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.
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