Word: fittest
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...Competition plays a tremendously important part in evolution but the survival of the fittest does not always mean the survival of the strong, the predators, the parasites or even the adequately defended organisms." Sheer struggle tends to be supplanted by cooperation, Emerson observed, in each evolutionary step upward from the single cell to the many-celled organism to the family to societies...
...cause: The Nazis have simply carried to its logical limits an idea that is shared in some degree throughout Western civilization-the fatalistic idea that evolution and progress are the result of the survival of the fittest in a struggle to the death for life. World War II is the political and military stage of an intellectual revolution whose mild beginnings Author Barzun dates from...
...understand how these three men have dominated our thinking, says Author Barzun, try to imagine our speech without terms like survival of the fittest, struggle for existence, natural selection, exploitation of labor, dialectic materialism, scientific socialism, social significance, Nordic culture, music drama, leitmotiv, the twilight of the gods...
From each of these isms, says Author Barzun, people learned that "the riddle of the Sphinx had been solved." The solution might be a little technical and complicated. "Yet at bottom lay a simple principle" - the survival of the fittest, the theory of value and surplus value, the leitmotiv and its function. "The public could thus enjoy the double pleasure of simpleness and profundity. . . . Physical struggle led to survival, physical labor to value, physical object to musical theme, and at the end each system yielded the most exalted objects of contemplation; the adaptation of living forms; a perfect state...
...Mediterranean vitality. Its medieval and Elizabethan fairs were riots; its May Days were wide-open phallic festivals; its murders were as common as dirty looks. The streets by day were deafening, by night as dark as doom, at all times filthy enough to guarantee the survival only of the fittest. Londoners were so energetic that despite a generous round of fairs, festivals, bear-baitings and other formal diversions, they repeatedly broke forth in impromptu mass hell-raising. They loved sport, splendor, cruelty, gayety, anarchy. There was no regular police force in London until...