The step from the Struggle for Existence to Natural selection is a small one: if there is variation between organisms and only some survive, those with variations beneficial to the conditions are more likely to prosper. Correspondingly "any variations in the least degree injurious would be rigidly destroyed." So, says Darwin, "This preservation of favourable variations and the rejection of injurious variations, I call Natural Selection." Over one generation the change is slight and imperceptible, but over thousands upon thousands of generation distinct modification becomes apparent. The human inability to grasp the lengths of time involved has been one stumbling block for the comprehension of evolution, but Darwin draws a parallel with geology (a subject he returns to time and time again throughout Origin): "I am well aware that this doctrine of natural selection... is open to the same objections which were at first urged against Sir Charles Lyell's noble views on 'the modern changes of the earth, as illustrative of geology'; but we now seldom hear the action, for instance, of the coast-waves, called a trifling and insignificant cause, when applied to the excavation of gigantic valleys or to the formation of the longest lines of inland cliffs. Natural selection can act only by the preservation and accumulation of infinitesimally small inherited modifications, each profitable to the preserved being." Even accepting this, it does remain sometimes hard to grasp how the most complex and useful structures could have arisen purely through the tiniest changes generation upon generation. Darwin referred to the very fact that it does occur as 'climbing mount improbable', a phrase Richard Dawkins picks up for the title of one of his many books on the subject of evolution. Dawkins notes that evolution is still beset by criticism based purely on what he calls 'arguments of personal incredulity'. As Darwin writes, "The mind cannot possibly grasp the full meaning of the term of a hundred million years; it cannot add up and perceive the full effect of many slight variations, accumulated during an almost infinite number of generations." But these slight variations are nonetheless powerful: "A grain in the balance will determine which individual shall live and which shall die, - which variety or species shall increase in number, and which shall decrease, or finally become extinct."
Man had already demonstrated what was capable of being achieved through Artificial Selection, and nature "having incomparably longer time at her disposal" than man is far more effective in producing biological change than human breeders. Moreover, "Man can act only on external and visible characters: Nature... can act on every internal organ, on every shade of constitutional difference, on the whole machinery of life. Man selects only for his own good; Nature only for that of the being which she tends." This sort of language led some readers of Origin to imbue an agency into 'Nature' that Darwin did not intend, and in the third edition of the book he took the trouble to point out that while "it is difficult to avoid personifying the word Nature... I mean by Nature only the aggregate action and product of many natural laws, and by laws the sequence of events as ascertained by us." But still there occasionally remains the idea of improvement, of betterment, of progress. Try as he might, Darwin sometimes found it had to escape the language that embodied the ideas and preconceptions of 'progress' that defined so much of Victorian thinking. But he is no more guilty than modern popularisers of evolution are with their copious use of metaphor, Dawkins' 'Selfish Gene' being a prime example.
A conclusion drawn by Darwin that could be seen to perhaps reflect Victorian values is his solution to the thorny problem of apparent altruism in the animal world. Darwin raises the example of the bee: there are sterile workers that will not individually succeed in the Struggle for Existence, and when a bee stings protecting the hive it will perish. Darwin's solution is that with regard to social animals natural selection "will adapt the structure of each individual for the benefit of the community; if each in consequence profits from by the selected change." Darwin had already established that the Struggle for Existence is not unremittingly savage, but his solution does not appear as communistic: the benefit of the community is only a success so long as it leads to benefits to the individuals. This was an attitude at home in a culture that prized individual self-improvement and entrepreneurism, but also extolled the communal good of civilised society. Interestingly, H.G. Wells, one of the first writers to successfully integrate Darwinian themes into his fiction, paints in The War of the Worlds (1898) a frightening picture of how the natural urges of self-interest can take over from the societal conditioning in times of crisis.
However, with regard to Origin and its 'Victorian' concerns, whilst accepting the influence of social and political trends on scientific theorising, there is a danger of overstating this sort of case. For one, the Victorian social climate, like the world of science, was not composed of one set of views, but by a number of competing doctrines and ideas. And it is just as easy, despite the progressive overtones to evolution and the consolations of group selection, to see the process of a 'struggle' as set against the grain of Victorian ideas of harmonious social progress. With regard to apparent altruism, whatever the social climate, the observable facts in nature remain constant, and without knowledge of the existence of genes, Darwin's solution to problem of apparent altruism was the most logical and plausible. However, in recognising that there was something of an uneasy compromise between the good of the individual and that of the community, Darwin seems tantalisingly close to the actual truth that apparently altruistic behaviour arises in fact for neither individual nor community. Or rather if natural selection operates on the genetic level it may in the 'interest' of the genes to bolster the success of the community - and thus many of the individuals in it. This may be purely through protecting those who share the same genes (as in the case of social insects), or a process of reciprocal altruism: you scratch my back, I'll scratch yours (as in the case of many primates including humans.)
