Charles Darwin

1809–1882 · English naturalist, author of On the Origin of Species

Charles Darwin gets the credit because the phrase now works as a four-word summary of his book, and because he really did put it in that book — just not until the fifth edition, a decade after the first. He was scrupulous about the borrowing, writing in 1868 that ‘Mr. Herbert Spencer has well expressed the same idea by the Survival of the Fittest,’ and adding to the Origin’s introduction that Spencer’s expression ‘is more accurate, and is sometimes equally convenient.’ He was also uneasy about it: it cannot be used as a verb, and it invites exactly the misreading it was meant to prevent.

Traced to source

6 quotes we’ve traced to Charles Darwin

“A man who dares to waste one hour of time has not discovered the value of life”

Verified

“From so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved”

Verified

“There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved”

Verified

“A mathematician is a blind man in a dark room looking for a black cat which isn't there”

Disputed

“In the struggle for survival, the fittest win out at the expense of their rivals because they succeed in adapting themselves best to their environment”

Disputed

“Survival of the fittest”

Disputed

Not actually Charles Darwin

Often misattributed to Charles Darwin

Famous lines widely pinned on Charles Darwin that we’ve traced to someone else.

“A mathematician is a blind man in a dark room looking for a black cat which isn't there”

actually Origin unknown (anonymous)

“I was a young man with uninformed ideas. I threw out queries, suggestions, wondering all the time over everything; and to my astonishment the ideas took like wildfire. People made a religion of them”

actually “Lady Hope” (Elizabeth Reid Cotton)

“In the struggle for survival, the fittest win out at the expense of their rivals because they succeed in adapting themselves best to their environment”

actually Textbook authors of “Civilization Past and Present”

“It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent that survives. It is the one that is most adaptable to change”

actually Leon C. Megginson (paraphrasing Darwin)

“Let Us Hope Darwinism is Not True, But If It is, Let Us Pray It Does Not Become Widely Known”

actually Robert Forman Horton

“Survival of the fittest”

actually Herbert Spencer

“The Creator has an inordinate fondness for beetles”

actually J.B.S. Haldane

“The great tragedy of Science — the slaying of a beautiful hypothesis by an ugly fact”

actually Thomas Henry Huxley

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