Question

Charles Darwin was frequently familiar with the ideas and work of researchers in other disciplines. How could Malthus’ ideas pertaining to demography contribute to Darwin’s ideas of survival of the fittest and natural selection?

Answer 1

Darwin was influenced by many philosophers back in the time, and the one who significantly played a role was Thomas Malthus who wrote " Principle of Population"

In this essay he spoke about how the organisms on this planet will struggle to survive when overpopultaion strikes, irrespective of the food supply and other associated factors, the nature by itself will try to limit the growing population in order to maintain the equilibrium of nature by posing certain amount of struggles. He also said that out of this vast population, there will be certain organisms which will deal with it and survive while the others wont. Darwins attention was caught in this theory and he gave the concept of Survival of the Fittest and Natural Selection, the ones that survive and gets chosen by the nature will evolve continuously and lead to changes in the organism and keep contributing to evolution .

In short, before the ideas of Malthus, Darwin thought that the population will keep gowing and will once attain stability until they keep meeting their resources, but through MAlthus we was able to realise the possibilities of competition existing betweeen the organisms of the same population and it leading to Survival of the Fittest, and with Natural selection contributing to the process of Evolution.

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