Abstract: The formation of the cultural symbol “Natural Selection, Survival of the Fittest” underwent a process embedded in complex historical contexts. To reveal the historical truth, it is essential to sift through the multiple messages conveyed in Yan Fu’s Tianyan Lun. Yan Fu’s interpretation unfolded in two ways: one was to elaborate on the theoretical logic adopted by the author (Thomas Huxley or Herbert Spencer), while the other was to deduce the principle of the law of the jungle for Chinese audiences after the First Sino-Japanese War (1894—1895), leveraging his own background in Chinese culture. This shows how Yan Fu ingeniously condensed these ideas into “Natural Selection, Survival of the Fittest” and continuously reinterpreted them in historical contexts. Based on his translation theory of “faithfulness, expressiveness, and elegance”, Yan Fu selected different linguistic rhetorics and repeatedly revised discursive expressions to convey his ideas, drawing on both Western cultural classics and local social experiences. This practice clearly reflected his formed value judgments: who the readers were and how to interpret Western cultural classics. As a new ideology in modern Chinese society, the theory of evolution was embodied in the text of Tianyan Lun, where textual and social contexts interpenetrated and interpreted each other, demonstrating an obvious translation between academic theories and historical events. In this sense, Yan Fu’s translated version of the theory constructed a new knowledge genealogy of the doctrine of the struggle for existence.

Key words: “Natural Selection, Survival of the Fittest”, Yan Fu, text of Tianyan Lun, semantics, context, interpretation