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Global Darwin: Contempt for competition

Nature volume 462, pages 36–37 (2009)Cite this article

Darwin's idea of the 'struggle for existence' struck a chord with his fellow countrymen. But Russians rejected the alien metaphor, says Daniel Todes, in the second of four weekly pieces on reactions to evolutionary theory.

In An Essay on the Principle of Population, as it Affects the Future Improvement of Society (1798), Malthus argued against believers in social progress by citing an inexorable natural law: population tends to increase geometrically and food supply only arithmetically. These imbalanced progressions lead to a “struggle for existence” in which the winners prospered and the losers suffered privation and premature death. Nature itself decreed that human misery was inevitable.

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  1. Daniel Todes is at the Institute of the History of Medicine at Johns Hopkins University, 1900 East Monument Street, Baltimore, Maryland 21205, USA. He is currently completing a biography of Ivan Pavlov. dtodes@jhmi.edu ,

    Daniel Todes

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  1. Daniel Todes
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Todes, D. Global Darwin: Contempt for competition. Nature 462, 36–37 (2009). https://doi.org/10.1038/462036a

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