by Demand:
Charles Darwin said, “It is not the strongest species that survives, nor the most intelligent, but the one that is most adaptable to change.”
Rating:
Context:
This passage appears to have been originally presented as a paraphrase of Darwin’s ideas.
A popular quote found on blogs, graphics, TikTok and Reddit videos has been attributed to Charles Darwin, claiming that he said: “It is not the strongest species that survives, nor the most intelligent, but the most adaptable to change. ” The English naturalist has been subject to many misunderstandings and misspellings over the years.
This quote often changes depending on where you look, with another version substituting “responsive” for “adaptable” for example. Nicholas J. Matzke of the department of integrative biology at the University of California, Berkeley, learned that this quote may have been taken from someone paraphrasing Darwin. Matzke won an award for his demystification effort from the Darwin Correspondence Project in 2009.
Matzke’s discovery was on the website of the project, a collection of Darwin’s writings housed at the University of Cambridge. He discovered that the quote appeared to be a paraphrase of Darwin’s work, and came from a 1963 speech by Leon C. Megginson, a professor of management and marketing at Louisiana State University. The exact words of the speech were printed in the article “Lessons from Europe for American Business,” published in the Southwestern Social Science Quarterly. Megginson said:
According to Darwin’s Origin of Species, it is not the most intelligent of the species that survives; it is not the strongest that survives; but the species that survives is the one best able to adapt and adapt to the changing environment in which it finds itself.
Matzke, in his blog, also found that Megginson used a version of this paraphrase in other writings, and a former student even told him what he heard in his classes: “I learned a lot of good things from classes Leon Megginson. One of the most valuable things I heard him say went something like this: Charles Darwin did not say that only the strong survive. What he said is that the survivors are the ones who most accurately understand their environment and adapt to it successfully.”
Matzke shared some thoughts on how the quote came about:
(1) The quotation appears to begin as a paraphrase; there is no evidence that Megginson originally intended to accept this as an exact quotation; rather, at a later stage, someone copied the phrase down (perhaps in lecture notes, for example), and then later assumed it was a Darwin quote. (2) The quote seems to have evolved over time to be shorter and more pitiful. I suspect that shorter, more pithy quotes have an “adaptive advantage” in collections of inspirational quotes, motivational seminars, and similar venues that seem to be the habitats of quotation in the business world. I hereby call this process “pithification”. If, as I suspect, this is a common trend in false quotations, remember that you heard the process described and named here first. (3) The part that is not told in the story concerns what happened between 1964 and 1982. I have looked carefully at some old Megginson textbooks, so far without success (although Megginson was clearly read very widely , and that he likes to start his chapters with pithy quotes from famous people, usually without reference, and the authors are usually not indexed in the book index, so looking at the index doesn’t tell you whether Darwin is quoted or was … not).
According to the Darwin Correspondence Project, “Megginson was interested in the theories of evolution by ‘mutual aid’ proposed by the Russian zoologist Karl Kessler, and his remarks about Darwin clearly show that.”
John van Wyhe, founder of Darwin Online and professor at Cambridge University, also debunked this quote in 2008, arguing that it was nowhere to be found in the archived versions of Darwin’s letters, which drew Matzke’s attention to it.
Therefore, we consider this claim to be misallocation.
Sources:
“It Needn’t So…” The Guardian, 9 February 2008. The Guardian, https://www.theguardian.com/science/2008/feb/09/darwin.myths.
“Not the strongest of the species survives – Charles Darwin.” Due, 30 Dec. 2015, https://due.com/blog/not-strongest-species-survive-charles-darwin/ .
“It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent, but the most responsive to change. – Charles Darwin.” Quotespedia.Org. https://www.quotespedia.org/authors/c/charles-darwin/it-is-not-the-strongest-of-the-species-that-survive-nor-the-most-intelligent-but-the- person-most-responsive-to-change-charles-darwin/.
Good, Nick. “Survival of the Pirates.” The Panda’s Thumb, 3 Sep. 2009, https://pandasthumb.org/archives/2009/09/survival-of-the-1.html.
Megginson, Leon C. “Lessons from Europe for American Business.” The Southwestern Social Science Quarterly, vol. 44, no. 1, 1963, pp. 3–13. JSTOR, https://www.jstor.org/stable/42866937.
“Evolution Wrong.” Darwin Correspondence Project, 25 Nov. 2016, https://www.darwinproject.ac.uk/people/about-darwin/six-things-darwin-never-said/evolution-misquotation.
“Who are we.” Darwin Correspondence Project, 3 May 2015, https://www.darwinproject.ac.uk/about/who-we-are.
