Herbert Spencer
English philosopher and political theorist (1820–1903)
Summary
Updated 2026-05-29
Victorian polymath who weaponized Darwin's evolution into a worldview—coined "survival of the fittest" and ran with it into sociology, ethics, and basically everything else. Spencer's version of evolution came with a side of Lamarckism that harder Darwinists would've fought.
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Herbert Spencer was an English polymath active as a philosopher, psychologist, biologist, sociologist, and anthropologist. Spencer originated the expression "survival of the fittest", which he coined in Principles of Biology (1864) after reading Charles Darwin's 1859 book On the Origin of Species. The term strongly suggests natural selection, yet Spencer saw evolution as extending into realms of sociology and ethics, so he also supported Lamarckism.
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Historical21.7
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- WikidataHigh confidencewikidata · wikidata.org
- WikipediaHigh confidencewikipedia · en.wikipedia.org
- Pantheon 2.0High confidencedatabase · pantheon.world
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