Survival of the fittest was coined by Herbert Spencer, not Darwin
The phrase everyone pins on Darwin came from Herbert Spencer, who wrote it in 1864 after reading On the Origin of Species. Spencer went much further than biology, claiming a single law of progressive evolution governed stars, minds and societies. He became Europe's most famous intellectual, then almost vanished from reading lists after 1900.
Born in Derby in 1820, Spencer was taught science by his father George, a religious dissenter who distrusted all authority and ran a school on Pestalozzi's progressive lines. George was secretary of the Derby Philosophical Society, founded in 1783 by Erasmus Darwin, Charles's grandfather, and its members introduced the boy to pre-Darwinian evolutionary ideas, including Lamarck's. An uncle, a vicar near Bath, added some mathematics, physics and Latin, plus a firm belief in free trade and small government. Beyond that he was largely self-taught.
He drifted through railway engineering in the late 1830s before becoming sub-editor of The Economist from 1848 to 1853. His first book, Social Statics, appeared in 1851 and forecast that humans would adapt so completely to social life that the state would wither away. Through the publisher John Chapman he joined a London circle that included John Stuart Mill, Harriet Martineau and George Eliot, with whom he was briefly romantically linked. He also introduced Thomas Henry Huxley, later nicknamed Darwin's Bulldog, into that world.
Principles of Psychology, published in 1855, tried to merge associationist psychology with phrenology. Spencer proposed that repeated links between ideas become fixed in brain tissue and pass to offspring by Lamarckian inheritance, hoping to do for the mind what Newton did for matter. Sales were dismal: the final copies of a 251-copy first edition lingered until June 1861.
Unlike Auguste Comte, whose ambitions he matched but whose views he rejected, Spencer believed one universal law could explain everything, culture and morality included, against theologians who placed the soul beyond science. His authority peaked in the English-speaking world late in the century. By 1937 the sociologist Talcott Parsons could ask who still read him.
Source: Herbert Spencer
