Herbert Spencer

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 o…