Whatever the degree to which science reflects society, the reverse is certainly true, and Darwinism was a godsend to certain political positions. The laissez-faire of Malthus that had helped inspire Origin now took Darwinism as one of its chief weapons. Indeed the term 'survival of the fittest' so often associated with Darwin was not in fact coined by him at all, but by social philosopher Herbert Spencer (1820 - 1903), the originator of the doctrine of Social Darwinism. In many ways little more than the logical extension of existing laissez-faire ideology but with the spurious appropriation of Darwinism, Social Darwinism was the economic policy of total non-intervention by government in individual or industrial affairs, justified by the idea that those with superior talents and ability would 'naturally' rise to the top. Of course this meant that the weak would 'go to the wall' according to the natural order of things, all in the interests of what the likes of Spencer saw as social and economic progress.
Social Darwinism should not, incidentally, be confused with the doctrine of Eugenics. Eugenics, the selective reproduction of humans according to 'desirable' traits, was championed by Francis Galton (1822 - 1911) and often favoured state- intervention. Rather than just letting evolution take its course, it was giving it a helping hand in a particular direction. Besides, the notion of selective reproduction in human societies predates Darwin by millennia - Plato in his Republic for one is in favour of it - and it owes more to the animal breeders than to Darwin.
The many political perversions of Darwinism hardly bear repetition, but an intellectual and cultural trail does lead from 'the survival of the fittest' to some of the greatest atrocities of the twentieth century. What one might refer to as a sort of National Darwinism, coupled with the evils of Eugenics fused most notoriously in Nazi Germany and lead ultimately to the gas chambers of Auschwitz, but one cannot blame Darwin for any of this any more than one can blame Jesus for the Crusades or the Spanish Inquisition. And the political right was not alone in embracing Darwinism, just as Eugenics drew support from across the political spectrum. Wallace became an active socialist, and he saw evolution as caught up into the socialist project of 'improvement'. As Gillian Beer writes of Origin, "What is fascinating is to see the extent to which diverse societies can read in these pages those elements most justifying their own ideals and practises." In the interests of balance it is worth noting that a wilful ignorance of Darwinism has its fair share of pitfalls. In Soviet Russia in the 1930s Stalin sought to bring the laws of inheritance under the Marxist dictum of all-powerful environmental and social influence. Accordingly, the Kremlin appointed scientist T.D. Lysenko insisted on adhering to a half-baked crypto-Lamarckian doctrine, claiming that if winter wheat (which is planted in places with a climate mild enough to sustain it) were planted in Siberia among the stubble of spring wheat (which grows over the summer) it would be able to survive the coldest winter. Of course it didn't. Thousands died from famine.
Throughout all the interpretations of his theory during his lifetime, Darwin remained apolitical. But science has a hard time of remaining apolitical, and Darwin was not the last to suffer as a result of the way people interpreted his discoveries. The area of Sociobiology - the application of natural selection to the social systems and behaviour of animals, including humans - has suffered particularly. It has had to fight off confusion with Social Darwinism, accusations of racism, and the misconception by its critics that by stating 'what is' sociobiology is stating 'what ought to be'. Darwin himself was unafraid to champion the view the behaviours can be inherited and acted upon by natural selection. He devotes a chapter to "Instinct", (which he distinguishes from "Habits" thus allowing the capacity of learned behaviour and cultural transmission), and although his examples in Origin apply to the animal world, like all other aspects of his theory, the logical extension is that all the same underlying natural rules apply to man. And yet a century and a half later we still have trouble thinking of ourselves as animals.
However, politics and perceptions aside, the term 'survival of the fittest' has attracted criticism on its own turf. If it had stayed with Spencer, one could afford to ignore any objections to it, but the fact remains that Darwin did appropriate the term for later editions of Origin. The Fifth Edition published in 1869 sees the renaming of the fourth chapter from 'Natural Selection' to 'Natural Selection; or the Survival of the Fittest.' and Darwin writes in the text that "The expression used by Mr Herbert Spencer of the Survival of the Fittest is more accurate [than 'Struggle for Existence'] and is sometimes equally convenient." The phrase has been attacked for its circularity: Who survives? The fittest. Who are the fittest? Those who survive. Or as Sarah Norcliffe Cleghorn put it, "The unfit die, the fit both live and thrive. / Alas, who says so? They who do survive." A matter of semantics perhaps, but it is the duty of the communicator of science to remove any ambiguity or haziness in meaning. A more correct way of looking at evolution through natural selection is the survival - and crucially, as Darwin made clear, the reproduction - of the best fitted to a particular environment. Equally 'best fitted' should not be too strongly equated with notions of 'perfection.' Though Darwin writes of "that perfection of structure and coadaptation" or "an organ so perfect as the eye", he also notes that "Natural selection will not produce absolute perfection, nor do we always meet, as far as we can judge, with this high standard under nature." He gives the example of the dominance effected by introduced species over indigenous ones that might be thought to be more perfectly adapted for their environment. But, "Natural selection tends only to make each organic being as perfect as, or slightly more perfect than, the other inhabitants of the same country with which it has to struggle for existence." Moreover specialisations to a particular set of conditions are all very well, but if the conditions change, the apparent 'perfection' is nullified - a lesson the woolly mammoth learnt to its cost.