Alfred Russel Wallace and the elimination of the unfit

The differences between Charles Darwins and Alfred Russel Wallaces theories of natural selection have been discussed for many years, with particular attention to their varying thoughts on sexual selection, whether competition occurs primarily between individuals or varieties, and how human consciousness evolves. Potentially the most important difference between their respective points of view has, however, been largely overlooked. Darwins natural selection, later characterized as the survival of the fittest, contains an adaptation results in adaptations logic that some have criticized as tautological (Lewontin 1984) or even teleological (Reiss 2009). This inelegancy has been tolerated because the theorys stated premises (i.e. the presence of a limited resource base, coupled with variation within populations and the potential for procreation to the point of superabundance) remain as unassailable now as they were originally. In a paper in the journal Complexity (Smith 2012), however, I argue that Wallaces conceptualization, focusing on an elimination (or extermination) of the unfit driving mechanism, might represent a better vehicle for relating natural selection to other evolution-related phenomena such as mass extinction, divergence, speciation and the origins of variation itself.