Credit: J. Cameron
PARIS: Even the guardians of Darwin's flame got it wrong; some of his most often cited quotes don't appear anywhere in his published works.
Charles Darwin, born 200 years ago today, single-handedly shapeshifted our understanding of the natural world. But his powerful insights into evolution were written in a wordy, Victorian style and did not always emerge in compact, haiku-like nuggets of wisdom.
Hard going
"His writings can be quite hard going," noted Darwin scholar and Cambridge University professor John van Wyhe. "Often you have to read a whole chapter to know what he is talking about."
Which may be why no single sentence is cited more frequently as a distillation of the great man's ideas than this one: "It is not the strongest species that survive, nor the most intelligent, but the ones most responsive to change."
It's etched in marble at the California Academy of Sciences, in the U.S., and was cited last week by the Cite de Sciences in Paris, France.
A close runner up is: "In the struggle for survival, the fittest win out at the expense of their rivals because they succeed in adapting themselves best to their environment." The website of the Natural History Museum in London singled out that gem for a massive celebratory exhibit.
Spurious quotes
Together, they appear in countless books and magazines, as well as tens of thousands of websites in dozens of languages. But both quotations are spurious, according to top Darwin scholars.
"These sentences do not appear anywhere in Darwin's work," said Patrick Tort, a Darwin expert at the National Museum of Natural History in Paris who said he has spent the last decade "combating the endless distortions of Darwin's ideas."
To make matters worse, neither quote is faithful to his ideas about the role of natural selection in evolution.
"These pithy little sayings try to encapsulate Darwin," Wyhe said, amused and annoyed in equal measure. "Unfortunately all of them are actually rather wrong."
It is not the species that are most responsive to change that are likely to survive, he explained. "It is the ones that are lucky, or already have the right features that can be passed on to the next generation."
