Survival of the Fittest

Most people assume that Charles Darwin coined the famous phrase 'survival of the fittest'. Actually, Darwin never used those words in any of his writings. The man who invented the term was Herbert Spencer, the 19th-century thinker and founder of the school of thought known as Social Darwinism.

Darwin used the phrase 'natural selection' to describe the process that lay at the center of his theory of evolution. 'Survival of the fittest', though still a term commonly used as shorthand for Darwin's theory, is actually misleading: it makes it seem as if survival is the standard for evolutionary success. Actually, reproduction is what counts, and survival only matters insofar as it allows reproduction. If you compared a parent of three who died at 25 years old with another person who lived to 100 but never had children, the former of the two would be the more successful in evolutionary terms.