What, now, is the doctrine of natural selection, as Darwin propounded it? All animals vary; every individual differs from others of its kind, even from its closest kin and from its parents in some or many particulars and to different degrees. Whatever the causes, the fact of variation stands unquestioned. Some variations are of course due to direct environmental influence, and to these Buffon attributed an excessive importance; other deviations from the parental or average specific type are no doubt due to indirect effects of the environment, as Lamarck contended. But there are countless other variations that can not be so explained, some of them indeed appearing before an individual is subjected to the action of the environment, and these are the congenital variations due to some constitutional even if unknown causes. These seemed to Darwin to be the most important in evolution.
The second element of the doctrine is that over-production, or rather over-reproduction, is a universal characteristic of living things. The normal rate of multiplication is such that any given form of animal or plant would cumber the earth or fill the sea in a relatively brief period of time. We now know that a bacillus less than 1⁄5000 of an inch in length multiplies under normal conditions at a rate that would cause the offspring of a single individual to fill the ocean to the depth of a mile in five days. "Slow-breeding man," wrote Darwin, "has doubled in the past twenty-five years." But excessive multiplication is checked by the third part of the whole process, namely, the struggle for existence, that fierce unequal warfare waged by every individual with its inorganic surroundings, with other species of living things, and with others of its own kind. Indeed where members of the same species compete, the struggle often surpasses in ferocity the warfare with other organisms. Communal organisms only are in part exceptions, for in these the battle involves the clash of community with community more than it does the interests of the individuals of a single colony. To what, now, do these elemental processes lead, asks Darwin. Though all seek to maintain themselves, all can not possibly live when only a few can find sustenance or can escape their enemies. Naturally those which possess any advantage whatsoever, that vary ever so slightly in the direction of better adjustment would survive where their brethren perish. And this is nature's selective process, with its positive and negative aspects—the survival of the fittest and the elimination of the unfit. Now we can see why adaptation is a universal characteristic of species—there are no unadapted. If such there were, they have fallen long ago, and the world knows them no more. True it is that perfection is not attained by any creature, but it must establish a modus vivendi or it perishes. Thus, Darwin held, nature perfects species by dealing directly with favoring derivations that are mainly congenital, and so through these it selects the herditary factors that determine favorable variations.
