“达尔文主义”这个词语在十九世纪晚期用来代表伊拉斯谟斯·达尔文的工作。1860年4月，当查尔斯·达尔文1859年的《物种起源》被托马斯·亨利·赫胥黎在Westminster Review中提到后，这个词语的意义才变成今天这样[13]。赫胥黎把这本书称为“a veritable Whitworth gun in the armoury of liberalism”（“自由的军械库中一把真正的惠特沃斯枪”），将科学自然主义提升至超过宗教信仰的高度, 并在赞扬达尔文思想有用之处的同时，表达了对达尔文渐进论专业角度的保留看法，还对能否证实自然选择可形成新物种表示怀疑。[14] 赫胥黎把达尔文的成就与尼古拉·哥白尼解释行星运动相提并论：
What if the orbit of Darwinism should be a little too circular? What if species should offer residual phænomena, 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, any work has appeared calculated to exert so large an influence, not only on the future of Biology, but in extending the domination of Science over regions of thought into which she has, as yet, hardly penetrated.[6]
In the animal world we have seen that the vast majority of species live in societies, and that they find in association 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 most numerous, the most prosperous, and the most open to further progress. The mutual protection 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. — Peter Kropotkin， Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution (1902), Conclusion.
[Both] a Darwinian 'left' and a Darwinian 'right' were in place before most people had grasped the Darwinian middle, which was where the maker was.[15]
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