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Chapter 8 MIRROR, MIRROR ON THE WALL, WHO'S THE FITTEST OF Us ALL? Then will the world enter upon a new stage of its history-the final competition of races for which the Anglo Saxon is being schooled ... This powerful race will move down upon Central and South America, out upon the islands of the sea, over upon Africa and beyond. And can any doubt that the result of this competition will be the "survival of the fittest?" Josiah Strong 1885 What Josiah Strong alluded to in the last sentence above was natural selection, the theory that Charles Darwin proposed in 1859. Notions like "survival of the fittest" and "struggle for existence" often come to mind when one is asked about the meaning of natural selection. However , neither phrase was original with Darwin. The first was used by Thomas Malthus, who, in A n Essay on the Principle of Population, expressed the view that human reproductive capacity far exceeds the available food supply. Human beings compete among themselves for the necessities. The unrelenting competition engenders vice, misery, war and famine. The second phrase was coined by the social philosopher Herbert Spencer in 1862.1 If, indeed, Darwin adopted the notion of "struggle for existence," he had mixed feelings about the idea. The "struggle for existence" was a concept he used only cautiously. He must have perceived that such slogans conceal two important questions, namely, who are the fittest and what are they fittest for? We shall see that several different answers have been given to these questions. Some have disastrous political and social repercussions. With the publication of his research, Darwin did two things: First, he convinced the scientific world that evolution had occurred, and second , he proposed the theory of natural selection2 as its mechanism. 71 72 Alain Corcos For this he became famous. However, he should have shared his fame with another man, Alfred Russell Wallace. Prior to Darwin's publishing his famous research, Wallace had written a short essay that he sent to Darwin in 1858. In this essay, Darwin was astonished to find that Wallace had also developed the idea of natural selection. In order to share the honor of having established the mechanism by which natural selection is brought about, Wallace and Darwin agreed to read their papers before the Linnean Society in London the same day, on July 1, 1858. However, it has been Darwin's book, The Origin of Species, with its impressive weight of evidence and argument that left its mark on the thinking of humanity. Strangely, neither Darwin nor Wallace were the first to think in terms of natural selection. Darwin's own grandfather, Erasmus Darwin , expressed such an idea at the end of the eighteenth century in his book Zoonomia (or, The Laws of Organic Life). And the same idea can also be found in the writing of William Wells. In a small essay, "Account of a Female of the White Race of Humanity, Part of Whose Skin Resembles that of a Negro," Wells described certain patches of black skin on the otherwise white body of a woman named Hannah West. From his observations, he concluded first "that great heat is not indispensably necessary to render the human color black." This led him to seek his answer to the cause of dark skin elsewhere. Since Wells was a physician, it is not surprising that he thought of diseases. Suppose , he thought, that resistance to a disease prevalent in Africa was correlated in some way to darkness of skin. This would account for the spreading of black people over the continent, since those with white skin would be eliminated by the disease. Wells wrote: Of the accidental varieties which would occur among the first few scattered inhabitants of the middle region of Africa, some would be better fit than others to bear the diseases of the country. This race would consequently multiply, while the others would decrease, not only from their inability to sustain the attacks of disease, but from their incapacity of contending with their more vigorous neighbors. The color of this race, taken for granted from what has already been said, would be dark. But the disposition to form varieties still existing, a darker and a darker race would in the course of time occur, and as the darkest would be the best fitted for the climate, this would at length become the most prevalent, if not the only race, in the particular country in which it originated...

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