Was Charles Darwin a Darwinist?
This is a question we would do well to ponder in regard to Darwin’s The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex, which was published just over 150 years ago, in 1871. Darwin always described this volume as his “big book,” in preference to his more famous On the Origin of Species. It was the first to deal at length with a recognizable theory of natural selection and also marked Darwin’s first public use of the word “evolution.” The book did not in fact originate the term “survival of the fittest”—the English philosopher-biologist Herbert Spencer had first used it in 1864—but it does offer an introduction to what later became known as Social Darwinism, or eugenics.
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