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  • 2022-10-12 (xsd:date)
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  • Did Darwin Say It Is ‘Not the Strongest of Species That Survives’ but the ‘Most Adaptable’? (en)
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  • English naturalist Charles Darwin has been subject to numerous misunderstandings and misattributions across the internet. One in particular takes the form of a popular quote that you can find on random blogs and in graphics, where Darwin reportedly said: It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent, but the one most adaptable to change. This quote often varies depending on where you look, with another version replacing adaptable with responsive, for example. Nicholas J. Matzke, of the Department of Integrative Biology, University of California, Berkeley learned that this quote may have been taken from someone who was paraphrasing Darwin. Matzke won an award for his debunking effort from the Darwin Correspondence Project back in 2009. The Darwin Correspondence Project, a collection of Darwin’s writings housed at the University of Cambridge, featured Matzke’s discovery on their website. He found that the quote appeared to start out as a paraphrase of Darwin’s work, and came from a 1963 speech by Leon C. Megginson, Professor of Management and Marketing at Louisiana State University at Baton Rouge. The exact words of the speech were printed in the article Lessons from Europe for American Business, published in the The Southwestern Social Science Quarterly. Megginson said: Matzke, in his blog, also found Megginson used a version of this paraphrase in other writings, and even a former student told him what he heard in his classes: I learned a lot of good things from Leon Megginson’s classes. One of the most valuable things I heard him say went something like this: Charles Darwin didn’t say that only the strong survive. What he said was that those who survive are the ones who most accurately perceive their environment and successfully adapt to it. Matzke shared a few observations on how the quote had evolved: According to the Darwin Correspondence Project, Megginson had an interest in the theories of evolution through ‘mutual aid’ advocated by the Russian zoologist Karl Kessler, and his statements about Darwin clearly reflect that. John van Wyhe, founder of Darwin Online and a professor at the University of Cambridge also debunked this quote in 2008, arguing that it was not found anywhere in the archived versions of Darwin’s letters, which brought it to Matzke’s attention. We thus rate this claim as a misattribution. (en)
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