The Flight of the Phoenix (1965 film) The Flight of the Phoenix (1965 film) The Flight of the Phoenix is a 1965 American drama film starring James Stewart, produced and directed by Robert Aldrich, and based on the 1964 novel "The Flight of the Phoenix" by Elleston Trevor. The story describes a small group of men struggling to survive their aircraft's emergency landing in the Sahara Desert, and stars Richard Attenborough, Peter Finch, Hardy Krüger and Ernest Borgnine. The ensemble cast includes Ian Bannen, Ronald Fraser, Christian Marquand, Dan Duryea and George Kennedy as other passengers on the aircraft. Though the film was a failure at the
Survival of the fittest Survival of the fittest "Survival of the fittest" is a phrase that originated from Darwinian evolutionary theory as a way of describing the mechanism of natural selection. The biological concept of fitness is defined as reproductive success. In Darwinian terms the phrase is best understood as "Survival of the form that will leave the most copies of itself in successive generations." Herbert Spencer first used the phrase, after reading Charles Darwin's "On the Origin of Species", in his "Principles of Biology" (1864), in which he drew parallels between his own economic theories and Darwin's biological ones: "This survival of the