JF Ptak Science Books Quick Post
I can't be sure of where this stands overall, but it certainly seemed to my reading over the last x-yearsx that using a quote or idea from our Mr. Darwin to sell something in the first decade or two after the publication of On the Origin of Species.... is a rare thing. So seeing this ad in the back of the volume of Popular Science Monthly (1877) was really surprising, as it was taking the phrase we find in Darwin to sell the long-lasting qualities of a life insurance firm. (Well, the phrase actually starts out with Herbert Spencer as he was influence by OTOOS, writing it to express an idea in economics in his Principles of Biology in 1864; Darwin himself adopts it in Variations of Animals and Plants under Domestication in 1868 and then in the fifth edition of OTOOS in 1869. I've included a lengthy quote from the Spencer, where the phrase turns out on page 444.) I do have a recollection of a drawing in Punch of a crying Mr. Darwin in a quarter illustration promoting kindness to animals or some such...but offhand there's no memory of using the man/ideas as a sales vehicle before this. Again, that's not my field so I may be missing a lot--if you know of other ads like this please let me know.
Herbert Spencer, Principles of Biology, 1864, first edition, page 444 (via Internet Archive):
"Now if the individuals of a species are thus necessarily made unlike, in countless ways and degrees — if the compli- cated sets of rhythms which we call their functions, though similar in their general characters, are dissimilar in their details — if in one individual the amount of action in a par- ticular direction is greater than in any other individual, or if here a peculiar combination gives a resulting force which is not found elsewhere ; then, among all the individuals, some will be less liable than others to have their equilibria over- thrown by a particular incident force, previously unexperi- enced. Unless the change in the environment is of so vio- lent a kind as to be universally fatal to the species, it must affect more or less differently the slightly different moving equilibria which the members of the species present. It cannot but happen that some will be more stable than others, when exposed to this new or altered factor. That is to say, it cannot but happen that those individuals whose functions are most out of equilibrium with the modified aggregate of external forces, will be those to die ; and that those will sur- vive whose functions happen to be most nearly in equilibrium with the modified aggregate of external forces. But this survival of the fittest, implies multiplication of the fittest. Out of the fittest thus multiplied, there will, as before, be an overthrowing of the moving equilibrium wher- ever it presents the least opposing force to the new incident force. And by the continual destruction of the individuals that are the least capable of maintaining their equilibria in presence of this new incident force, there must eventually be arrived at an altered type completely in equilibrium with the altered conditions."
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