Darwiniana
emjohnson | January 8, 2010Herbert Spencer coined the term "survival of the fittest" in 1852 and suggested that Darwin use it himself after he read On the Origin of Species in 1859. However, Darwin was resistant because he thought it could be misinterpreted. According to historian Thomas Leonard, Spencer then appealed to Alfred Russell Wallace to pressure Darwin to accept the term. Darwin eventually agreed and it appeared in the fifth edition of Origin in 1869.
emjohnson | December 14, 2009"Even the best of modern civilisations appears to me to exhibit a condition of mankind which neither embodies any worthy ideal nor even possesses the merit of stability. I do not hesitate to express the opinion that if there is no hope of a large improvement of the condition of the greater part of the human family; if it is true that the increase of knowledge, the winning of a greater domain over nature which is its consequence, and the wealth which follows upon that domain are to make no difference in the extent and the intensity of want with its concomitant physical and moral…
emjohnson | December 13, 2009Alfred Russell Wallace, co-discoverer with Darwin of the theory of natural selection, was so great an admirer of the English philosopher Herbert Spencer that he named his first-born son Herbert Spencer Wallace on June 22, 1867. Ironically, Wallace later became a socialist, a view that was diametrically opposed to Spencer's right-wing libertarian views.
Source: David Stack, The First Darwinian Left: Socialism and Darwinism, 1859-1914 (Cheltenham: New Clarion Press, 2003), 47.