Tag Archives: natural selection

Darwin and the “strongest of the species” quotation

This is old news, but hundreds of yearly posts on Twitter suggest not everyone on the planet got the memo, so I want to make another post about this quote:

“It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent that survives. It is the one that is the most adaptable to change.”

The sentences are actually from Leon Megginson (details), a professor of marketing at Louisiana State University who died in 2010. But people love to attribute it to Darwin. E.g., as shown in the photograph below from the California Academy of Sciences.

It is not the strongest of the species that survives

If you give motivational seminars and need the quotation on a slide, here you go.