That Darwin regarded war
as an insignificant or even non-existent part of natural selection must
be clear to all who have read his books. He was careful to state that he
used the term "struggle for existence" in a "metaphorical sense," and
the dominant factors in the struggle for existence, as Darwin understood
it, were natural suitability to the organic and inorganic environment
and the capacity for adaptation to circumstances; one species flourishes
while a less efficient species living alongside it languishes, yet they
may never come in actual contact and there is nothing in the least
approaching human warfare. The conditions much more resemble what, among
ourselves, we may see in business, where the better equipped species,
that is to say, the big capitalist, flourishes, while the less well
equipped species, the small capitalist, succumbs. Mr. Chalmers Mitchell,
Secretary of the London Zoological Society and familiar with the habits
of animals, has lately emphasised the contention of Darwin and shown
that even the most widely current notions of the extermination of one
species by another have no foundation in fact.[1] Thus the thylacine or
Tasmanian wolf, the fiercest of the marsupials, has been entirely driven
out of Australia and its place taken by a later and higher animal, of
the dog family, the dingo. But there is not the slightest reason to
believe that the dingo ever made war on the thylacine. If there was any
struggle at all it was a common struggle against the environment, in
which the dingo, by superior intelligence in finding food and rearing
young, and by greater resisting power to climate and disease, was able
to succeed where the thylacine failed.
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