Theory of Natural Selection’’ to the
sixth edition. 20
The main target of the chapter was the British zoologist and
Catholic theologian, St. George Jackson Mivart (1827–1900). According
to Darwin, in the book On the Genesis of Species (1871), Mivart
‘‘collected all the objections which have ever been advanced by
myself and others against the theory of natural selection ... and ...
illustrated them with admirable art and force.’’ 21 Among his arguments,
Mivart suggested that a series of sudden changes rather than
slow, gradual change might better explain the development of species.
Thus, Darwin’s attempt to explain the missing parts in the
sequence of fossil forms in Chapter IX, ‘‘On the Imperfection of the
Geological Record,’’ was the wrong approach: there were no gaps.
Gradualism, uniformitarianism, and the idea that ‘‘nature does not
make any jumps’’ were false foundations for Darwin’s theory of evolution.
22 After consulting with Alfred Russel Wallace, among others,
Darwin decided to devote a new chapter in The Origin of Species to
Mivart’s book.
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