Darwinism is a term used for various processes related to the ideas of Charles Darwin, particularly concerning evolution and natural selection. Darwinism in this sense is not synonymous with evolution, but rather with evolution by natural selection. In the 19th-century context in which Darwin's Origin of Species was first received, "Darwinism" came to stand for an entire range of evolutionary philosophies about both biology and society. One of the more prominent approaches was that summed in the phrase "survival of the fittest" by the philosopher Herbert Spencer, which was later taken to be emblematic of Darwinism.
Darwinian process requires the following schema:
Self-replication/Inheritance:
Some number of entities must be capable of producing copies of themselves, and those copies must also be capable of reproduction. The new copies must inherit the traits of old ones. Sometimes the different variations are recombined in sexual reproduction.
Variation:
There must be a range of different traits in the population of entities, and there must be a mechanism for introducing new variations into the population.
Selection:
Inherited traits must somehow affect the ability of the entities to reproduce themselves, either by survival, or natural selection, or by ability to produce offspring by finding partners, or sexual selection.
Natural Selection and Survival of the Fittest
Darwinism is the answer to two very different kinds of questions. First, Darwinian Theory tells us how a certain amount of diversity in life forms can develop once we have various types of complex living organisms already in existence. If a small population of birds happens to migrate to an isolated island, for example, a combination of inbreeding, mutation, and natural selection may cause this isolated population to develop different characteristics from those possessed by the ancestral population on the mainland. When the theory is understood in this......
