# Fame.am profile — machine-readable export
# Canonical URL: https://fame.am/person/herbert-spencer
# Generated: 2026-09-07T19:25:32.984Z

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url: "https://fame.am/person/herbert-spencer"
name: "Herbert Spencer"
slug: "herbert-spencer"
description: "He gave us \"survival of the fittest\" — but Herbert Spencer meant it as a grand theory of everything, from cells to societies, a vision of inevitable progress that made him the most famous thinker in the English-speaking world by 1890 and then vanished almost completely."
tagline: "English philosopher and political theorist (1820–1903)"
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  entityType: "https://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q39631"
birthDate: "1820-04-27"
deathDate: "1903-12-08"
livingStatus: "DECEASED"
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# bio (long form, separated for readability)
bio: |
  Spencer was born in Derby on 27 April 1820 and trained as neither scientist nor philosopher but came to both, writing across biology, sociology, psychology, anthropology, and ethics with equal ambition. After reading Darwin's On the Origin of Species in 1859, he coined "survival of the fittest" in his 1864 Principles of Biology, though he stretched evolution far beyond natural selection, folding in Lamarckism and applying the concept to mind, culture, and social institutions as progressive development. For decades he commanded enormous authority — the single most famous European intellectual of the late nineteenth century — but his system aged badly. By 1937 Talcott Parsons could ask, "Who now reads Spencer?" and expect no real answer.