“Survival of the Fittest” is not the invention of Charles Darwin. Herbert Spencer coined the phrase, and only in the fifth edition of “The Origin of Species” did Darwin include it.

Economists have taken to using “Survival of the Fittest” as a case-in-point, a fact of life that is unchangeable. It is a justification for “Capitalism,” often paired with a poor understanding of what “Survival of the Fittest” means. They try to douche economics of morality, as if their ultimate goal is to return to prelapsarian nature. The jungle.

As far as examples go, most are intellectual lightweights and choosing one is akin to picking numbers out of a hat. But do not underestimate them—as Homer Simpson advises us, “Never underestimate the power of stupid people in large numbers.”

So I choose for the moment Alexander Wissel of “Investment U” a publication that is largely unread but serves as a convenient example. He argues, in a sigh-inducing piece titled “Why we need less of Michael Moore,” that Capitalism is not evil because it is about “profit and earnings.” What bothers me about this piece is not the argument itself, but what he uses as the cornerstone of his argument: “Survival of the fittest.”

“Survival of the fittest means just that,” Wissel argues, “The fittest and most able survive. The weaker ones do not. Capitalism systematically allows that to happen. It pulls money away from inefficiency (and sometimes stupidity) and puts it in the hands of the smarter folks.” That is, Capitalism moves money away from “Investment U” and toward publications like “The Wall Street Journal” that actually do that rare phenomenon known as “journalism.”

Once again, I don’t particularly care about Wissel’s argument, but rather how it reflects the incessant trend among lazy polemicists like him to piggyback on a contrived form of “Survival of the Fittest.”

If Wissel had bothered to ever read “The Origin of Species” he would have seen first that Darwin does give “Survival of the Fittest” first billing—he uses his own term, “Natural Selection” which is generally far more accurate and less misleading.

Darwin writes, in a somewhat dense but important sentence, “I have called this principle, by which each slight variation, if useful, is preserved, by the term natural selection, in order to mark its relation to man's power of selection.”

The choice of “natural selection” as a term is used as the converse to its opposite: “man’s power of selection.” Darwin never argues that “natural selection” is in any way better than “natural selection.” That job is done by the fetish of nature espoused by the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

These concepts are fraught with nuance, but that is not excuse for ignorance.