page_title: Herbert Spencer
section_title: Evolution
hierarchical_section_title: Herbert Spencer / Evolution
caption_attribution_description: Herbert Spencer, by John Bagnold Burgess (died 1897). See source website for additional information. This set of images was gathered by User:Dcoetzee from the National Portrait Gallery, London website using a special tool. All images in this batch have been confirmed as author died before 1939 according to the official death date listed by the NPG.
context_page_description: Herbert Spencer was an English philosopher, biologist, anthropologist, and sociologist known for his infamous theory of social Darwinism throughout contemporary history.
  Spencer is best known as the originator of the expression "survival of the fittest", which he coined in Principles of Biology after reading Charles Darwin's 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.
  Spencer developed an all-embracing conception of evolution as the progressive development of the physical world, biological organisms, the human mind, and human culture and societies. As a polymath, he contributed to a wide range of subjects, including ethics, religion, anthropology, economics, political theory, philosophy, literature, astronomy, biology, sociology, and psychology. During his lifetime he achieved tremendous authority, mainly in English-speaking academia. "The only other English philosopher to have achieved anything like such widespread popularity was Bertrand Russell, and that was in the 20th century."
context_section_description: Spencer first articulated his evolutionary perspective in his essay, 'Progress: Its Law and Cause', published in Chapman's Westminster Review in 1857, and which later formed the basis of the First Principles of a New System of Philosophy (1862). In it he expounded a theory of evolution which combined insights from Samuel Taylor Coleridge's essay 'The Theory of Life' – itself derivative from Friedrich von Schelling's Naturphilosophie – with a generalisation of von Baer's law of embryological development. Spencer posited that all structures in the universe develop from a simple, undifferentiated, homogeneity to a complex, differentiated, heterogeneity, while being accompanied by a process of greater integration of the differentiated parts. This evolutionary process could be found at work, Spencer believed, throughout the cosmos. It was a universal law, that was applying to the stars and the galaxies as much as to biological organisms, and to human social organisation as much as to the human mind. It differed from other scientific laws only by its greater generality, and the laws of the special sciences could be shown to be illustrations of this principle.
  The principles described by Herbert Spencer received different interpretations. Bertrand Russell stated in a letter to Beatrice Webb in 1923: 'I don't know whether [Spencer] was ever made to realize the implications of the second law of thermodynamics; if so, he may well be upset. The law says that everything tends to uniformity and a dead level, diminishing (not increasing) heterogeneity'. The alleged contradiction between Spencer's theory and the second law of thermodynamics might arise from limiting the definition of homogeneity and heterogeneity to the homogeneity and heterogeneity of the spatial distribution of matter. For instance, according to the second law of thermodynamics, molecules of gas filling a room eventually fill the room at similar intervals. On the other hand, the directions of motion of the molecules become more heterogeneous. Increasing heterogeneity of this sort aligns with the increase of entropy, related to the number of microscopic configurations consistent with the macroscopic quantities characterizing the system. Herbert Spencer considers Evolution, defined as the integration of matter and the dissipation of motion, to be necessarily followed by Dissolution, defined as the dissipation of matter and the integration of motion. Therefore, the heterogeneity of matter alone is not claimed to be ever increasing. Additionally, Herbert Spencer states that Dissolution goes towards Equilibration, a state of the system with no differential Force between its parts. A comparison can be made of such state with Thermodynamic equilibrium, a state with no net macroscopic flows of matter or of energy.
  Spencer's attempt to explain the evolution of complexity was radically different from that to be found in Darwin's Origin of Species which was published two years later. Spencer is often, quite erroneously, believed to have merely appropriated and generalised Darwin's work on natural selection. But although after reading Darwin's work he coined the phrase 'survival of the fittest' as his own term for Darwin's concept, and is often misrepresented as a thinker who merely applied the Darwinian theory to society, he only grudgingly incorporated natural selection into his preexisting overall system. The primary mechanism of species transformation that he recognised was Lamarckian use-inheritance which posited that organs are developed or are diminished by use or disuse and that the resulting changes may be transmitted to future generations. Spencer believed that this evolutionary mechanism was also necessary to explain 'higher' evolution, especially the social development of humanity. Moreover, in contrast to Darwin, he held that evolution had a direction and an end-point, the attainment of a final state of equilibrium. He tried to apply the theory of biological evolution to sociology. He proposed that society was the product of change from lower to higher forms, just a
caption: Portrait of Spencer by Burgess, 1871–72
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