Category Archives: Photography

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.

Skunk cabbages in snow

Photograph of Eastern skunk cabbage (Symplocarpus foetidus) covered with snow.  I didn’t confirm with a thermometer, but these are famous for heating themselves up, maintaining 35 °C (95 °F) internal temperature even when outside air is below freezing.  Heat helps volatilize the awful smell, which can be attractive to flies and beetles, but also creates a hot “room” inside the curved leaf (spathe) that surrounds the inflorescence on the spadix (hidden from view at this angle).  But a more likely hypothesis of why this ability evolved is that thermoregulation protects pollen tube growth and female reproductive structures from frost damage. Either way, one of my favorite plants. Growing in the Crum Woods, Swarthmore, Pennsylvania.

Eastern skunk cabbages (Symplocarpus foetidus) in snow. They heat up to provide warm environments for flies, their primary pollinators. Crum Woods, Swarthmore College, Pennsylvania.