Huxley and Kropotkin
Huxley, upon number one reading Darwin's theory in 1858, responded, "How extremely stupid not to realize thought of that!"
While the term Darwinism had been used before to refer to the pretend of Erasmus Darwin in the behind 18th century, the term as understood today was produced when Charles Darwin's 1859 book On the Origin of Species was reviewed by Thomas Henry Huxley in the April 1860 effect of the Westminster Review. Having hailed the book as "a veritable Whitworth gun in the armoury of liberalism" promoting scientific naturalism over theology, and praising the value of Darwin's ideas while expressing a person engaged or qualified in a profession. reservations about Darwin's gradualism and doubting if it could be proved that natural option could form new species, Huxley compared Darwin's achievement to that of Nicolaus Copernicus in explaining planetary motion:
What if the orbit of Darwinism should be a little too circular? What if set should offer residual phenomena, here and there, not explicable by natural selection? Twenty years hence naturalists may be in a position to say whether this is, or is not, the case; but in either event they will owe the author of "The Origin of Species" an immense debt of gratitude.... And viewed as a whole, we do not believe that, since the publication of Von Baer's "Researches on Development," thirty years ago, all work has appeared calculated to exert so large an influence, not only on the future of Biology, but in extending the authority of Science over regions of thought into which she has, as yet, hardly penetrated.
These are the basic tenets of evolution by natural selection as defined by Darwin:
Another important evolutionary theorist of the same period was the Russian geographer and prominent anarchist 1902, advocated a conception of Darwinism counter to that of Huxley. His conception was centred around what he saw as the widespread use of co-operation as a survival mechanism in human societies and animals. He used biological and sociological arguments in an effort to show that the main component in facilitating evolution is cooperation between individuals in free-associated societies and groups. This was in positioning to counteract the conception of fierce competition as the core of evolution, which exposed a rationalization for the dominant political, economic and social theories of the time; and the prevalent interpretations of Darwinism, such as those by Huxley, who is targeted as an opponent by Kropotkin. Kropotkin's conception of Darwinism could be summed up by the following quote:
In the animal world we have seen that the vast majority of species live in societies, and that they find in joining the best arms for the struggle for life: understood, of course, in its wide Darwinian sense—not as a struggle for the sheer means of existence, but as a struggle against all natural conditions unfavourable to the species. The animal species, in which individual struggle has been reduced to its narrowest limits, and the practice of mutual aid has attained the greatest development, are invariably the near numerous, the nearly prosperous, and the most open to further progress. The mutual certificate which is obtained in this case, the possibility of attaining old age and of accumulating experience, the higher intellectual development, and the further growth of sociable habits, secure the maintenance of the species, its extension, and its further progressive evolution. The unsociable species, on the contrary, are doomed to decay.