What did Darwin mean by his statement the ''fittest'' oragnism survive?

Question

What did Darwin mean by his statement the ''fittest'' oragnism survive?

Answer 1

The organism that can still produce the most offspring.

Most people think that the "fittest" only means most likely to survive, but that's only half true.

"Fit" in evolutionary theory means able to produce the most offspring...of course that includes being the most likely to survive so that you can produce and raise offspring.  This includes being able to adapt to the environment...weaker animals will die and therefore not produce offspring, and if they do produce offspring, those offspring will often be weak and die out.

Answer 2

He is referring to those organisms, which through a process of natural selection, are best able to adapt to their environmnent.  In a sense, they have emerged as survivors because they are best able to "fit" what nature has provided.  The phrase "survival of the fittest" is a metaphor for the process of natural selection.

Answer 3

Jen B has the only correct answer. Reproductive success is the only " fitness " that really matters.

Answer 4

Actually, Darwin never used the phrase "survival of the fittest." Someone else coined it, and he referred to it on occasion after it became popular. Darwin was more concerned with Natural Selection, which is a much less misleading phrase than "survival of the fittest," but Darwin used the two terms interchangeably to reference to the same basic concept.

Either way, it's a simple way of saying that whatever organism best suits its environment will be more likely to survive and reproduce. "Fittest" is misleading. The Three-toed Sloth has a very high level of "fitness," regardless of its actual speed and musculature. Snails are similarly "fit."

If the environment changes, the definition of fitness changes. If some tree-roaming predator was introduced that fed on sloths, sloths would no longer have a high level of fitness due to their slow speed.

Answer 5

The best adapted for that given environment.

Answer 6

That's what Hitler also  thought and see what terrible  disaster   followed his reasoning.

Answer 7

Fit organisms are genetically predisposed for differential reproductive success. Something in their genome allows them to reproduce better than other individuals in the same population, thus their genes are represented to a larger degree in succeeding generations.

For humans, if you have one child and your child has children, your fitness is positive. However, if you have no kids or you have kids but none of them reproduce, your fitness is zero; that is, your unique genes leave the gene pool as an evolutionary dead-end.

Answer 8

That phrase was actually coined by Herbert Spencer who was applying beliefs similar to Darwin to society.

Darwin did harbor teleological beliefs that all organisms were striving towards perfection, but his principle of natural selection doesn't mean this.  Natural selection basically means the changes organisms display in response to natural (usually environmental) forces applied to them.  Herbert Spencer took this belief and coined the term "survival of the fittest" when in fact natural selection now doesn't mean "always getting better" in all cases.

Answer 9

the organism which is able to adapt to a change in environment

Answer 10

This is an extremely short post for me but, put simply, Darwin meant "fittest", as in "the organism that is 'most fit' to its environment".