The final of this wonderful trinity of _a prioris_ is a repetition of
an argument advanced ages ago by Queen Victoria’s Lord Salisbury, when
he was President of the British Association. Even then it struck people
that he had been poorly coached for the occasion. Assuming that one or
two individuals have got all these “survival value” differences in the
correct proportions--against which the chances are zero--how by any
theory of Natural Selection are we to suppose they will meet, breed,
and perpetuate them? So this argument runs. The chances are again
declared to be zero, the third zero, and Mr. Belloc, I gather, calls
in Design again here and makes his Creative Spirit, which has already
urged these two individuals, lions, or liver flukes or fleas or what
not, to make an effort and adapt themselves, lead them now to their
romantic and beneficial nuptials, while the Theory of Natural Selection
grinds its teeth in the background and mutters “Foiled again.”
But this third argument reinforces the first, in showing what is the
matter with Mr. Belloc’s ideas in this group of questions. He has got
the whole business upside down. I rather blame the early Darwinians in
this matter for using so inaccurate a phrase as the “Survival of the
Fittest.” It is to that phrase that most of Mr. Belloc’s blunderings
are due. Yet he ought not to have been misled. He had a summary of
modern views before him. He criticises my _Outline of History_, he
abuses it, and yet he has an extraordinary trick of getting out of its
way whenever it swings near his brain-case. I warn the readers of that
modest compendium expressly (and as early as page 16) that the juster
phrase to use is not the Survival of the Fittest, but the Survival of
the Fitter. I do what I can throughout to make them see this question
not in terms of an individual, but in terms of the species.
Yet Mr. Belloc insists upon writing of “the Fittest” as a sort of
conspicuously competitive prize boy, a favourable “sport,” who has to
meet his female equivalent and breed a new variety. That is all the
world away from the manner in which a biologist thinks of the process
of specific life. He sees a species as a vast multitude of individuals
in which those without individual advantages tend to fail and those
with them tend to be left to continue the race. The most important fact
is the general relative failure of the disadvantaged. The fact next in
order of importance is the general relative survival of the advantaged.
The most important consequence is that the average of the species
moves in the direction of advantageous differences, moving faster or
slower according to its rate of reproduction and the urgency of its
circumstances--that is to say, to the severity of its death-rate. Any
one particular individual may have any sort of luck; that does not
affect the general result.
I do not know what Mr. Belloc’s mathematical attainments are, or indeed
whether he has ever learnt to count beyond zero. There is no evidence
on that matter to go upon in these papers. But one may suppose him
able to understand what an average is, and he must face up to the fact
that the characteristics of a species are determined by its average
specimens. This dickering about with fancy stories of abnormal nuptials
has nothing to do with the Theory of Natural Selection. We are dealing
here with large processes and great numbers, secular changes and
realities broadly viewed.
I must apologise for pressing these points home. But I think it is
worth while to take this opportunity of clearing up a system of foggy
misconceptions about the Theory itself that may not be confined
altogether to Mr. Belloc.