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Survival of the fittest

noun

Definitions

Noun
  1. 1
    Natural selection. uncountable

    "Slow though the process of selection may be, if feeble man can do much by artificial selection, I can see no limit to the amount of change, to the beauty and complexity of the coadaptations between all organic beings, one with another and with their physical conditions of life, which may have been effected in the long course of time through nature's power of selection, that is by the survival of the fittest."

  2. 2
    a natural process resulting in the evolution of organisms best adapted to the environment wordnet

Etymology

Coined by English philosopher and political theorist Herbert Spencer in 1864 after reading Charles Darwin's On the Origin of Species, and used by Darwin himself in subsequent editions of that work.

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