If thou hast done foolishly in lifting up thyself, or if thou hast thought evil, lay thine hand upon thy mouth. Proverbs 30:32
"Horticulturalist Patrick Matthew who put forward his own
survival-of-the-fittest idea in an appendix to a somewhat recondite
publication called Timber and Naval Arboriculture in 1831:
As Nature, in all her modifications of life, has a power ofincrease far beyond what is needed to supply the place of what falls by Time’s decay, those individuals who possess not the requisite strength, swiftness, hardihood, or cunning, fall prematurely without reproducing — either a prey to their natural devourers, or sinking under disease, generally induced by want of nourishment, their place being occupied by the more perfect of their own kind, who are pressing on the means of subsistence.
Matthew expressly stated that the conception of natural selection
“came intuitively as a self-evident fact without the effort of
concentrated thought.”
It had not occurred to him that he had made a
great discovery and he clearly saw his perceptions as everyday truisms
for persons concerned with growing plants or rearing animals.
Such empirically observable phenomena required no special explanation, Matthew stated." EN&V