To the surprise of no one, the New York Times hailed the “thunderclap of a speech” in an editorial titled “Calling Radicalism by Its Name.” But Social Darwinism has been thick in the air of late ...

Charles Johnson argues that Richard Dawkins has mischaracterized Herbert Spencer: First, Spencer was not a "Social Darwinist." He was not, in fact, a Darwinist at all; he published his most famous ...

We've heard the evolutionary term, "survival of the fittest." A more descriptive popular definition would be, "those organisms best adapted to existing conditions are able to survive." There is a long ...

Herbert Spencer, the 19th-century British philosopher, is remembered today as the forbidding -- almost forbidden -- father of "Social Darwinism," a school of thought declaring that the fittest prosper ...

I was disappointed to learn that Mary Midgley attributes much of Christian fundamentalists’ fear and hatred of evolution to Herbert Spencer’s social Darwinism, which he promulgated in the US in the ...

Herbert Spencer was once considered a towering figure in Western intellectual life. The ideas expounded by this “eminent Victorian” philosopher were imprinted on the minds of an entire generation of ...

THE winding-up of the trust created under the will of Herbert Spencer for the publication of sociological material relating to the less advanced societies has been fittingly marked by the Trustees in ...

Appropriately for a book about the impact of Darwinism on 19 th-century American life, Banquet at Delmonico’s has a distinguished intellectual pedigree. In his best-seller The Metaphysical Club, Louis ...