Chapter Natural Selection and "The Survival of the Fittest" of The Origin of Species - Study Guide by Charles Darwin

stating 'what is' sociobiology is stating 'what ought to be'. Darwin himself was unafraid to champion the view the behaviours can be inherited and acted upon by natural selection. He devotes a chapter to "Instinct", (which he distinguishes from "Habits" thus allowing the capacity of learned behaviour and cultural transmission), and although his examples in Origin apply to the animal world, like all other aspects of his theory, the logical extension is that all the same underlying natural rules apply to man. And yet a century and a half later we still have trouble thinking of ourselves as animals.

However, politics and perceptions aside, the term 'survival of the fittest' has attracted criticism on its own turf. If it had stayed with Spencer, one could afford to ignore any objections to it, but the fact remains that Darwin did appropriate the term for later editions of Origin. The Fifth Edition published in 1869 sees the renaming of the fourth chapter from 'Natural Selection' to 'Natural Selection; or the Survival of the Fittest.' and Darwin writes in the text that "The expression used by Mr Herbert Spencer of the Survival of the Fittest is more accurate [than 'Struggle for Existence'] and is sometimes equally convenient." The phrase has been attacked for its circularity: Who survives? The fittest. Who are the fittest? Those who survive. Or as Sarah Norcliffe Cleghorn put it, "The unfit die, the fit both live and thrive. / Alas, who says so? They who do survive." A matter of semantics perhaps, but it is the duty of the communicator of science to remove any ambiguity or haziness in meaning. A more correct way of looking at evolution through natural selection is the survival - and crucially, as Darwin made clear, the reproduction - of the best fitted to a particular environment. Equally 'best fitted' should not be too strongly equated with notions of 'perfection.' Though Darwin writes of "that perfection of structure and coadaptation" or "an organ so perfect as the eye", he also notes that "Natural selection will not produce absolute perfection, nor do we always meet, as far as we can judge, with this high standard under nature." He gives the example of the dominance effected by introduced species over indigenous ones that might be thought to be more perfectly adapted for their environment. But, "Natural selection tends only to make each organic being as perfect as, or slightly more perfect than, the other inhabitants of the same country with which it has to struggle for existence." Moreover specialisations to a particular set of conditions are all very well, but if the conditions change, the apparent 'perfection' is nullified - a lesson the woolly mammoth learnt to its cost.