SURVIVAL • FREE TRANSLATOR.ORG • Definition of Survival

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/sərvˈaɪvəl/ Listen

noun

Survival n.

A living or continuing longer than, or beyond the existence of, another person, thing, or event; an outliving.

(Arhaeol. & Ethnol.) Any habit, usage, or belief, remaining from ancient times, the origin of which is often unknown, or imperfectly known. "The close bearing of the doctrine of survival on the study of manners and customs."

Survival of the fittest. (Biol.) See Natural selection, under Natural.

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Etymology of 'Survival'

Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48

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"Survival" Quotes from Famous Books

... matter, the question presents itself to the biologist why it should not be so. The irrefragable philosophy of modern biology is that the most complex forms of living creatures have derived their splendid complexity and adaptations from the slow and majestically progressive variation and survival from the simpler and the simplest forms. If, then, the simplest forms of the present and the past were not governed by accurate and unchanging laws of life, how did the rigid certainties that manifestly and admittedly govern the more complex and ...

— Scientific American Supplement, No. 643, April 28, 1888 • Various

... the many little absurdities in American customs; the old story of the survival of the two buttons at the back of the coat, and, by the way, Miss Esmeralda, the two buttons on the back of your habit are out of place, not because of your tailor's fault, but because of yours. They should make a line at right angles with ...

— In the Riding-School; Chats With Esmeralda • Theo. Stephenson Browne

... of inheritance is exceedingly intricate, working often in a seemingly capricious and fitful way. Qualities, both good and bad, are dropped as well as acquired, and the process ends sometimes in the degradation of the type, and the survival of the unfit rather than the fittest. The most trifling and fantastic tricks of inheritance are quoted in support of the transmutation theory; but little is said of the sudden apparition of powerful original qualities, which almost always rise like pure creations, and are gone with ...

— Louis Agassiz: His Life and Correspondence • Louis Agassiz

... Dale needed not to have pressed his victory over the helpless fathers so unrelentingly, and after the first ten pages by cases and proofs that are quite needless and ex abundanti; simply the survival of any one distinguished Oracle upwards of four centuries after Christ—that is sufficient. But if with this fact we combine the other fact, that all the principal Oracles had already begun to languish, more ...

— Memorials and Other Papers • Thomas de Quincey

... more uselessly employed than when he is at this trick of bastinadoing asses' hide. We know what effect it has in life, and how your dull ass will not mend his pace with beating. But in this state of mummy and melancholy survival of itself, when the hollow skin reverberates to the drummer's wrist, and each dub-a-dub goes direct to a man's heart, and puts madness there, and that disposition of the pulses which we, in our big ...

— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition - Vol. 1 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson

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