Biography of Herbert Spencer

Even though August Comte coined the term sociology, British social theorist Herbert Spencer was the first to write a comprehensive text on the subject.

Herbert Spencer was born in Derby, England on April 27, 1820. He was the first of seven children of William George Spencer and Harriet Homes Spencer, and the only one to survive infancy.

His father was a teacher and school master who has inherited a school from his father, Matthew Spencer.

The education that Spencer received from his father placed a heavy emphasis on empirical science.

This was reinforced by his experience of roaming the countryside where he collected specimens, acquired a tolerable knowledge of animal and insect life and taught himself how to sketch from nature.

When Herbert Spencer was seventeen one of his uncles secured a job for him as a civil engineer with a railway company in London.

Technical education and experience led him to see himself as a philosopher. His books sold more than 100,000 copies, even after most of them had been issued in serial form a various journal-like publications.

Herbert Spencer coined the phrase "survival of the fittest" in 1852. The concept of the survival of the fittest was later adopted by Darwin.

Survival of the fittest, meaning not the strongest but those best suited to a particular environment. This leads to the third point in Darwin’s scheme.

Spencer argued that the development of all aspects of the universe is evolutionary, including human character and social institutions, in according with principle of ‘survival of the fittest’

Among his books include:
*Social statistics (1850)
*The Principles of Psychology (1855)
*Essays 1858 -1874 (3 volumes)
*Education: Intellectual, Moral, Physical (1861)
*First Principles (1862)
*The Principles of Biology 1864-1867 (2 volumes)

He died on 8 December 1903.
Biography of Herbert Spencer 

Who was Charles Darwin (1809-1882)?

Charles Darwin took five years trip around the world on a ship called the Beagle, but he liked staying home best of all.

Charles Robert Darwin was born on February 12, 1809, in Shrewsbury, a small village in England. He was the second son and fifth of six children of Dr. Robert Darwin, an eminently successful physician, who in turn was the son of Erasmus Darwin, the author of Zoonomia.

He studied at Edinburgh and received his BA from Cambridge in April 1831.  Charles Darwin is among the most influential scientists who ever lived.

Darwin’s observations in the Galapagos and in the other countries he visited had a profound effect on his thinking. Darwin began to think about the relationships among the facts he was accumulating.

In July 1837, less than none months after landing at Falmouth, Darwin began writing downs his thoughts on their relationship and origins of species in a notebook.

He changed the way humans view their place in nature. His explanation of the evolutionary process occurring through natural selection forms the basis of modern-day biological sciences, including the applied disciplines of agriculture, medicine and most recently biotechnology.
Who was Charles Darwin (1809-1882)?

Darwin and his Theory

Charles Darwin was born on 12 February 1809, the fifth of six children. His grandfather Erasmus Darwin was a physician and poet with fascinating for natural philosophy. The poet known depictions of the natural world and the speculation about the nature and origin of life.

In his 1794 book Zoonomia Erasmus discussed the origin of development of life. Charles father Robert Waring Darwin was a successful and wealthy physician.

Darwin attended Shrewsbury school from 1818 to 1825 with hoped to become a doctor. Later in 1825 his father took him away from school and sent him and his brother to Edinburgh Medical School.

The theory of evolution is commonly linked with Charles Darwin’s publication of The Origin of Species’ in 1859. Many of his idea that Darwin put forth in his book had been discussed for at least a century.

The Origin of Species contributed to the theory was a clear statement of the process by which evolution occurs, which was called natural selection.

In 1831 Darwin set out on a round the world voyage on the ship H.M.S Beagle, serving as the ship’s naturalist. During this voyage Darwin began to accumulate data that resulted in his concept of evolution.

The Voyage of the Beagle is a title given to the book written and published in 1839 by Darwin as his Journal and Remarks, which brought him considerable fame and respect.

From his study of the similarities among existing species around the world, together with the similarities between living and fossil species, he gradually came to the conclusion that some species were related to one another through common lines of descent, a view that clearly challenged the biblical notion of a single Creation of all the various life forms in the world.

He proposed and provided scientific evidence that all species of life have evolved over time from one or a few common ancestors through the process of natural selection.

The term Darwinism almost by default, covered all kinds of evolutionism and unfairly eclipsed the world of others like Huxley, Wallace.

Darwin and his Theory