“It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent, but the most responsive to change…”
Leon C. Megginson, Professor of Management and Marketing at Louisiana State University at Baton Rouge is the man credited for mis-attributing the above quotation to Charles Darwin in ‘Lessons from Europe for American Business’, Southwestern Social Science Quarterly, 1963. He wasn’t the last.
The statement was part of a “description and explication” of Darwin’s ideas, according to the Quote Investigator website. The words were not written by Darwin in “On the Origin of Species” or anywhere else. As well as authoring his famous books, Darwin was at the heart of British scientific society, travelling often to London and elsewhere to attend meetings and confer with colleagues.
One intrepid researcher indexed 15,000 letters known to have been written by or to Charles Darwin as part of the darwinproject.ac.uk, so we definitely know he said “I am bothered with heaps of foolish letters on all sorts of subjects…”
We feel his pain.
