Ashley Solutions

Of course, many people otherwise well fitted to live have died because of what may be called chance or accident, but if we think of the process going on year by year until only one in a hundred of those born in a given place are left alive, it is impossible to deduce that the one which has survived the dangers and risks that were fatal to the others was not, in all the faculties and qualities essential to the long-term survival of the race, decidedly better organized than the those who perished.

Herbert Spencer calls this process the “survival of the fittest,” and though the term may not be entirely accurate in the case of any one species in any one year, we might conclude that the struggle is going on every year, during the whole duration of each species. We can believe that, overall and in the long run, those who survive are among the fittest. The struggle for survival is so brutal, so incessant, that the smallest defect in any sense organ, any physical weakness, any disability in constitution, will almost certainly, at some point, be fatal.

This continual weeding out of the less fit, in every generation, and with particular severity in recurring adverse seasons, will produce at least two results. The first is the preservation of each species in the highest state of adaptation to the conditions of its present existence. Thus, as long as these conditions remained unchanged, the effect of natural selection will be to keep each well-adapted species unchanged and thriving.

Learn more about the demographics of the evolution creation debate.