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Herbert Spencer, b. Apr. 27, 1820, d. Dec. 8, 1903, was the major Victorian English philosopher of biological and social evolution. Although he received no formal education and was derided by the academic establishment of his time, he won a large popular following for his optimistic view that evolution is synonymous with progress. His work significantly influenced 19th-century developments in biology, psychology, sociology, and anthropology. Spencer's book The Principles of Biology (1864-67) was used as a text at Oxford University; his The Principles of Psychology (1855) became a text at Harvard University; and at Yale University, his Study of Sociology (1873) was the textbook for the first course offered in the United States on sociology.

Spencer's significance to these diverse disciplines is that he was one of the first to affirm that human society may be studied scientifically and that he did so from an evolutionary point of view based on the assumption that human behavior is socially determined. His evolutionary theories were conceived before those of Charles Darwin, and Spencer is thought to have coined the phrase "survival of the fittest." In his later 3-volume work, Principles of Sociology (1876-96), Spencer clarified his belief that social structures arise out of social functions. Spencer's Autobiography was published in 1904.