# Charles Darwin English naturalist (1809–1882) whose *On the Origin of Species* (1859) established that species change by descent with modification and that the mechanism is natural selection — variation, inheritance, and differential survival — which remains the unifying framework of biology ([[Evolution]], natural selection). He reached the theory by 1838, after the *Beagle* voyage and a reading of Malthus ([[Malthusianism]]) that gave him the engine — more are born than can survive — and sat on it for twenty years until Alfred Russel Wallace sent him the same idea from the Malay Archipelago in 1858. *The Descent of Man* (1871) extended it to humans and added sexual selection. He is in this vault for two reasons that have little to do with each other. ## The creationism fight Darwin is the target the religious right has organized against for a century, and the fight has never been about the science. The Scopes trial (1925) was a test case staged by both sides; the Supreme Court struck down bans on teaching evolution in 1968 and "equal time" for creation science in 1987; *Kitzmiller v. Dover* (2005) found intelligent design to be creationism relabeled and its teaching unconstitutional; and the current front is state "academic freedom" bills and the [[Young Earth Creationism]] movement's institutions. The [[Science and Religion in America]] page has the arc, [[Science Denial]] and [[Enlightenment Science]] the structure: the objection to Darwin is the objection to a method that yields an account of origins without a purpose in it, and the political form the objection takes — the school board, the textbook, the statute — is the same one used against climate science later ([[The Republican War on Science]]). ## The misappropriation "Social Darwinism" — the doctrine that competition among people, classes and races is natural selection and that helping the losers thwarts nature — is not Darwin's. It is [[Herbert Spencer]]'s ("survival of the fittest" is Spencer's phrase, which Darwin adopted in later editions), extended by Spencer's American admirers into a defense of laissez-faire, and by Darwin's cousin [[Francis Galton]] into [[Eugenics]], the program of improving the human stock by selective breeding that runs through [[Madison Grant]] to the sterilization laws. Darwin's own view of natural selection in humans was that sympathy and cooperation were themselves selected for; he opposed slavery with unusual vehemence for his class and saw the races as one species. The [[Social Darwinism]] page separates the lineages. The [[Anthropology Hub]], [[Science and Empire]], [[The Golden Bough]] and Stratigraphy pages record what the Victorian sciences did with his framework — some of it his, most of it not. ## See Also - [[Evolution]] · [[Malthusianism]] · [[The Genomic Revolution]] · [[History of Science Hub]] - [[Young Earth Creationism]] · [[Science and Religion in America]] · [[Science Denial]] · [[Enlightenment Science]] · [[The Republican War on Science]] - [[Herbert Spencer]] · [[Social Darwinism]] · [[Francis Galton]] · [[Eugenics]] · [[Madison Grant]] - [[Anthropology Hub]] · [[Science and Empire]] · [[The Golden Bough]]