FACTORS OF ORGANIC EVOLUTION. 463 



accept " survival of the fittest " as a synonymous expression, because 

 its author so designed it. "By natural selection or survival of the 

 fittest," writes Spencer, " by the preservation in successive generations 

 of those whose moving equilibria hajipen to be least at variance with 

 the requirements, there is eventually produced a changed equilibrium 

 completely in harmony with the requirements." 



It should be said that there is no reason other than usage why the 

 phrase " survival of the fittest " should not apply to the result of 

 Lamarckian or functional evolution as well as of Darwinian or select- 

 ive evolution. It simply expresses a fact, without designating the 

 cause or the process. Cope has written a book upon the Origin of 

 the Fittest, in which the argument is Lamarckian. The phrase 

 implies a conflict, and the loss of certain contestants and the salvation 

 of certain others. It asserts that the contestants or characters which 

 survive are the fittest, but it does not explain whether they are fit 

 because endowed with greater strength, greater prolificness, completer 

 harmony with surroundings, or other attributes. I should like to sug- 

 gest, therefore, that the chiefest merit of the survivors is unlikeness, 

 and to call your attention for a few minutes to the significance of the 

 phrase — which I have used in my teaching during the last year — the 

 survival of the unlike. 



This phrase — the survival of the unlike — expresses no new truth, 

 but I hope that it may present the old truth of vicarious or nondesigned 

 evolution in a new light. It defines the fittest to be the unlike. You 

 will recall that in this paper I have dwelt upon the origin and progress 

 of differences rather than of definite or positive characters. I am so 

 fully convinced that, in the plant creation, a new character is useful to 

 the species because it is unlike its kin, that the study of difference 

 between individuals has come to be, for me, the one absorbing and 

 controlling thought in the contemplation of the progress of life. These 

 differences arise as a result of every impinging force — soil, weather, 

 climate, food, training, conflict with fellows, the strain and stress of 

 wind and wave and insect visitors — as a complex resultant of many 

 antecedent external forces, the effects of crossing, and also as the result 

 of the accumulated force of mere growth; they are indefinite, non 

 designed, an expression of all the various influences to which the pass- 

 ive vegetable organism is or has been exposed; those differences which 

 are most unlike their fellows or their parents find the places of least 

 conflict, and persist because they thrive best and thereby impress 

 themselves best upon their offspring. Thereby there is a constant 

 tendency for new and divergent lines to strike off, and these lines, as 

 they become accented, develop into what we, for convenience sake, 

 have called species. There are, therefore, as many species as there are 

 unlike conditions in physical and environmental nature, and in propor- 

 tion as the conditions are unlike and local are the species well defined. 

 But to nature, perfect adaptation is the end; she knows nothing, per 

 se, as species or as fixed types. Species were created by John Ray, 

 not by the Lord; they were named by Linnaeus, not by Adam. 



