In 1866 Alfred Russel Wallace, Herbert Spencer, and Thomas Henry Huxley teamed up to urge Darwin to replace ‘natural selection’ with ‘survival of the fittest’ in future editions of the Origin. They felt that the purely ex post facto process suggested by this phrase would undercut the creationist objection that natural selection is haunted by intentional design. However, this is inaccurate. Thinking of natural selection as survival of the fittest leads to confusions between Darwin’s theory and the closely related but different accounts of Wallace, Spencer, and Huxley. Darwin’s own conceptual framework relied on comparing natural selection to the artificial selection of plant and animal breeders to argue for a trans-generational process in which natural selection gradually shape chance variant traits of individuals into adaptations. The notion of survival of the fittest changed that to perceiving natural selection primarily as the executioner of unfit organisms, in the process allowing it to serve as backing for unrestricted capitalism (‘social Darwinism’), racist imperialism, and eugenics.