Suppose the Archduke had ducked

Andrew Berry

• Nonzero: The Logic of Human Destiny by Robert Wright
  Little, Brown, 435 pp, £22.50, March 2000, ISBN 0 316 64485 4

Interviewed by the BBC 25 years after Herbert Spencer’s death, Beatrice Webb, who had known him well, referred to him as Darwin’s John the Baptist. Spencer would have relished the description, which is in many ways appropriate: he coined the phrase ‘survival of the fittest’ and was responsible for popularising the term ‘evolution’. Indeed, his adherence to evolution, ‘a profession of faith’, as he put it, both anticipated and exceeded Darwin’s. In 1852, seven years before the publication of On the Origin of Species, Spencer was already carrying the argument to evolution’s creationist adversaries: ‘Those who cavalierly reject the Theory of Evolution, as not adequately supported by facts, seem quite to forget that their own theory is supported by no facts at all.’